After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South

10. Class, Factionalism, and the Radical Retreat: Black Laborers and the Republican Party in South Carolina, 1865–1900

10  Class, Factionalism, and the Radical Retreat Black Laborers and the Republican Party in South Carolina, 1865–1900 Brian Kelly Reflecting on the dramatic changes that had transpired over the previous quarter century, the prominent black North Carolina educator Charles N. Hunter wrote in 1902 that he felt “abundantly vindicated” for having counseled compromise and moderation among black South Carolinians caught in the vortex of the struggle over Reconstruction. His efforts to “influence his own race and party” during a visit to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1874 had met with boisterous hostility from the former slaves comprising the grassroots of the Republican Party. At a time when their hold on power seemed increasingly tenuous, freedmen rejected Hunter’s appeals for conciliation with white conservatives and refused even to “accord [him] a decent hearing.” But by the time he took pen in hand at the dawn of the new century, circumstances had conspired to shift political sentiment even among the formerly unyielding black South Carolinians, rendering them more amenable to moderation and gradualism. Relieved of the prospect of being hounded from the podium, Hunter felt exonerated by the transformation that had taken place, noting with satisfaction that “the mass of my people are now willing to hear me.”1 In observing that the forceful, collective militancy animating black politics in the period before Redemption had been humbled over the course of a protracted retreat in the years afterward, Hunter’s assessment seems to run counter to one of the principal trends in post–civil-rights-era historiography . In place of the bleak appraisal of an earlier generation of scholars who shared Rayford Logan’s description of the same period as the “nadir” in African American history, the emphasis in recent scholarship on enduring black agency has generated a much more positive appraisal. Under ad- 200 Brian Kelly verse circumstances, recent studies emphasize, African Americans were able to sustain a vibrant community life, building institutions that allowed them to weather the storm of Jim Crow. Concentrating its energies on ambitious self-help schemes and espousing a strategy of racial uplift, an incipient black middle class successfully bridged the gap between themselves and African American urban and rural workers, some scholars contend, laying the basis for an impressive race solidarity that transcended class tensions. Far from being out of step with the plight of black Southerners, accommodationists like Hunter and—more prominently—Booker T. Washington appear in much of the recentliterature as“radicalandeffective”advocatesfor “AfricanAmerican power.”Theirpatientworkbehindthescenes,onehistoriansuggests,“laidthe groundwork for the militant confrontation of the Civil Rights Movement.”2 Despite these recent trends, there are good reasons to take Hunter at his word when he suggests that the collapse of Reconstruction altered something fundamental in the internal life of the black community. This essay is an attempt to offer an explanation of those changes in a single southern state,South Carolina,betweenemancipationandthe late nineteenth century. The dramatic deterioration in circumstances for black Southerners that accompanied the restoration of power to propertied whites affected all African Americans, of course; but I will argue that its effects were felt most acutely bythepredominantlyworking-classconstituencywhosegrassrootsmobilization powered the Radical project in the early years after emancipation. The same pressures that marginalized black workers within the Republican Party and later re-subjugated them in the wider society, encouraged the ascent of a more conservative, cramped vision of “race progress” compatible with the new order. The carriers of this vision were drawn, disproportionately, from the ranks of those who had been free before the war and from a small but increasingly influential emerging black middle-class that included former slaves.3 As Thomas Holt noted in his pioneering study, Black over White, Reconstruction politics in South Carolina reflected from the outset an exceptional disparityinproperty-holdingandprewarstatusamongitsblackpopulation— particularly along the coast. Elsewhere in the South only New Orleans could boast of an established free black community on a par with Charleston’s,4 and intheearlyperiodfollowingemancipationmanyamongthecity’spropertied, literate free black community seemed ambivalent about allying themselves with plantation field hands. The prominent Charlestonian J. H. Holloway’s later attempt to distance himself from the “Crap Shooters” by whom, he suggested ,therace was“nowrepresent[ed]”wasnotcompletelyuntypical.Inap- Black Laborers and the Republican Party in South Carolina, 1865–1900 201 pealing to whites for support during his campaign for alderman in the period following Redemption, Holloway would stress his credentials as a member of the elite Brown Fellowship Society, his ownership of...