Hunting and Fishing in the New South: Black Labor and White Leisure after the Civil War

• 3 “The Art of Serving Is with Them Innate”: African Americans and the Work of Southern Hunting and Fishing
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• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 78-108
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CHAPTER 3

“The Art of Serving Is with Them Innate”
African Americans and the Work of Southern Hunting and Fishing

The assistance of a negro is as necessary to the full enjoyment
of a coon hunt as cranberry sauce is to the completion
of a turkey dinner.

— North Carolina sportsman, Recreation, 1901

White sportsmen had long criticized African Americans’ sporting practices as a threat to wildlife and as flouting the codes and methods guiding “proper” sporting behavior. They believed such conduct symptomatic of general black inferiority, testimony that former slaves ravished the Southern wilderness, and further proof that freedom threatened Southern prosperity. Yet, despite the venom with which sportsmen decried blacks’ hunting and fishing practices, they did not wish African Americans to be completely banished from the Southern sporting field.

Thus white sportsmen maintained that people of color could and indeed must have a permanent place in hunting and fishing in the South. When carried out independently by former slaves, hunting and fishing revealed all the limitations of liberation, but, when performed for and with their white betters, they represented the subordination that confirmed whites’ sporting and social superiority. As independent sportsmen, African Americans threatened Southern wildlife and whites’ sporting privilege; as dedicated servants, they became valuable sources of necessary labor and vibrant symbols of white mastery that helped elite white sportsmen reconnect with the idealized racial hierarchy of the antebellum South. African-American labor thus became an indispensable physical and symbolic component of “proper” Southern sport. Put simply, black service became, in the eyes of many whites, a welcome antidote to black liberation.

In 1895, Chicago sportsman Emerson Hough contributed a series of articles to Forest and Stream that described his recent trip through Mississippi and strongly encouraged Northerners to head south for their field sports. Hough had several reasons for such enthusiasm. The South had richer resources in fish and game, and provided a friendlier welcome to sportsmen, than any other region. Hunting and fishing had yet to be commercialized in the South to the same extent as elsewhere, and thus provided a field for gentleman, not hunters for market. Finally, and for Hough perhaps most importantly, Southern field sports demonstrated the proper ordering of the races. When Hough experienced firsthand the role of African Americans in hunting and fishing in Mississippi, he liked what he saw. “The negro makes a large factor in the field sports of the South. In the North we do our own camp work, team driving, etc., to a large extent, and when you speak of this to a Southern sportsman it always causes surprise.” Southern sporting arrangements differed significantly. “The Southern idea of comfort in camp means a large tent, abundant camp furniture and two or three servants to do the work—an idea which certainly grows upon one, and which one is not disposed to call a bad one after he has gained acquaintance with it.” For Hough, the North simply did not compare with the South in the area of available and agreeable sporting labor. Northerners typically performed their own sporting labor in the field. “In the South you simply hail the first negro, and the negro doesn’t ask any questions, and doesn’t say anything about pay. A good deal of the time he doesn’t get any pay, but he has put in the time just the same, and feels as happy.”¹

For the thousands of Northern sportsmen who hunted and fished in the Southern United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African Americans’ central but inherently subordinate position provided a reason for heading south and a model of race relations for the rest of the nation. “If I could have one of the most sincere wishes of my heart gratified,” Hough wrote, “I would export about four thirds [sic] of all the Chicago city Negroes, and I wouldn’t send them to Liberia either.”²

African Americans, then, played a vital role in the sport of white Southerners and visiting tourists who hunted and fished across the South in the decades after the Civil War, making Dixie one of the leading sporting destinations in the United States. Since the early days of slavery, African-American labor had been a central part of white Southerners’ sporting ideal. Antebellum elites felt more like masters when they had African-American subordinates on hand to sharpen the distinction between owner and property. After Emancipation, subordination of blacks became even more important to white Southerners.

Wherever elite sportsmen led, African-American laborers followed. Before Emancipation, slaves provided skilled and menial labor as huntsmen and fishermen, packed supplies and equipment, worked as guides, tracked, located, and drove quarry, and performed many other tasks in the sporting field. Just as importantly, they provided key symbols of white-over-black domination. In a system disrupted by war and Reconstruction, elite whites both symbolically resurrected and concretely reinforced their hold on African Americans through the hierarchical relationships of hunting and fishing. Myths of the Old South, which flourished into the twentieth century, enabled whites to celebrate hunting and fishing as important institutions that helped them preserve and relive that lost golden age. The racial subordination created and reinforced in the field provided a remedy for the social, economic, and labor problems posed by independent African Americans’ exploitation of Southern fish and game. Reasserting the antebellum sporting ideal—subordinate black labor directed by wealthy white Southerners—provided a strategy for reclaiming lost control. With slavery destroyed and Southern social relations restructured, sportsmen needed black labor more than ever. Having black subordinates in the field returned whites to a mythical era of aristocratic sport and racial control and projected to the world, including Northerners such as Emerson Hough, a solution for the South’s “Negro problem.”

Thus the presence of black labor remained central to white Southerners’ quest to recapture the past and frame the future, and also became part of the experiences of the sporting tourists who flocked to the South after the Civil War. To these visitors, a Southern sojourn created an Old South that provided both enjoyable sport and an authentically Southern experience. Whether wealthy visitors whose sporting vision required fine attire and aristocratic field ethics, or middle-class hunters and fishermen whose primary concerns were steady supplies of fish and game, sporting tourists expected African-American subordinate companions to make their fleeting experience of the now-mythic Old South more realistic.

White narrators described the role of former slaves in Southern sport with a nostalgic longing that, in part, accounts for the thematic symmetry between antebellum and post-Emancipation accounts of African Americans’ hunting and fishing. As Nicholas Proctor points out, “white hunters often conceived of the hunt as a portal into an immutable (if substantially fictional) South.”³ Yet accounts of black labor in white sportsmen’s hunting and fishing reflected more than an affinity for past achievements in racial domination. Such descriptions also focused on the present by responding to a changing Southern social structure in which whites had lost permanent, legal control of the black populace and faced a serious threat to the labor supply essential to the South’s economy. Images of slaves in antebellum accounts of hunting and fishing had a substantial impact on the tenor of post-Emancipation narratives, but one must be careful not to label those later narratives as merely backward looking. While harking back to a lost golden age, the visions of black inferiority and incompetence constructed in hunting and fishing narratives, as in Hough’s endorsement of the servitude he found in Mississippi sport, were also responding to contemporary threats to white supremacy. Postwar sporting narratives simultaneously presented a longing for the past, a lamentation for the present, and perhaps a hopeful corrective vision for the future.

If it is incorrect to label such sportsmen’s accounts as exclusively backward looking, it is equally problematic to interpret them as reflecting only notions of white supremacy. There is more to be gained from studying accounts of African Americans’ labor on whites’ hunting and fishing excursions than simply how such accounts solidified and refined images of racial control. A close examination shows that black huntsmen, fishermen, and laborers drew substantial benefits from their involvement in whites’ sport. Most obviously, they found a source of steady employment and an avenue of economic improvement that only grew as the South became an increasingly popular sporting destination. Ironically, whites’ use of hunting and fishing to confirm racial subordination, which made black labor a permanent part of Southern hunting and fishing, created opportunities for some former slaves, particularly those who were highly skilled in the ways of fish and game and lived in the popular resort areas of the South. For while the stereotypes of racial domination perpetuated by whites in their narratives of Southern hunting and fishing reified racial distinction, they also made the presence of rural blacks an indispensable part of the Southern sporting experience.

African Americans achieved substantial material and financial gains from their work. Aside from wages, black laborers often took home a portion of the day’s catch, which supplied meat for personal and family subsistence. Their work often allowed them to earn supplies and equipment, including ammunition, tackle, even old firearms, as payment or gratuity, which provided opportunities to improve their own hunting and fishing. While such financial and material gain neither erased the images of inferiority proffered in white sporting accounts nor changed the inherently unequal power relationships, it is clear that laboring for whites did not benefit whites alone. Some African Americans found a niche for themselves in the new sporting system.

In fact, a close examination of the sporting interactions between whites and blacks uncovers rare accounts in which black sportsmen-laborers did not become the victims of white exploitation and stories in which interactions between blacks and whites did not reinforce images of racial subordination. Some accounts provide glimpses into moments when African-American laborers could turn the tables on their white employers by challenging both the litany of racial stereotypes and the supposed white mastery that demanded their presence in the field. Indeed, the reason whites needed such laborers—for their skill and experience in the sporting field—became an avenue through which African Americans could use hunting and fishing to demonstrate their own expertise, poke fun at their employers, and seize a level of authority they normally could not possess. Just as laboring for white sportsmen gave blacks important economic benefits and greater access to Southern fields, forests, and streams, it sometimes provided opportunities to counterbalance the images of dominance and subordination that Southern elites sought to perpetuate.

