Introduction
Hunting, Fishing, and Freedom
In 1937, former Alabama slave Heywood Ford recounted to a Works Progress Administration interviewer the escape of a fellow slave named Jake Williams. For Williams, who hated their plantation’s overseer “case he was so mean an’ useta try to think up things to whup us for,” the last straw came one day when the overseer, after seeing him playing with his “ole red-bone houn” dog Belle instead of working, sternly reproached him and hit the dog sharply with a rock. That night Williams told Ford he was running away and begged a favor. “I wish you’d look after my houn’ Belle,” he requested. “Feed her an’ keep her de bes’ you kin. She a mighty good possum an’ coon dog. I hates to part wid her, but I knows dat you is de bes’ pusson I could leave her wid.” With that, Williams slipped out of the cabin and escaped into a nearby swamp.
It did not take long for the overseer to notice the slave’s absence and set after him with a pack of hounds. They soon caught up with Williams, who climbed a tree to avoid his pursuers. When the overseer climbed up after him, Williams, in desperation, kicked him to the ground. What happened next astonished the terrified runaway. On hitting the ground, the overseer was immediately set upon by the hounds, who “to’ dat man all to pieces.” An even greater shock came when Williams realized the identity of the lead dog. “De leader of dat pack of houn’s, white folks, warn’t no blood houn,” asserted Ford. In fact, a “plain old red-bone possum an’ coon dog” had led the pack. It was none other than Williams’s own Belle.
Ford heard this remarkable tale from Jake Williams himself, who fled with the loyal hound after the incident described above. “I seed Jake after us niggers was freed,” Ford recalled. “Dats how come I knowed all ’bout it. It must have been six years after dey killed de oberseer.” By pure chance, the two friends reunited in Kentucky. “He was a-sittin’ on some steps of a nigger cabin. A houn’ dog was a-sittin’ at his side.” Ford told Williams how glad he was to see him and asked if the dog was Belle. “‘Naw,’ Jake answers, ‘Dis her puppy!’ Den he tol’ me de whole story.”1
Ford’s account, which the interviewer tellingly titled “Heywood Ford Tells a Story,” is no doubt embellished or fictionalized.2 But even if only a colorful tale to please the interviewer, it nonetheless reveals important facts about blacks’ life in the rural South before and after Emancipation. First, as evidenced by Jake Williams’s attachment to Belle, African Americans depended on independent economic activities such as hunting to survive the rigors of bondage. Second, as demonstrated by Williams’s flight following the overseer’s implicit threat to his use of Belle to meet his needs, slaves protected such activities as best they could and resisted attempts to deny them. Finally, as shown by Ford’s reunion with Williams, Belle’s puppy happily sitting by his side, the reliance on traditions such as hunting, or on loyal hunting dogs, did not end with Emancipation.
Since the early colonial period, from tidewater Maryland to the Mississippi Delta, from the South Carolina Lowcountry to the Alabama frontier, Southerners had hunted and fished for food, market, or sport. For both blacks and whites, exploitation of the sporting field became a key marker of racial and class status. For well-to-do whites, the ability to hunt and fish freely, to use certain methods and equipment, and to employ black laborers to attend their excursions became ways to publicly display their wealth and social standing. The pursuit of fish and game became purely a sporting activity, unburdened by the specter of necessity that drove others’ hunting and fishing. For African Americans, particularly slaves, hunting and fishing were vivid symbols of an economic, cultural, and spatial separation from whites that reflected the struggle for control over their own lives and labors. Hunting and fishing became forms of work that demonstrated not aristocratic pretension but the pressing need for food and income.
Hunting and fishing remained deeply rooted traditions that reflected Southerners’ aspirations and reinforced their identities. Yet it is essential to note that the hunting and fishing traditions of blacks and whites developed in opposition to each other. Elite whites followed established sporting codes carried over from European aristocracy and reveled in hunting and fishing in ways that those in lower social strata could not. African-American hunters and fishermen had no such pretension. In earning a part of their living away from agricultural labor in the service of whites, and confounding expectations of proper behavior for people of color, they sought to maximize their independence and thereby challenged the Southern racial hierarchy.
