Josiah Walls Josiah Walls 1842-1905 Josiah Walls Florida’s Black Congressman of Reconstruction Peter D. Klingman LibraryPress@UF Gainesville, Florida Cover: Map of the West Indies, published in Philadelphia, 1806. From the Caribbean Maps collection in the University of Florida Digital Collections at the George A. Smathers Libraries. Reissued 2017 by LibraryPress@UF on behalf of the University of Florida This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial- No Derivative Works 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. You are free to electronically copy, dis- tribute, and transmit this work if you attribute authorship. Please contact the University Press of Florida (http://upress.ufl.edu) to purchase print editions of the work. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). For any reuse or distribu- tion, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any of the above conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the University Press of Florida. Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author’s moral rights. ISBN 978-1-947372-12-2 (pbk.) ISBN 978-1-947372-14-6 (ePub) LibraryPress@UF is an imprint of the University of Florida Press. University of Florida Press 15 Northwest 15th Street Gainesville, FL 32611-2079 http://upress.ufl.edu The Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series In 2016, the University Press of Florida, in collaboration with the George A. Smathers Libraries of the University of Florida, received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mel- lon Foundation, under the Humanities Open Books program, to repub- lish books related to Florida and the Caribbean and to make them freely available through an open access platform. The resulting list of books is the Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series published by the Li- braryPress@UF in collaboration with the University of Florida Press, an imprint of the University Press of Florida. A panel of distinguished schol- ars has selected the series titles from the UPF list, identified as essential reading for scholars and students. The series is composed of titles that showcase a long, distinguished history of publishing works of Latin American and Caribbean scholar- ship that connect through generations and places. The breadth and depth of the list demonstrates Florida’s commitment to transnational history and regional studies. Selected reprints include Daniel Brinton’s A Guide- Book of Florida and the South (1869), Cornelis Goslinga’s The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580–1680 (1972), and Nelson Blake’s Land into Water—Water into Land (1980). Also of note are titles from the Bicentennial Floridiana Facsimile Series. The series, published in 1976 in commemoration of America’s bicentenary, comprises twenty-five books regarded as “classics,” out-of-print works that needed to be in more librar- ies and readers’ bookcases, including Sidney Lanier’s Florida: Its Scen- ery, Climate, and History (1875) and Silvia Sunshine’s Petals Plucked from Sunny Climes (1880). Today’s readers will benefit from having free and open access to these works, as they provide unique perspectives on the historical scholarship on Florida and the Caribbean and serve as a foundation upon which to- day’s researchers can build. Visit LibraryPress@UF and the Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series at http://ufdc.ufl.edu/librarypress . Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series Project Members Library Press@UF Judith C. Russell Laurie N. Taylor Brian W. Keith Chelsea Dinsmore Haven Hawley Editorial Advisory Board Gary R. Mormino David C. Colburn Patrick J. Reakes University of Florida Press Meredith M. Babb Linda Bathgate Michele Fiyak-Burkley Romi Gutierrez Larry Leshan Anja Jimenez Marisol Amador Valerie Melina Jane Pollack Danny Duffy Nichole Manosh Erika Stevens This book is reissued as part of the Humanities Open Books program, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Acknowledgments M ANY people deserve my sincere thanks for their help with this project, but I especially wish to thank Dr. Samuel Proctor, professor and friend, for his many suggestions, comments, and keen criticism. He saved this manuscript from countless errors in style, organization, and content. Whatever errors remain are, of course, mine alone. For their assistance in research, I would like to thank the staffs of the following libraries and repositories: the P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History and Miss Elizabeth A. Alexander; the University of Florida Research Library and Mr. Ray Jones; the Amisted Research Center and Mr. Clifton Johnson; the National Archives and Mr. James Walker; the Library of Congress; and the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A special debt is owed to Professor William C. Childers, Department of English, University of Florida, for kindly allowing me to examine and cite from the Garth James Papers in his possession, and to Professor Jerrell H. Shofner, chairman of the Department of History, Florida Technological University, for directing me to sources as well as for his insight into Florida's Reconstruction. Last, I should like to thank my wife, Nina, for she really understands how it feels to share one's life with a man named Walls. Preface A NDRE GlDE once remarked that greater wisdom lay in asking how, rather than why, events happen. By examining the public career of one man, I hope that this study will shed light on that question as it concerns Josiah Walls and black political participation during Florida's Recon­ struction. Although there were other black politicians in the state during that period—John Wallace, Henry Harmon, Charles Pearce, and Robert Meacham, for example—none attained the stature or received the atten­ tion given Walls throughout his career. Unfortunately, however, he has eluded history as a man; only his public image remains, and that is incomplete. In consequence, answers to the basic questions of how he managed his life are difficult to ascertain. Little remains to provide us with his views. No one can accurately state what things affected him, or how, or what forces shaped his life. What has survived about Josiah Walls consists for the most part of newspaper references to his many political campaigns and elections, the documentary evidence of his two contested election cases heard before the Congress, the journals of the House of Representatives and of the Florida legislature outlining his role as a member of each, and a few descriptions left by contemporaries. Only a letter or two in Walls' own hand have survived. He and his widow filed for pensions from the federal government, and these applications comprise major sources of bio­ graphical data, including descriptions of Walls' health, his second mar­ riage license, and other materials. In 1971, moreover, this author inter­ viewed two elderly residents in Tallahassee who knew Josiah Walls and vii Vlll PREFACE his family during his last years following his move there from Alachua County, near the turn of the century. With this limited material it has been possible to reconstruct the public life of Josiah Walls. It is not a complete biography. I hope it is at least a satisfactory attempt to focus upon the major Negro politician of Recon­ struction Florida and, in so doing, to gain new insight into black political participation during that era. But if this is to be more than sheer narrative, the reader also must recognize its interpretive framework. In this study I examine Walls not by measuring what he accomplished or failed to accomplish for his race, but by focusing on how he functioned in an era of racial conservatism in Republican policies and politics. Because of that racially determined fact, the traditional tests for politicians, such as power or prestige, success or influence, fail when applied to Walls or, indeed, to any of the Reconstruction Negro officeholders. Apart from all questions as to his native ability, Josiah Walls lacked the basic strength to bring about significant changes for his race. Yet, within definite limits, Walls not only survived but succeeded in an age when neither survival nor success was guaranteed to a Negro. There cannot, however, be an in-depth probe into the reasons. What there can be is a look at a man and his participation in Reconstruction politics on the local, state, and national levels. And if Gide was right, then in this pursuit the reader perhaps may capture some of the flavor of the kind of man Josiah Walls was. Research into Josiah Walls' public career produced a variety of prob­ lems in assembling information. As indicated, he did not leave a collec­ tion of papers or records for analysis, thereby negating any concerted effort at "fleshing out" his personality. There are at least three reasons for this absence of personal materials. First is the possibility of Walls' own lack of a sense of history and the importance of his role therein. Second, he may have been indifferent to recordkeeping. Then, too, the careless­ ness of record preservation in the nineteenth century probably has led to the destruction of much correspondence of that time; records were simply not kept in the systematic fashion of today. This lack was un­ doubtedly compounded by the fact that Walls was black. Apart from Frederick Douglass, few black leaders in the period engaged in lengthy correspondence with white contemporaries; as a result, their messages and letters for the most part were not saved, and those few which have reached the present arrived more as a matter of chance than a matter of course.