AFRICAN AMERICANS’ SPORTING LABOR

Although the presence of blacks in white Southerners’ field sports remained a constant, the tasks they performed depended on a variety of factors. Different kinds of excursions required different types of laborers. The fox hunts enjoyed by wealthy Southerners in some regions, as well as other excursions designed to mirror aristocratic English sporting traditions (in which full field regalia and large numbers of attendants played symbolically necessary roles), usually employed the largest numbers of black laborers. Such excursions were rare, however. It is easy to exaggerate the number of large plantations with hundreds of slaves in the antebellum South, and the degree to which Southern hunting mirrored the ideal of the English country gentry. Indeed, regal hunts, such as that attended by Edward J. Thomas, a planter of Savannah, Georgia, while vacationing at a relative’s plantation in South Carolina, were uncommon for all but the wealthiest sportsmen. “About two o’clock—it was in December—all hands would prepare for a fox hunt,” Thomas recalled, “horns blowing the signal would be heard from the stable yards… saddle-horses, held by negro chaps in gay caps, would be waiting on the lawn, but not long waiting, for we would all soon be in the saddle and cantering to the forests.” Such scenes counted among Thomas’s most cherished experiences. “I never had anything to suit my taste as did these fox chases,” he declared.⁴

Such extravagant hunts, while rare, demonstrate how the projection of aristocratic ideals remained an important function of elite field sports. The clarion call of horns, the use of expensive livery, and other displays of pageantry proved that planter-sportsmen such as Thomas’s South Carolina kinsman Colonel Julius Huguenin, master of the hunt described above, had the necessary refinement to follow the sporting codes perfected by the English country gentlemen they sought to emulate. The sheer size of such excursions, with their well-trained hounds and the finest horses, proved that planter-sportsmen also had the financial clout to provide the most lavish sporting experience.⁵ And finally, the presence of the “negro chaps in gay caps,” central to Southern aristocratic sport, not only provided labor but symbolically reinforced whites’ mastery over the African-American population.

The use of freedmen in these excursions testifies to the aristocratic values at the heart of elite Southern field sports. Consider the language employed by One of the Scribes, as an 1872 contributor to American Sportsman called himself, when he described time in camp on a Virginia hunt. The party spent much time “lying like kings upon our royal couch of ceder [sic] down, listening to the gossip of the huntsmen and the comicalities of the colored peasantry”; having black labor on hand made the party feel “like kings.”⁶ The descriptions of Southern hunting and fishing used by native and visiting sportsmen to create this fantasy of aristocratic mastery show the degree to which the appeal of the sporting experience depended on subordinated African Americans. Northerner Edward King embraced this fantasy while touring near Mobile, Alabama. Overcome by the scenes he encountered, he wrote that “the long avenue seemed all my own; I could almost fancy that the coast was mine; the islands and the light-houses were mine, and that the two negro hunters, loitering by with guns on their shoulders, were my gamekeepers, come to attend me to the chase.”⁷ Elite sportsmen coveted such mastery, whether over the natural environment or over African Americans, which they symbolically, and sometimes materially, constructed and reconstructed in the sporting field.⁸

Although the quest for aristocracy would remain an important part of the Southern sporting field, most sportsmen lacked the financial wherewithal to provide such pageantry. Large-scale hunts—such as an 1867 deer hunt on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, described by David Franklin Thorpe, in which “we had nineteen white men, about a dozen negroes and eight hounds, six of them being young dogs”⁹ —remained rare. Most Southerners, even elites, hunted and fished on a smaller scale, and therefore most African-American sporting laborers toiled on more ordinary outings. Yet even on such smaller excursions, black laborers maintained their symbolic importance. Occasional larger hunting or fishing trips that carried a greater symbolic or recreational function required more black labor. Most Southern sportsmen who frequently employed former slaves hired but one or two, with more laborers added depending on the wealth of the white sportsmen, the number of people taking to the field, the length of the outing, and the type of game sought. A two-week trip, for example, required more gear and equipment and more portage by laborers than a simple two- or three-day expedition. Hunting or fishing trips in coastal, swampy, or other wetland regions, for which both boats and knowledge of landmarks and waterways were at a premium, demanded more skilled laborers, guides, and boatmen. Large-game hunting, for such quarry as deer, bear, or catamount (mountain lion), required more drivers and shooters and typically called for more laborers than did expeditions for small game such as squirrels or opossums. Yet no matter the size of the excursion, African-American labor remained a necessity, both for the work and for the symbolic ideal of blacks’ subordination.

When whites took to the sporting field, they invariably sought out labor suited to that important dual function. The recruitment of labor often went hand in hand with other motivations for entering the sporting field, which involved more than just hunting or fishing. Some sportsmen, particularly visitors from other, more populated and urbanized regions, saw in the Southern sporting field a chance to venture into a wilder, less-developed part of the country that re-created a by-gone America and required a shorter (and safer) trip than the Western frontier. J. B. Burnham, for example, saw a chance to escape crowded Northern cities and modern cultures. “To one whose nerves have been worn to the quick by the ceaseless hurry of city life the easy going ways of the South are balm and healing,” he declared. Leaving the North, where he was “condemned to hustle and elbow and push lest he get eternally left,” the Northern visitor might envy the South for its “pleasing disregard of Father Time, whom he has been accustomed to respect and worship as coequal with the almighty Dollar.”¹⁰ The South, for many sportsmen, held the possibility of escaping modern life. Chester L. Fidlar, when describing a hunt with black guides Ace of Spades, Cass, and Bill, and their dogs, asked: “What was there about following those dogs that was so fascinating? I tried to solve the feeling, and I believe it was because it was primitive … We enjoy stepping down from the pinnacle of our civilization, and reverting for a time to the ways of our progenitors.”¹¹ This desire to seek untamed frontiers, to return to a less civilized era without truly abandoning the luxuries and refinements of modern America, seemed to have a more than tangential connection to the South’s racial history.

Statements that paired the South’s sporting benefits with its race relations appear frequently in nineteenth-century sporting literature. Such discussions specifically included African Americans— or, at least, idyllic memories of African Americans as slaves—as important parts of such experiences. For Southerners, this connection evoked memories of a time (at best exaggerated, at worst fictional) when the world was properly ordered. Wirt Howe, who advertised his shooting grounds near Columbus, Mississippi, in Outing magazine, assured potential investors that “the large plantations of the cotton belt, which present the same appearance that they did in ante-bellum days and which are operated upon methods that have been in use for many years, are, from an agricultural point of view, unlike anything existing elsewhere in this country.” Moreover, he pointed out, each plantation had its own set of “‘quarters,’ parallel rows of log cabins where live the negro hands and their families, very much as they did in the days of slavery.”¹² Thus visitors could rest assured that their surroundings, physically and racially, mirrored the antebellum ideal that lured them south.

Sportsman “P” clearly revealed this longing for the stereotypical trappings of the Old South. “Of all the sports of the field or forest, mountain or plain, wooded hillside or swampy jungles,” he wrote, “none affords such real, genuine, jolly, rollicking fun as the old fashioned possum hunt, which is a peculiarly Southern institution, and can be seen in perfection only on the old plantation and among the darkies.” The opossum hunt “is eagerly entered into by all classes, from the learned judge to the irrepressible small boy and the happy-go-lucky cornfield negro.” Perhaps lamenting the passage of another “purely Southern institution,” P saw in the old-style opossum hunt a glimpse of a broadly appealing past that “always brings sweet memories to the country-raised southerner, and are not appreciated by others.” Those desperate to recapture old times must head south with all speed and, most importantly, must remember a critical ingredient of the old-time hunt. “Such an one would be repaid for a journey to the favored land for that special purpose, though tyros should by all means get some Uncle Sam, who is to be found on every plantation, to act as master of the hunt.”¹³

Charles Henry Smith, writing under the pen name Bill Arp, painted a typically rosy, paternalistic picture of slavery, presenting hunting expeditions with slaves as an aspect of antebellum life that he missed most.¹⁴ Noting with sadness that “the good old plantation times are gone,” Smith recalled days when masters cared for their slaves and slaves reciprocated with loyalty, “times when these old family servants felt an affectionate abiding interest in the family.” “We frolicked with their children, and all played together by day and hunted together at night, and it beat the Arabian Nights to go to the old darkey’s cabin of a winter night and hear him tell of ghosts and witches.” Smith later commented on the recollections of his friend Dr. Curry, who also used the hunt to represent the lost social relations of slavery. “How feelingly he records his companionship with the family negroes,” Smith recalled. Hunting excursions comprised some of Dr. Curry’s favorite memories. “Oh, the tender and teary recollections of ’possum hunts and coon hunts and rabbit hunts and corn shuckings,” Smith concluded, “and eating watermelons in the cotton patch and sometimes finding them while pulling fodder in the hot and sultry cornfield!”¹⁵ For those like Smith and Curry whose sporting memories figured prominently in their reconstruction of a Southern golden age, hunting and fishing provided a window into an ideal past, with whites the kindly masters and people of color the loyal slaves.