This examination of the connection between hunting and fishing and Southern race relations began as a proposal for a master’s thesis on the role of hunting and fishing in plantation slave communities. A cursory examination of the logical starting point for such a study—slave narratives, including those compiled in the 1930s by the Federal Writers’ Project—revealed that many former slaves enthusiastically recalled stalking through the woods or fishing at a nearby creek and that such activities stood out as rare high points in a cold, capricious system based on brutal exploitation. Their descriptions, moreover, indicated that hunting and fishing as sport or recreation was at best a secondary consideration for slaves. Hunting and fishing served more vital functions. When former slaves described the primary benefits of these activities, they recalled not only recreation but, more significantly, the crucial ability to feed themselves when sufficient food was denied them, the feelings of pride that came with providing for themselves and their families in a system that sought to keep slaves in a state of dependency, and the valuable market activities, both simple and elaborate, that provided bond people and their families with much-needed cash and goods. Much more than fun or sport attended such abilities. As former slave Charles Ball remembered about the day he acquired an old musket for hunting, “I now began to live well, and to feel myself, in some measure, an independent man.”3
The hundreds of narratives by former and runaway slaves indicated that hunting and fishing gave slaves greater control of their time and cultivated independence rather than mere recreation, a theme that ultimately formed the heart of my master’s thesis.4 Based mostly on former-slave narratives and elite whites’ accounts of plantation life, the thesis argued that hunting and fishing strengthened slaves’ nutritional and material condition, provided food, money, and material goods, and gave slaves time for family and community camaraderie. Hunting and fishing created and augmented feelings of independence among slaves and turned privileges granted by masters into customary rights that slaves expected. Once such privileges became established, slaves regarded them as part of a contract—informal, of course, yet important and worth defending. Moreover, just as some masters used hunting and fishing to solidify their hold on labor, slaves used these activities to make claims to their own time and cultivate opportunities to resist, subtly and overtly, the conditions of bondage. The thesis explained some of the ways in which slaves relied on the natural environment to ease the daily burdens of bondage. It identified hunting and fishing as sometimes contested activities inseparably linked to slavery and raised important, unanswered questions about the connections between hunting and fishing and race after Emancipation.
These numerous questions about African Americans’ hunting and fishing in the postwar South ultimately gave rise to this book. I wondered how much former slaves relied on the natural environment after liberation and to what extent former slave owners approved of such activities. I wondered how much Emancipation—bringing African Americans greater physical mobility, more economic alternatives to agricultural labor, and (generally) increased access to firearms— altered the Southern sporting field. Most importantly, I wondered to what extent conflicts between whites and blacks over hunting and fishing, reports of which appeared occasionally in antebellum primary sources, increased with Emancipation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I learned that such conflicts created far more controversy in the decades following the Civil War. Yet I was unprepared for the open hostility that the research revealed.
Hunting and fishing appeared regularly in postwar complaints about African Americans. Indeed, I could hardly read a white Southerner’s description of post-Emancipation life without finding highly critical references to the practices. Far from decreasing after Emancipation, the number of such accounts that touched on issues of race expanded dramatically. These descriptions, moreover, often took on a decidedly different tone than similar reports on the Old South. Antebellum narratives of slaves’ hunting and fishing reflected white Southerners’ confident mastery over those in bondage, but postwar depictions often revealed a deep unease with black liberation and a growing anger over freed people’s customary rights. Hunting and fishing, as sources of slave privilege and temporary independence, sometimes irritated and occasionally alarmed antebellum planters, but they did not view these activities as serious threats to their basic control. After liberation, however, white Southerners saw that those same activities, often performed free from white oversight, allowed African Americans to earn a living apart from regular labor in the service of whites, to challenge white sportsmen’s monopoly over Southern hunting and fishing, and to create greater power and control over their own time and work.
This was the central question that propelled this study forward. How could such activities, common across the South for centuries for black and white Southerners, become such a source of open economic, cultural, and legal conflict in the decades after the Civil War? Why did white Southern elites, who often readily embraced slaves’ hunting and fishing, so quickly and venomously decry these activities when performed by freed African Americans? What role did liberated African Americans play in Dixie’s sporting field in the half-century after Emancipation? How, exactly, did freedom change the nature of Southern hunting and fishing? Answering these questions is the purpose of this book.