Ultimately, white Southern sportsmen’s attachment to the antebellum ideal reflected both a longing for a return to a largely mythical age of racial domination and a deep-seated dissatisfaction with the post-Emancipation social order. By constantly returning to hierarchical social relations created and reflected by hunting and fishing, relations they associated with antebellum life, white Southerners critiqued a version of the new Southern society—particularly its race relations—with which they were increasingly dissatisfied. As Jacob F. Rivers III noted in his literary analysis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Southern sporting narratives, the keepers of Southern hunting and fishing traditions found that “the principles underlying the aristocratic code of Southern sportsmanship provided an excellent cultural framework within which to think about and to articulate the negative changes they saw in their respective societies.”¹⁶ Several components linked African-American subordinates to whites’ hunting and fishing in the post-Emancipation South. White Southerners’ fond recollections of hunting or fishing with slave companions, sporting tourists’ idyllic visions of a romantic, aristocratic Old South, and, not least, sportsmen’s need for steady labor—all led thousands of sportsmen who traversed the South to rely on the labor of African Americans. For many, such an excursion simply could not be truly “Southern” without it.

Descriptions of African-American laborers permeate narratives of Southern hunting and fishing, from setting off on excursions through scenes of sociable camp life at their conclusion. At all times when in the field, whites kept black subordinates with them to do their work, make them feel more like the aristocratic sportsmen of old, and reinforce feelings of racial mastery. C. Wayne Cunningham, in a 1900 letter to Outing, wrote that the arrival of a white sporting party created an exciting social spectacle for African Americans on the Georgia coastal islands, especially for those who labored for white sportsmen. When the party arrived at the wharf, a black deer-driver would blow his bugle to “let the colored people on the island know we were coming, and to be on hand at the wharf.” On landing, the party was “greeted by several of the island negroes” and their hunting hounds. Cunningham recalled that “no welcome could have been finer to a crowd like ours than seeing those hounds and hearing their familiar voices.” Of the crowd of local blacks that met the party, two stood out for Cunningham: “old Dick Shed, the stalwart, beaming-faced negro, who is kindness personified” and “Daddy Bob, the short and dumpy, whose ‘whiskey-cough’ is well known to all those who have ever hunted on St. Catharine’s Island.”¹⁷ Such scenes demonstrate both the possibility of employment for black Southerners and whites’ seeing such heraldry as a mark of their superior status and an integral part of the Southern sporting experience.

White sportsmen cultivated the notion that their black laborers experienced as much excitement over the prospect of sporting service as did whites over having black workers at their disposal. As sportsman “C” recalled about his dealings with a gentleman from Maryland named Watkins, “The negroes that country round looked on him as a kind of oracle, and when Massa Watkins arrived every darkey’s face beamed with pleasure; and when a coon hunt was proposed the entire darkey community went mad with joy.” On these excursions, C continued, Watkins usually took along with him “a small army of darkies, each one of them armed with an axe, or a half-starved, ragged cur,” to do the bulk of the work for him.¹⁸ An unnamed Outing contributor, recalling a similar enthusiasm for black labor in the furtherance of white sport, wrote of his “loyal henchman, ‘Ole Brack Pete,’” and noted that each year, as fishing season approached, Pete would sing excitedly of the upcoming chance to serve:

She’s a long time a-comin’
She’s almost heah—
She’s dun bin erlong time on de way;
Russle wid dem gum boots,
Hump y’usef chile—
Marse Ned’s gwine fishing’ —rite erway.

“I am no singer … but I think I understand the feeling that drives that ebony rascal to caterwauling and bellowing when trout time’s a-coming,” this contributor noted, explaining his loyal employee’s excitement over “Marse Ned’s” annual resumption of fishing. “It is the same spirit of restlessness, warmed to life by the first mild breezes, which sets me to rummaging and to fussing with flies and feathers, and to overhauling a certain old tackle-box as it has been overhauled these many years.”¹⁹ For laborers such as Ole Brack Pete, enthusiasm for service, optimistically presented as the pinnacle of black social ambition, came from a love of field sports and of laboring for whites.

Once sportsmen departed for the field, they relied on African Americans for all sorts of necessary tasks, including transportation, particularly for visitors who might not know the lay of the land. “To enjoy good fishing at Beaufort the first thing you need is a good boatman,” a South Carolinian wrote, under the name Cosmopolitan, in July 1874. “Happily they abound, and Alfred or Henry Boyd, Stephen Turner or Caesar Davis will serve you well for a moderate compensation, procure stout lines and strong hooks, such as are used by the local fishermen.”²⁰ Describing an excursion near Lake Ellis, North Carolina, “J.E.W.” recalled that, through the railroad’s station agent, his party secured the services of “‘Sparks’ a genuine North Carolina collard stuffer” who, “together with his cart and critter, form the transportation of ourselves and our traps.”²¹ Northerner Horatio Bigelow recalled that when he and a companion hunted at John’s Island, South Carolina, they employed African-American guides. “Bill had Uncle Joe, a coal black negro with a white wooly beard, to shove him around through the marsh, while I drew two small nigs, each with a shoving pole, who managed to keep our clumsy old bateau moving.”²²

Sometimes, acquiring a skilled guide made the difference between success in the field and going home empty-handed. Sportsman Edward A. Robinson of Baltimore, Maryland, recalled a trip through Georgia during which “we stopped at several places as we went along to try the fishing, but did not have much success.” Finally, Robinson and his friends “made arrangements with a coal black fellow named Lewis to drive us across the island to a celebrated fishing place called Bluff Creek Hammock.”²³ On a duck hunt on the Savannah River, an Outing contributor writing under the name Dick Swiveller, unfamiliar with the scores of inlets and marshes that dot coastal Georgia, likewise relied on skilled black guides and pilots. “The bateau was commanded by Niger Joe, a prince of camp cooks, while Aleck, his black friend, guided the shooting craft skillfully down the current, past the bending willows under which the wild fowl are found and flushed at the approach of the boat.”²⁴ Particularly in lowland and coastal regions of the rural South, where slaves had long been employed as huntsmen, fishermen, and boatmen, African-American laborers remained readily available and, more importantly, knew local fields, forests, and waterways better than most. They thus provided the best and most sought-after transportation.

Having reached their destination, sportsmen depended on experienced black hunters and fishermen to locate the quarry and take them to it. As they well knew, this often provided the best chance for a successful expedition. Fishing for tarpon in an unspecified part of the region, Fred J. Wells needed an experienced guide to locate and land the notoriously difficult fish. He chose Louis Collins, “one of the best guides in the South” who had “lived on the banks of the Fish River all his life, and is thoroughly acquainted with the habits and peculiarities of the different species of fish.”²⁵ R. S. Pollard noted that he and his companions also relied on an African-American guide to locate their prey for a Virginia raccoon hunt. “The snow was at least 12 or 15 in. deep, which indicated at once that we were to have a glorious time,” he began. Because their host’s “old darky Coleman … had been reconnoitering the whole time of the day before to find out where the best hunting grounds were, and had just returned, informing us that ‘I neber see so many coon tracks before in all my born days,’ we knew that our most ardent hopes were about to be realized.”²⁶ If white sportsmen wanted the best chance at catching their prey, they knew they should turn to the area’s most experienced black huntsmen and fishermen.

Indeed, sportsmen often found African Americans’ knowledge of a region’s fish and game to be extensive. Naturalist Bradford Torrey, who toured the South in 1898, wrote with surprise of the knowledge demonstrated by an African-American guide hired in South Carolina. “I quizzed him about birds. Yes, he had noticed them; he had been hunting a great deal.”²⁷ White visitors relied heavily on laborers’ experiential knowledge, not only for conveyance but also for information and guidance. On the deer hunt on the Georgia coast described above, C. Wayne Cunningham noted that the guides determined the route he and his companions would take. After finishing their breakfast, the party waited while their three guides, Charles Grant, Dick Shed, and Daddy Bob, “fell to a discussion as to what drive we should first take. First, all three disagreed; then, after much expounding on Charles’ part and assenting on Dick’s, it was determined that we should take one of the drives near the house to start with.”²⁸ White sportsmen, particularly if not native Southerners, quickly learned what many Southerners had known since slavery: African Americans knew not only where to find fish and game but also the best ways to get them.

An unnamed contributor to Forest and Stream in 1885 described this connection between black knowledge and white sport. “While out one day with a friend we were joined by a strapping young fellow who volunteered to take us to every ‘gang of pattidges’ on the plantation. He informed us that he and another negro had only a short while before bagged twenty-three quail out of twenty five shots.”²⁹ The message to white readers was clear: black Southerners could both find game and, to the distress of some white sportsmen, kill it with efficiency. Harry Worcester Smith, in A Sporting Family of the Old South, recalled occasional visits to a friend’s plantation for hunting and fishing trips. His friend often consulted “his overseer and factotum, old Black Sam” for advice on sporting matters. “On the farm and in matters pertaining thereto, Sam was the Chief’s [Smith’s friend’s] alter ego and he was universally admitted to be a first-rate judge and manager of farm stock generally,” Smith wrote, “but far above this the old darky prided himself on his knowledge of and skill in hunting raccoons, and other nocturnal ‘varmints.’”³⁰

Not all white sportsmen would admit to relying on black subordinates to find fish and game, but none hesitated to use them for the variety of tasks required once the prey was located. Black labor in those situations became an absolute necessity for many outsiders. F. A. Olds noted in 1900 that “the prerequisites for a hunt are a negro, an elderly one preferred, a couple of dogs, kept up during the day so as to be ‘sharp’ for the hunt, a light, an ax, and a sack,” making clear his dictum that African Americans were one of the starting points for a Southern excursion.³¹ “The assistance of a negro is as necessary to the full enjoyment of a coon hunt as cranberry sauce is to the completion of a turkey dinner,” a Charlotte, North Carolina, sportsman wrote in 1901. “When starting out to spend a night with the coons, we always took with us 2 or 3 darkeys, 2 sharp axes, and 2 large corn sacks.” As an example he described a Virginia raccoon hunt. “One day, about the first of the coon season, Arch [the contributor’s friend and hunting companion] sent over a darkey to ask if I would go hunting that night. I sent back word that I would, and would take Ned, Jake, and Dick, my father’s 3 hired men, to cut down trees and carry the game.”³²

Frank A. Heywood also wrote of the need for black subordinates. Describing small-game hunting in the Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina, he noted that “for coon and possum hunting, provide yourself with plenty of ‘niggers’ and coon dogs, and start into the swamp immediately after dark.” For Heywood, hiring black laborers to perform the heavy tasks was indeed necessary, but perhaps in some ways secondary to the spectacle of watching such laborers in action. “It will not be long before the dogs will have treed a coon. Then comes the fun,” Heywood noted of watching his hired hands carry out their appointed task. “Muscular negroes attack the tree with sharp steel or mount into its branches. Torches of lightwood blare brightly. The hunters gather about. The tree falls or the coon is shaken from the branches. In either case there is a conglomerate mass of negro, dog and coon.” Heywood’s description reveals his obvious enthusiasm for such contests. “Thump! The dog has him; and a tussle occurs, but the dog wins. Thump again! A negro has smitten a brother in his anxiety to strike the coon. Yah! A negro has caught a possum, and inserting the beasts’ tail in the clevis of a hickory stick, starts for home, the envy of his sable companions.”³³ In these hunts, black labor also served a key psychological function. These scenes—“the height of fun,” according to Heywood—that depicted African Americans as simultaneously lacking in grace and civility but still under the control of white sportsmen formed one of the most common tropes of dominance in whites’ accounts of Southern field sports.

Black laborers also cared for and managed the dogs, mainstays of hunting sports, on whites’ expeditions. Hunting dogs were one of the most effective means for locating a variety of small game, such as fox, rabbit, and squirrel, and even for driving large game such as deer. Calling to mind both European aristocracy and the antebellum planter elite, possession of a well-bred, finely trained pack of hounds symbolized sporting refinement.³⁴ For Southerners, this function also found expression in the ubiquitous presence of the slave dog-handler, who appeared frequently in antebellum sporting narratives. After Emancipation, the loyal former slave who controlled the pack remained a staple of both Southern sport and sporting literature; with slavery gone, it was a particularly valuable icon for Southern elites who seemed to admire these dog-handlers as much for their symbolic value as their practical benefit.

Andrews Wilkinson, while hunting in lower Louisiana, took to the field in a multiracial party that included a former slave dog-handler, and later recalled this individual in regal tone and with more than a hint of longing for the “old days.” Wilkinson’s party consisted of seven persons, including “three creoles from neighboring white plantations” and Jean Baptiste, “our colored ‘master of the hounds.’” Jean Baptiste was born on a local sugar plantation, where he had served as huntsman, and “during his involuntary bondage he had endured no heavier tasks than were allotted to a hound master, gamekeeper, and venison provider of the old regime.” The high status accorded Jean Baptiste did not disappear with the end of slavery, nor did his function as a symbol of aristocracy and racial control. Representative of a continuity in race relations before and after Emancipation, re-created in the Southern sporting field, Jean Baptiste proved that freedom did not “ruin” all African Americans. “Though grizzled with advancing age and by thirty years of freedom, and blackened and warped by the winds and suns of half a hundred hunting seasons,” Wilkinson noted, “he still remained the guardian, trainer, and master of our general neighborhood pack of deerhounds.”³⁵

It was also common, particularly with the end of slavery, for white sportsmen to hire African-American dog-keepers who used their own animals for hunts. F. A. Olds, on a hunt on the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, employed Amos, “a faithful darky, to whom a hunt on Bald Head is a never-failing delight.” Amos provided trained hounds for the hunt, in this case “a sort of spaniel named ‘Jumbo’ and a non-descript cur named ‘Pete,’” and managed them in the field. While Amos did not know Pete’s exact breed, he did not doubt his effectiveness. When Olds asked about Pete’s lineage, “Jes one o’ dem standard cur dogs, de most reliablest dog a nigger kin have,” Amos responded. “His faith in Pete was justified by results,” Olds concluded.³⁶ While hunting in Maryland, H. M. Howard hired two black dog-keepers, the first a “wiry little, old negro, with ill-fitting and discolored clothes, and run down boots” named Uncle Ned, and the second, “another negro, a strapping young fellow,” named Lincoln. They brought along “three dogs of doubtful ancestry, popularly termed coon dogs,” called Dash, Spark, and Dandy.³⁷ The skill of laborers such as Jean Baptiste, Amos, Uncle Ned, and Lincoln, who since the early days of slavery had been among the most skilled hound masters in the South, played a critical role in the success of whites’ field sports and in maintaining the illusion of a racial aristocracy that seemed threatened in the decades following Emancipation.

As indicated by an account from an unnamed Tennessee sportsman, describing an opossum shooting party he organized for his sister and a friend who was visiting from Boston, black laborers were often responsible for the success of an excursion—and not just while in the field. Leaving with a large party of perhaps twenty young men and women, in addition to the writer’s mother and another married woman who went along as chaperones, the party soon met “the negro I had hired, and his pack of dogs.” On the hunt, the dogs located their quarry. They treed an opossum, which was shaken out by one of the laborers and fell to the ground dead. By the end of the evening the party had caught four more. “When we started homeward all agreed we had never had a better time,” the narrator recalled. Some of the party members later expressed surprise that a fall from a tree could so easily kill an opossum. What they did not know was that the narrator had again relied on his African-American laborer. “They do not know that when I hired the negro I saw 4 ’possums in his cabin and bought them; instructing him to send a small boy ahead of our party to plant dead ’possums in trees at ½ hour intervals.”³⁸ Because it would not do to allow guests to go home empty-handed, the laborer not only had worked on the hunt but, more importantly, had kept his white employer from losing face.