The study also raised important questions about the interplay of Southern hunting and fishing and class relations. Conflict over those traditions did not occur just between elite whites and African Americans; poor whites no doubt played a part in the story as well. Yet given the centrality of establishing the ways in which hunting and fishing reflected former slaves’ struggle for greater independence, I chose not to focus on poor whites directly. Sources so rich for studying African Americans’ relationship to hunting and fishing, moreover, often proved strangely silent on poor whites. African-American sources tended to focus exclusively on blacks’ own sporting and subsistence activities. Elite white sources—particularly sportsmen and prosperous landowners—if they ventured beyond documenting their own connection to hunting and fishing, frequently discussed African Americans’ contributions but seemed to ignore those of poor whites. Because so much of what made a sporting expedition authentically “Southern” to native and visiting elites depended on the presence of people of color, African Americans receive far more discussion than poor whites. Whether in the narratives of visiting sportsmen, the published accounts of native Southerners, or magazine articles discussing Southern sporting excursions, descriptions of hunting and fishing scenes and complaints about sporting abuses tended to focus on race.
Such questions as the relationship between poor whites and African Americans in the sporting field; the extent to which elites used the rhetoric of race, embedded in emerging efforts to restrict wildlife, to target both poor whites and blacks; and the degree to which elites succeeded in convincing lower-class whites to accept such wildlife restrictions as a way to control the black population—all are potentially revealing, but beyond the scope of this study. Focusing on poor whites might provide a better understanding of the inherent class conflicts reflected in Southern hunting and fishing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the limited sources suggest, in part by their scarcity, that poor whites played a limited role in constructing the larger contours of African Americans’ relationship to those long traditions.
The sources consulted for this book also raised important questions about the geography of Southern hunting and fishing after Emancipation. J. William Harris, in his Pulitzer Prize-nominated Deep Souths: Delta, Piedmont, and Sea Island Society in the Age of Segregation, reminded us that “there is more than one South to tell about,” and all scholars must be careful to avoid painting the whole region with too broad a brush.5 Despite that caveat, this study poses a challenge to those who demand geographic specificity. Like the issue of poor whites, the question of geographic focus dogged the project from the outset, and, again, the nature of the sources would shape the finished product. Because specific sources concentrated in one particular state or region were lacking, and because the majority of the available material, particularly periodical literature, was not geographically specific beyond identifying the location of individual contributors, it became difficult to limit the discussion of Southern hunting and fishing to one part of the South or to identify regional variation in the topic, as Harris did so thoroughly in Deep Souths.
Nor was a geographically limited study possible. Articles in sporting periodicals, which often did not specifically discuss geography, became perhaps the key source for the study. In such sources, sportsmen often seemed much more willing to describe the acts of hunting and fishing or discuss their companions than to relate the location of their excursions. One can sometimes get a sense of overall sporting geography from the magazines and published sporting narratives, since part of the reason sportsmen wrote to these publications was, ostensibly, to share information and tips on good sport, but even that is uneven. Since many of the key sources for the study were national in nature, this book often deals with the national dialogue on hunting and fishing and the ways in which Southern hunting and fishing fit into it. This national dialogue, while excellent for understanding the intersection of hunting and fishing and race that became so central to both Northerners’ and Southerners’ views, does not provide specific sources for tracing geographic variation. I do not argue that African Americans’ relationship to hunting and fishing was homogeneous across the region—in fact, I note regional variations where appropriate—but detailed discussion of geographic variation was not possible and would not have added substantially to the central argument.
The volume is not without a geographic focus, however. Thick description of hunting and fishing in specific parts of the South remained elusive, but the sources do provide something of a geographic framework for the study. Hunting and fishing, particularly for employment or marketing, or as part of the emerging sporting tourism industry, became contested in regions with large African-American populations. With some exceptions, most accounts came from areas with large black populations, including north-central North Carolina, coastal South Carolina and Georgia, north Florida, south-central Alabama, western and southern Mississippi, and southern Louisiana. These areas correspond to the “black belt” that snaked across the South between the 1860s and the 1920s. The fact that the majority of my evidence originates from such black belt areas allows me to demonstrate both that African Americans hunted and fished most substantially and effectively in areas where their numbers were high and that complaints about blacks’ exploitation of those traditions drew the most criticism in areas where whites contended with a large black population.