There seemed to be no limit to the tasks black laborers would perform on these hunting expeditions. While at their father’s Myrtle Grove plantation south of New Orleans, Andrews and H. W. Wilkinson employed “Tom Howard, our reliable colored cook and camp servitor, and old Jean, the ante-bellum plantation deer-hunter, [who] loaded up our cat-rigged hunting-boat with a big tarpaulin tent, camp-beds, provisions for a week’s cruise, and a good supply of hunting and fishing accoutrements.”³⁹ When S. Phelps sought good sport near Pine Bluff, North Carolina, he did so “with a prominent State officer”—whom he met through the recommendation of an officer of the Seaboard Air Line Railway, one of the leading promoters of hunting and fishing in North Carolina—with “his keen scented pointer in front and a well scented darkey behind.”⁴⁰ C. W. Boyd and a companion set out for a winter shoot in South Carolina, “determined to go in style.” One of their first tasks was to find a black laborer to serve their camp. After being “overwhelmed with applications,” they settled on Barney, “a genuine Southern negro, with thick lips, broad, good-humored face, and somewhat of a character in his way,” who met their needs perfectly. Barney proved a valuable asset. “Not an event of importance took place in local sporting circles of which Barney did not know, and of which he was not magna pars, as Virgil puts it,” Boyd noted. “Add to this that he was a first-rate cook, and in social intercourse constantly inclined to risibility, with a never-failing flow of conversation, and no one, I think, can disapprove of our choice.”⁴¹ It was important for Boyd and his friend to employ an experienced sportsmen, but they specifically sought one with a particular personality type—a “genuine Southern negro,” of “good-humored face,” who “in social intercourse constantly inclined to risibility”—that fit their preconceived idea of a properly subordinate African-American companion.

Black laborers’ role did not end with the set camp, baying hounds, or captured fish or game. African Americans carried the products of these excursions from the field, cleaned and refitted equipment and supplies, even provided entertainment for sportsmen on the return to camp. White sportsmen, particularly those with aristocratic pretensions, would not perform these jobs themselves and believed them to be ideal work for black subordinates. R. S. Pollard, for example, relied on his guide to find a laborer to carry home their game. “It was now impossible for us to carry all our game,” Pollard remembered. “We were getting more or less tired from our tramp, so we sent Coleman over to a neighboring colored man’s home to ask him if he would not take our game home for us. Coleman soon returned with this man, and after telling him he could take one of the coons for his trouble, we were off again.”⁴² When a sportsman writing as Mortimer returned with his companion from an excursion near Virginia’s York River, they were met by “several of the darkies, who took our traps in charge, and we started for the house.”⁴³

Even the social life that awaited sportsmen at their destination sometimes included African Americans. Whether in the stereotypical Southern sporting camp of which nineteenth-century sportsmen often wrote or, for well-heeled sportsmen, in the more upscale sporting lodge or resort, black subordinate companions remained visible. One unnamed sportsman, describing an 1875 trip to South Carolina, noted that the presence of former slaves, as well as their activities and behavior while in camp, helped white sportsmen judge the caliber of camp life. Commenting on the social distance between blacks and whites, as well as their respective foods, this contributor again demonstrates the multivaried importance of African-American subordinates. “The negroes were grouped around their own fire at a respectable distance eating their store of provisions contained in one iron kettle, consisting of hominy with the addition of a few birds. We, of the white, or ‘plain’ skins, as our dusky friends are pleased to call us, made an ample meal of a more luxurious character, and chatted merrily till late hours.”⁴⁴ Such accounts again suggest that white sportsmen used the presence of African Americans as much to cultivate their own identity as for labor.

The entertainment provided between excursions, which sometimes included black performers, also reveals a close relationship between the presence of African Americans and whites’ notions of a complete sporting experience. The program to open the 1889 season at the North Carolina Health and Sporting Resort in Avoca, for example, was made more authentic by the presence of a black chorus. As reported in the Chowan County Edenton Fishermen & Farmer, the program consisted of a prayer, a welcome address, a formal speech by an R. B. Creecy, “then an old plantation and fishing beach song by a choir of colored singers then dinner.”⁴⁵ Such sporting entertainment could even attract a following across the Atlantic. When renowned Massachusetts-born sportsman Harry Worcester Smith, founder of the Master of Foxhounds Association of America and famous for his Southern hunts, took a hunting holiday in Ireland in 1912, he took along his favorite servants, including Norman Brooks, Dolph Wheeler, Sam Webster, Wiley Thrash, and Joe Thomas. These servants reportedly charmed guests at a Christmas gathering at Middleton Park. Smith had arranged numerous American delicacies, including confectionery from New York, ham from Virginia, deerfoot sausages from Massachusetts, and grapefruit from Florida. But nothing proved as big a hit as Smith’s servants. The guests “were loud in their praises of the viands and the efforts of my colored cook; and between the courses, Wheeler, my trainer, charmed them with his beautiful double-note whistle, and time and time again the colored quartette would sing and all hands join in the chorus. Finally, after coffee, the table was moved and the rugs withdrawn, and such step dancing as only a Southern darkie can give was shown to those assembled.”⁴⁶

Whether at a resort or in camp, on a bateau or in the field, steering or shooting, trapping or carrying home trophies of the day’s endeavors, African Americans never strayed far from the thousands of white sportsmen who traversed the South in the decades after the Civil War. These subordinate companions performed the countless, often menial and thankless functions that enabled Southern hunting and fishing (at least as recognized by white sportsmen) in the first place. They also carried out the other crucial function of being black. Sportsmen who hunted and fished in the Southern states demanded the presence of African Americans to make the South seem more like “the South” as they wished to remember or experience it, to help transform white sportsmen into country gentlemen of former days, and to reaffirm, even celebrate, the racial hierarchy that had been muddled by Emancipation. Indeed, African Americans provided their employers not just with luxury and labor, but with an inexorable link to their cherished identities as sportsmen, Southerners, and whites.

THE BENEFITS OF SPORTING LABOR

African Americans found themselves essential to the Southern sporting ideal, because of whites’ willingness to profit from blacks’ hunting and fishing talents and their desire to use the presence of people of color to validate white identity, but such exploitation was not completely one-sided. Black sporting laborers gained benefits from their centrality to Southern field sports, sometimes substantial benefits, and not just financial or material. Wages, the most common benefit, gave sporting laborers a chance to earn cash income in a money-scarce economy. Particularly in the most popular sporting states of the South, including the Carolinas and Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, sporting labor gave African Americans the opportunity to secure a ready supply of hard money.

Given the geographic and demographic diversity of the South, and that African Americans worked for whites all across the region, it is difficult to determine whether there were standard wage levels for sporting labor. Any standard must have been local and narrators rarely mentioned specific payment to laborers, which complicates any estimation of typical compensation. Cosmopolitan asserted in 1874 that a black laborer “will serve you well and faithfully for a moderate compensation,”⁴⁷ a sentiment typical of white sportsmen, who rarely discussed specific terms of employment. B. H. Wilkins, in his memoir “War Boy,” noted that “poor folks used to make a few dollars poling the sportsmen around,” but provided no detail.⁴⁸ J.E.W., by contrast, who hunted near Lake Ellis, North Carolina, offered one of the few examples of specificity. “The best of our guides can be hired for one dollar per day and rations, and almost every man in the country owns one or more hounds.”⁴⁹

Evidence indicates that many black sporting laborers sold their services on their own terms, informally, and often not for cash. The jobs provided not only wages but opportunities to earn a share of the fish or game caught or to exchange skill for sporting gear and equipment. The informal economy of the sporting field enabled black laborers, the vast majority of whom did not exclusively hunt or fish for a living, to secure the best deal they could at a given time and use the products of their work, earned in cash or kind, to supplement their normal income. It is impossible to determine with certainty how often whites paid African Americans in cash and how often they paid them in animals, skins, or other goods or services, but narrative evidence indicates that noncash rewards were commonplace.