This criticism encapsulated the many tensions inherent in the transition from slavery to freedom. The ability to hunt and fish provided freed people with privileges that clashed with whites’, particularly agricultural employers’, expectations of proper African-American behavior. Along with independent hunting and fishing came better control of subsistence, freer use of guns and dogs, and the ability to more easily avoid permanent labor in the service of whites. In the minds of white observers, these freedoms clashed with the future prosperity of the region. The increasingly bitter tone with which white Southerners discussed blacks’ hunting and fishing in post-Emancipation sporting narratives indicates that those activities would continue to be key points of conflict in Southern life for decades. Indeed, as elite whites discovered, those customary traditions, born in slavery and later employed by freed people liberated from the master-servant relationship that had once characterized such activities, posed very real threats to their control.
Between the late 1860s and the mid-1920s, the role of hunting and fishing in Southern society changed. In addition to becoming a growing source of tension between elite whites and former slaves over freed blacks’ privilege, subsistence, and labor, hunting and fishing also became increasingly important to the region’s emerging tourism industry. The South’s emergence as a leading sporting destination heralded economic and cultural reunion between North and South. Thousands of visitors from around the country and across the world journeyed to Dixie, seeking both ready supplies of fish and game and an “authentic” Southern experience, which included the presence of subordinate African Americans to complete the vision of a mythical antebellum South. Elite landowning Southerners thus had a direct vested interest in restricting former slaves’ hunting and fishing even as the presence of blacks in the sporting field became more important to the region’s fish and game industry. As sporting tourism garnered millions for the coffers of the leading resort and sporting states, Southerners’ need to protect fish and game, preserving it for whites only, became more urgent. Like agricultural employers and landowners, sportsmen and tourism investors increasingly realized that independent hunting and fishing by African Americans was bad for business.
With time, a coalition of white Southern elites agreed on the need to control hunting and fishing in response to African-American liberation. For landowners and agricultural employers, former slaves’ renewed ability to freely pursue fish and game challenged elite whites’ quest for tractable labor and raised troubling questions about the harmful effects of independent black subsistence. For sportsmen, unrestricted hunting and fishing gave African Americans the ability both to capture valuable wildlife and to engage in sporting behavior that elite whites wished to retain as their exclusive purview. For those invested in sporting tourism, independent black hunters and fishermen not only competed with native and visiting sportsmen for the products of the chase, thereby damaging the remunerative potential of an increasingly lucrative industry, but also challenged the basic assumptions about black subordination that lay at the heart of the popularity of Southern tourism. For each of these groups, then, African Americans’ hunting and fishing underscored the problems of black independence and presented immediate challenges to their economic and social positions. For decades, this coalition discussed, criticized, and forcefully attacked independent hunting and fishing by African Americans in order to limit these activities to those who followed codes of proper sportsmanship, to those who brought tourist and investment capital into the region, and to those whose labor did not bear the future of Southern economic prosperity. For elite whites, hunting and fishing might remain permanently biracial, but control of it could not.
Between Emancipation and the early twentieth century, then, sportsmen, landowners, and agricultural employers responded to black liberation by attacking blacks’ customary rights. If they could circumscribe how former slaves supported themselves, they might compel tractable labor. If they could force people of color to adhere to codes of proper sportsmanship or remove themselves from the sporting field altogether, they might maintain elite whites’ dominion over Southern fields, forests, and streams. And if they could use regulation of hunting and fishing to keep African Americans both more dependent on white employment and more susceptible to white control, they might simultaneously guarantee elite whites’ future economic prosperity while preserving images of African-American inferiority for tourists. But the going was not easy. Before the coalition could effectively target those threats, they first had to convince a reluctant, poorer Southern public—long suspicious of restrictions on general access to fish and game—that the need to control an increasingly independent-minded black population far outweighed traditional hostility to legislative action targeting cherished customary rights.
By the 1920s, decades of vigorous public complaint from this coalition of white interests about African Americans’ hunting and fishing had secured several important victories. With the explosion of sporting tourism, many Southerners began to understand the financial motivations for better protecting fish and game. With the rise of a national conservation movement, which by the late nineteenth century had penetrated even the reluctant South, sportsmen had begun to accept some limits on hunting and fishing as necessary measures to stop abuses by immoderate lower-class sportsmen. By the beginning of the Jim Crow period, both Southern and national audiences agreed that failure to control African Americans lay at the heart of the region’s economic, social, and sporting problems. The time had finally arrived for a wide-ranging legislative attack on African Americans’ right to hunt and fish.
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