As described above, Pollard, while hunting raccoon in Virginia with his guide Coleman, solicited a local African American to carry his party’s game home “after telling him he could take one of the coons for his trouble.”⁵⁰ A former slave named John accompanied George Clark Rankin on his nighttime raccoon hunts. John kept the raccoons for his own use because, like many other whites, Rankin perceived raccoons—although great sport to hunt—as food fit only for African Americans. After returning from the field, “a few nights later John would have a coon supper. But right there I drew the line,” Rankin wrote. “No coon for me.”⁵¹ For his service to Andrews Wilkinson on an expedition near New Orleans, Old Jean, who served as a slave huntsman before Emancipation, received a share of the meat. According to Wilkinson, this was ideal because “we had all the snipe and duck shooting that we wanted, while ‘Malviny and the chilluns’ [ostensibly Jean’s family] were provided with enough smoked coon-meat and pickled poules d’eau [small game bird of the rail family] to last them for the remainder of winter.”⁵²

On Fred Mather’s specimen-collecting expedition near Catahoula Lake, Louisiana, with laborer and guide Sam, in addition to paying unspecified wages Mather included several other incentives. To keep Sam happy, he allowed him to sell a portion of the fish and game caught, “as a perquisite, a tip or reward.”⁵³ A single catfish that Sam had landed, which Mather allowed him to sell, brought the laborer “$2.50, about 4 cents per pound,” not an insignificant amount of money in 1898.⁵⁴ Mather also used new equipment as incentive for Sam. While they were searching for a turtle specimen, Sam noticed Mather’s fine set of hooks and lines and remarked, “Golly, I’d like to get some o’ dem hooks fo’ big catfish, dey’s de bes’ I ever see.” Mather promised Sam that he could indeed earn those same hooks. “Sam, if you can put me where I can get an alligator snapper of 60 lbs. or more, you shall have all these hooks and lines.”⁵⁵

Aside from the financial and material windfalls, sporting labor also created rare opportunities for blacks to display skills in the sporting field that many employers believed to be a prerogative of whiteness. Hunting and fishing sometimes gave African Americans a showcase for their mastery over the natural environment and its products, a mastery that whites wished to deny them. At times they could exploit their key role in Southern field sports to challenge whites’ authority by embarrassing their employers or engaging in interpersonal behavior with white companions that would be unheard of outside the sporting field. Sporting laborers had a certain amount of social leeway not enjoyed by most other black Southerners, particularly as Reconstruction turned to Redemption and, eventually, segregation. Put simply, because African Americans were indispensable to “proper” Southern hunting and fishing, they could push at the limits of “proper” behavior for people of color.

Whites’ accounts of taking to the field with black companions provide occasional glimpses of times when African Americans could display their skills in front of, and sometimes at the expense of, their white employers. Cunningham, for example, on his deer hunt in coastal Georgia, recalled that one of his laborers loudly proclaimed confidence in his own talent by blowing a bugle on arriving at their destination. As noted earlier, the bugle call was used to alert the island’s black population to be ready for an approaching white sporting party, but according to Cunningham, “the bugler claimed that the reason he blows his bugle is not so much to warn the colored people of our approach, as the deer. Drawing himself up in a proud manner he would say, ‘Boss, when I blow dis horn I can hear dem deer say, “Dere come Chas. Grant.”’”⁵⁶ Such bravado by a black subordinate in the presence of whites was typically impermissible, but in the context of field sports, within the safety provided by their essential service, African Americans could trumpet, or bugle, their own skill.

This relative safety is shown in an account of a 1902 Pinehurst, North Carolina, hunt written by an unnamed white sportsman who hunted with “Tom, my colored guide.” While stalking a bevy of quail, they scared some birds into the air. Both men fired, but with very different results. The employer missed, but “a half a second later Tom’s gun scored a kill.” Soon after, another group of birds took flight, with the same results. “Try as I might I couldn’t pick a bird and at last, I blazed at the bunch,” the white sportsman recalled. “Tom’s gun had cracked with mine and two birds fell. He had waited until they were in line and killed both!” Tom’s shooting superiority was not lost on his employer. Yet, perhaps not wanting to endanger future employment and most likely well acquainted with the dangers of stepping “out of place” in 1902 North Carolina, Tom downplayed his superior shooting. He even attempted to give his employer credit for one of the kills. “‘Berry good shot, sah!’ he remarked, indicating that one of the birds was mine, and I was too chagrined to contradict him,” the sportsman noted.

The white sportsman had clearly been outdone, a point that neither he nor his guide cared to dwell on. “I knew he had ‘wiped my eye’ once and killed two birds with his second barrel,” the employer admitted, “but I kept quiet and guiltily took the bird and tucked it away in my coat, when the old dog brought it to me.” Tom’s importance to the hunt allowed him to use his skill to the utmost, in the process proving himself the better marksman and upsetting the notion of African Americans’ inherent inferiority as shooters and sportsmen. Notice, however, that Tom minimized his challenge to white racial assumptions and any violation of the codes of behavior in relation to whites by not calling attention to his superior skills. Indeed, that ability probably allowed him to annoy his employer with his magnanimous demeanor. The narrator recalled Tom’s discretion on their journey home. “As we rode I held an interesting colloquy with myself, and Tom very kindly confined his remarks to his horse and the dogs.”⁵⁷

Providing for the reputation of a sporting employer in this fashion was another requirement of African-American sporting subordinates. Suzanne C. Linder, in her Historical Atlas of the Plantations of the ACE [Ashepoo, Combahee, Edisto] River Basin—1860, described the sporting histories of several South Carolina plantations (Lavington, Bugbee, The Oaks, Drainfield, Fee Farm, and Godfrey) and recounted the services of “local African Americans [who] served as paddler and guides.” One in particular, named Bristow, possessed this quality of prudence regarding his employers. Bristow “was especially valuable because it was said he could paddle with one hand and shoot with the other. Given enough compensation, he could also be discreet about just who did the shooting.”⁵⁸ As such discretion indicates, black sporting laborers were well aware that their employment often depended on more than skill; it also suggests that they stood in a unique position in which they might benefit from such circumspection.

African Americans’ ubiquity in Southern hunting and fishing sometimes allowed them to turn the tables on white sportsmen, with their centrality to “proper” Southern sport offering a measure of protection in the process. Examples of this are rare in sporting narratives—as one can imagine, white narrators were eager to present themselves and their fellows in a good light—but they do exist. An anonymous cartoon in the August 1903 Recreation, for example, demonstrates how black subordinates might position themselves to counter an employer’s interests. Entitled “How Old Sport Stopped the Game Hog’s Little Game,” the cartoon depicts the return from the field of the stereotypical white “game hog”—the wealthy sportsman who cared little for the careful management of wildlife and slaughtered more than he should. Accompanying him is Old Sport, a black laborer. In the first panel, Old Sport struggles under the burden of so many animals. Faced with legal limits on how much game he can kill and transport, the Game Hog devises a clever scheme to evade eager game wardens; in the second panel, he is stowing his trophies in his luggage. Old Sport watches the subterfuge with a subtle smile, and finds a way to repay the Game Hog for making him bear such a burden. In the final panel, the Game Hog is smugly awaiting his train, seemingly unaware of the game warden searching his luggage.⁵⁹ I do not suggest that black laborers turned in employers who violated bag limits; in fact, I have not found an example of this. But this cartoon does show that sporting laborers, because of their near centrality to whites’ field sports and their close proximity to whites while in the field, were very familiar with employers’ sporting habits, would know if any laws were violated, and might be able to use such knowledge to their advantage.

William Allen Bruce provides a more concrete example of a laborer stepping “out of place.” In his account of a fox hunt in Charlotte County, Virginia (“no where else on earth does fox hunting yield so much pleasure as here, sir!”), a black sporting companion seized the opportunity to prove his skill and knowledge at the expense of his white employers. A particularly sly fox had kept Bruce and his companions at bay for months. Eventually, Bruce organized a large party to dispatch the fox once and for all. Again the fox eluded the hounds and disappeared, a scene that repeated many times. Finally, Bruce called on the opinion of Old Moses, “the ‘darkey’ hand,” who “fairly swelled with pride at being able to enlighten so many white folks on such an important topic.” Moses gleefully pointed out a nest in the middle of a hollow scrub oak stump and, “after enjoying the expression of astonishment on our faces,” explained how the fox had hidden from the party each and every time.

Moses’ proud exhibition of knowledge allowed the party to quickly catch the fox and allowed Moses to display his prowess in that one form of hunting most closely associated with Virginia’s aristocracy—a fact that, according to Bruce, Moses let no one forget. “Mose had the pelt to make him a pair of ‘glubs’ [gloves],” Bruce noted, “and he never tires of telling how this sly old fox was caught.”⁶⁰ Protected by the real and symbolic value of his labor, Moses earned not only gloves but also a chance to display talents that proved a source of pride long afterward. Such occurrences often annoyed or embarrassed white narrators, but since laborers such as Old Moses resided in an inherently subordinate capacity, these incidents could perhaps be dismissed as aberrations that neither challenged assumptions about blacks’ sporting skill nor posed any real threat to the racial hierarchy.

Indeed, one must be careful not to overstate any leveling effect provided by the importance of African-American sporting labor. Though they remained critical to white sportsmen, black subordinates stayed precisely that—subordinate. Ultimately, no matter how skilled the laborer and no matter how much whites claimed to value certain loyal and dear servants, African Americans’ key role in Southern field sports could only push so far at the boundaries of the social hierarchy. The ever-growing racial divide limited that ability in the post-Emancipation South. If certain black laborers found opportunities to temporarily “turn the world upside down,” those instances remained exceptional. African Americans who relied on hunting and fishing for employment performed difficult and often dangerous work for the benefit of white sportsmen who valued their subordinates only as far as whites’ conceptions of proper and enjoyable sport were served.

Consider the story of South Carolina sporting laborer Isaac Polite, who took to the field for the St. Helena Island Rifle and Sporting Club in 1867. Polite set out with a large party that included “nineteen gentlemen consisting of members of the Club both active and honorary, and a number of invited guests from the Navy, from Hilton Head, and from Beaufort.” It was a genteel affair and, according to David Franklin Thorpe, the club’s recording secretary, everyone had a good time. “The generous good cheer of the tables was discussed with zest, and the songs, the speeches, and exhibitions of heroic valor in the field were heartily enjoyed.”⁶¹ An accident involving Polite, which Thorpe described in a letter to an acquaintance, was the only mark on the whole affair. A member of the party, Mr. William H. Alden, not wanting to clean his gun for fear of dirtying his hands, asked Polite to clean it for him. When Polite reached for the gun, it discharged into his left arm, an accident requiring “amputation saving the wrist joint and thumb.” Alden gave the laborer fifty dollars, “and a sum was made up at once of one hundred and thirty dolls [sic], but that money can’t replace a hand.”⁶² Thorpe also recounted the incident in the St. Helena Club ledger, asserting that it was “the single untoward incident” of the trip and that “through the generosity of the club, [Polite’s] misfortune was mitigated by the prompt contribution of the sum of one-hundred and thirty one dollars, which was placed in the hands of his employer for the benefit of his family.” In addition to the money given to Polite’s employer, “a meeting of the Club convened at the camp voted a further donation be made at the next meeting.”⁶³ Their concern apparently had limits, however. At the club’s next meeting, on February 14, they made no effort to vote additional funds for Isaac Polite, who, ostensibly, would no longer be able to secure part of his living through sporting labor.

SPORTING LABOR AND WHITE AUTHORITY

Despite the benefits to African-American sporting laborers—their chance to earn money, fish, or game, an opportunity to display their skills and experience, and the rare instance in which they could utilize the importance of their labor to poke fun at or embarrass white employers—white sportsmen employed black laborers to serve their own needs and most likely did not particularly care whether their subordinates benefited. Black sporting laborers faced unavoidable limits on how much they could benefit from their work. Such labor served, first, the needs of white employers, as plainly demonstrated by the tragic story of Isaac Polite.

Whites used narratives of sporting excursions involving African Americans to proffer certain images of people of color, to both the sporting and the general reading public, that helped create and reify notions of black inferiority and white supremacy. Just as antebellum narrators of Southern field sports used descriptions of slaves and masters hunting and fishing together to create the archetype of the docile, blissfully ignorant slave, so post-Emancipation sporting narrators, writing in a transitional period of Southern race relations spanning the insecurity of Reconstruction and the racial domination of Jim Crow, used the presence of former slaves to create portraits of black (and, by reflection, white) character that lionized white control over the sporting field and African Americans. In the accounts in sporting periodicals and newspapers, and in sportsmen’s published recollections, writers constructed images of black Southerners that meshed with existing stereotypes and helped solidify emerging stereotypes of African Americans as unintelligent, uncivilized, incompetent brutes.

These narratives of Southern hunting and fishing, into the early twentieth century, served a variety of interrelated functions in their construction of particular images of African Americans. They re-created in the sporting field, through images of black loyalty, subservience, and docility, the racial hierarchy swept away by Emancipation. They provided humorous or degrading scenes involving black sporting companions that satisfied white readers’ stereotypical associations. They contrasted whites’ skill in the field with black subordinates’ incompetence and poor behavior, to solidify their own sense of mastery over hunting and fishing. Finally, they depicted African Americans as inferior sportsmen who lacked the skill, intelligence, and moderation in the field required for furthering efforts to conserve the South’s fish and game. Put simply, white authors crafted stories of the biracial sporting field to reinforce whites’ social and cultural authority, and for that reason such stories abound in narratives of Southern hunting and fishing.

The “Old-Time Negro” became a common device to display white authority. This invention of disgruntled Southerners in the decades after Emancipation revealed a longing for the days of slavery. Such descriptions contrasted elderly former slaves who remained loyal and true to their former masters with the younger generation of African Americans not born into slavery and not as dependent on or deferential to whites. The antebellum archetype of the faithful black sporting companion appears in the story “Moses, the Tale of a Dog,” by Francis J. Hagan, published in Outing in September 1898. “The Colonel” is on a sporting trip with two servants, one a former slave named Uncle Ephe, the other a young black employee named John White, who has brought along one of his young hunting dogs. The Colonel comments on the dog’s obvious good breeding. “[The puppy] looks to me stouter than the sire, and, I dare say, has speed,” he says. Forgetting his place, White, “carried away by this need of praise for his idol from such an imminent [sic] source,” speaks up. “Yes, sah, he pintedly [sic] is fast—scuse me, Kunnel, scuse me, sah.” White speaks before realizing it is not his business to offer his opinion on such matters. He is “confounded by his own temerity, bowing and scraping, with his hat off.” Loyal Uncle Ephe, who knows the propriety of such occasions, admonishes the youngster for his infraction. “‘Laws-a-me,’ said Uncle Ephe, sotto voce, enviously, ‘what’s this new generation o’ niggers a-comin’ to, a-takin’ de words out o’ their master’s mouths?’” ⁶⁴ For white readers, particularly Southerners, Uncle Ephe would have been a welcome character who provided reassurance that the racial deference of the “Old South” remained alive and well in the sporting field.

Such stories of black loyalty to white superiors were common in accounts of Southern hunting and fishing. For some sportsmen, broadcasting African-American laborers’ deference to whites became a worthy endeavor. An unnamed sportsman, describing an 1875 trip to coastal South Carolina, noted that he employed former slaves because the “study of character afforded by the negroes, decidedly the most primitive in manners and speech of the Southern blacks, is extremely interesting.” He then recalled the role of African Americans in his hunting party. After the pre-trip meal, “a little darkey popped his head in at the door” to inform them it was time to ready their traps and equipment and prepare to depart from headquarters—“an old Southern mansion with broad piazzas, large high studded rooms, and chimneys built out-side, formerly occupied by the plantation overseer, an important personage in those times.” The narrator described the captain of the company’s laborers, “a negro by the name of Sergeant Parker.” Parker was a kind and skilled hand, but more importantly, “understood his place thoroughly.” Whites had their minds set on tractable, dependable black labor and made it a necessary part of their sport. “What servants these colored men are,” the sportsman concluded. “The art of serving is with them innate.”⁶⁵

White commentators presented the sporting field as a place where racial subordination remained intact, where white sportsmen must and did dominate. African Americans neither controlled the sporting field nor had authority in relation to whites. When the races met in the field, which they often did, whites were in charge and African Americans deferential. Consider the account of “A Quail Hunt in North Carolina” by a contributor writing as H.W.K., during which his party met a group of black huntsmen. “Two of them had guns, the others were apparently unarmed, and they had a half a dozen dogs of as many breeds and colors. Evidently they were rabbit hunters. A North Carolina negro is a born rabbit hunter. A dozen or more of them will get together with possibly two or three guns among them and a horde of dogs of all kinds. Then they will have a rabbit hunt.” Apparently the sight of the huntsmen inspired the band of whites to temporarily suspend their search for quail and try for a rabbit. Standing on a railroad embankment, a few of the white huntsmen spied a rabbit and opened fire. They missed their mark, which the black huntsmen, gathered nearby, enjoyed very much. “Of course they were highly delighted, and their remarks were anything but complimentary to our skill; but we didn’t say a word—at least not aloud.” Then the group of African Americans fired. Apparently believing one of their party made the kill, “a shout of joy went up as one of the rabbit hunter’s dogs trotted in with the dead rabbit in his mouth.” Their glee soon abated as the whites, either believing they had shot the rabbit or simply sure the animal belonged to them by right, demanded the catch. According to H.W.K., the African Americans offered no debate or resistance. “Upon our claiming the game it was handed over, and the gift of a ten-cent piece sent off the colored contingent with many grins of delight.”⁶⁶ Properly deferential, the black huntsmen did not question the white men’s right to the rabbit, thereby affirming the racial hierarchy of the field. The whites responded by offering a gift of money to show their largesse.

Comic relief provided another obvious function of the frequent inclusion of African Americans in white descriptions of Southern hunting and fishing. Nineteenth-century sporting narratives, designed to sell books, newspapers, and magazines, often contained humorous and farcical occurrences from the field that focused on people of color. These descriptions of Southern excursions appeared just as American racism reached an all-time high. White authors often poked fun at African Americans. Such humor portrayed subordinate companions as unintelligent, unrestrained, and uncivilized in order to contrast stereotypical black character with the intelligence and self-control of white sportsmen.⁶⁷ In an account of a Charlotte County, Virginia, raccoon hunt, for example, an anonymous writer portrayed his three African-American companions, Ned, Jake, and Dick, as stereotypically overemotional and unable to restrain their excitable natures. When they reached the field and their hounds began to bay, the excessive exuberance of the three men made it difficult for the white sportsman to clearly assess the situation. “The Negroes could no longer contain themselves and began to yell,” he noted.⁶⁸ This juxtaposition of white and black sporting behavior is typical of nineteenth-century narratives. The white hunter is in complete control of his emotions while his black companions are not, a contrast that lays bare one of the stereotypes with which white sportsmen maintained the racial divide and labeled African Americans as inferior sportsmen.

To entertain his readers, Outing contributor John Mortimer Murphy relied on the popular notions that African Americans had a mortal fear of wild animals and were ignorant of the ways of the natural environment, both staples of nineteenth-century racial stereotypes and sporting narrative humor. Describing shooting in Florida, Murphy commented on African Americans’ alleged fear of alligators, noting that “if there is anything [of] which they have a wholesome fear it is an alligator … Bayonets have no terrors compared with the jaws of these … creatures.” Murphy explained that he once asked a guide why he was so afraid of alligators. The guide replied: “‘kase in old times, ‘bout de flood time, ‘gatahs used to live on collude people, and dat made ‘em so bad they was kicked out o’d’ Ark by Noah or his mudder. Now I don’t want ‘em to get any blacker by eatin’ me; not if I kin help it.’”⁶⁹ Here Murphy uses African Americans’ supposed dread of alligators, as well as a ludicrous explanation of the alligator’s history, to entertain readers probably well versed in assumptions of black intellectual inferiority. The account would also further demonstrate to a white audience that African Americans had an inherent fear and misunderstanding of the natural world and its creatures that both contrasted with whites’ keen knowledge and further proved African Americans to be incompetent sportsmen.

Sometimes the “humor” of such narratives came less from poking fun at blacks’ character than from placing them in physical danger. Such accounts often had a cruel edge that reveals much about the nature of the Southern racial hierarchy and the racism of the American sporting public. In Glories of the Carolina Coast, James Henry Rice Jr., one-time secretary of the South Carolina Audubon Society who would later become a leading proponent of using the “Negro question” to convince Southerners to accept wildlife restrictions, fondly recalled a contest between an African-American laborer and a tenacious raccoon on St. Helena Island. “One of the most laughable sights I ever witnessed was a fight between a negro man and a ‘tiger’ raccoon. The negro had cut down a big tupelo in which the raccoon was hiding. I had promised him a dollar for the job.” When the laborer went into the tree after the raccoon, a fierce wrestling match ensued. “Such spitting, growling and cursing mixed together I never heard before or since,” Rice recalled. “The raccoon was biting off pieces of skin and the negro trying to tear him loose. It was worth a dollar of anybody’s money.”⁷⁰ Rice delighted in watching a subordinate risk his personal safety for his employer’s benefit. The enjoyment of that “laughable sight” seemed to come from his subordinate’s struggle and from the fact that Rice could cause such mayhem simply by offering a dollar. Such stories, in which African Americans were placed in dangerous, humiliating, and, for some readers, “humorous” situations, became common in sporting narratives and helped sportsmen clarify who was in control of hunting and fishing in Dixie.

“Will Scribbler” wrote of another incident, to amuse the reading public, that also had a decidedly dark edge that would most likely have been understood and appreciated by a Southern audience. His account of a hunt on an unspecified plantation, like so many other sporting accounts, may have been highly fictionalized or told as much to “entertain” or “instruct” as to recount a real incident. Scribbler described a party of white huntsmen who came across a black sportsman in the field. The “native” was hunting with an old musket and a frail hound and volunteered to lead the men to a covey of quail if they repaid him with a few loads of shot. The men agreed and set off with their new companion. The circuitous route led them through a nearly impassable wall of briers and brush that yielded but one rabbit and a single bird. Angry with the “native” for producing poor results, the sportsmen became infuriated when he made another offer: “Hi, gemmen, I tecks yer whar dar’s er nudder gang ef gim’e sum mo’ loads!” By way of response, the white sportsmen chose to repay the guide for his temerity. “In answer we presented arms as if to deliver the desired ammunition at easy gunshot, but our tormentor tumbling heels over head into a convenient briar patch in a frantic effort to dodge behind a mammoth oak.” After the terrified guide embarrassed himself, “we concluded that sufficient retribution had found him out and so left him wondering what effect our nitro powder, wadded with paper, would produce when fired from that rusty musket.”⁷¹

In this incident, the guide failed in his duty to provide Scribbler and his companions with a sufficient quantity of game. For that, the whites made their “tormentor” pay a price by making him fear for his life. Certainly the author intended the story to be humorous, but there are other, embedded messages that would not have been lost on white sportsmen. Incompetent subordinates deserved what they got if their presumptuous claims of knowledge or authority proved detrimental to their betters. African Americans, such as the “native” in this story with his shoddy weaponry and inability to deliver on his promise, could not be taken seriously as skilled sportsmen. Unlike the laborers described earlier, lauded because they made good on the terms of their employment and because their status as trusted servants meant that whites viewed them as extensions of their own skill, a poor sportsman who operated away from whites’ oversight and then failed to deliver on his word should be treated with nothing but contempt.

An 1879 Currier & Ives lithograph by Thomas Worth demonstrates the familiar combination of images of African Americans’ role in hunting and suppositions of black inferiority. In this case, the accidental peppering of the black subordinate companion provides the scene’s supposed humor. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Indeed, even the entertainment drawn from cultivating mastery over African Americans in the field could barely qualify as sporting, at least as presented by some white commentators. When an otherwise refined, white sportsman took to the field with black companions, some asserted, this required stepping down from a higher level of civilization and temporarily embracing a less evolved form of sport. Edward W. Sandys described such excursions with something of a nostalgic longing, even as he made it clear that these endeavors were not true sport as he understood the term. When asked if he was familiar with raccoon hunts, he recalled that “before I ever attained the dignity of a full-fledged sportsman, while yet the complete outfit of cords and canvas, high-priced breech-loaders and well-broken dogs, was a fascinating dream of the future, I knew the coon.” Sandys knew that raccoon hunts were not proper for a true sportsman, but admitted that he still secretly engaged in them from time to time. “And, let me confess it,” he continued, “long after I down my quail and break my own dogs, I have sneaked away of an August night to join a crowd of ‘brack niggers’ for a good old-fashioned coon hunt.” Notice again the dual message. African Americans cannot be true sportsmen because they do not hunt properly, yet it is perfectly acceptable for whites to join in such occasions because they provide both a temporary escape from the trappings of civilization and a valuable study of black character. “Ah, those old nights!” Sandys concluded. “What jollifications, what carousals of boisterous, harmless savagery were they!”⁷²

African-American labor had long been a critical component of antebellum sportsmen’s notions of proper sport. For white Southerners of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the presence of loyal, dedicated black attendants reinforced their sense of mastery over the natural world and dominion over people of color. With slavery gone, the dual function of blacks’ sporting labor became even more important. As they recovered from the war and Reconstruction, as they struggled with black independence, as they grew increasingly frustrated with African Americans’ slaughter of fish and game, white sportsmen looked to the traditionally hierarchical race relations of Southern hunting and fishing to help resurrect the control and subservience that characterized the slave system and to recapture the mythologized interactions between white superiors and black subordinates that anchored their rosy remembrances of antebellum life.

African-American labor played a central role in the South’s emergence as a sporting destination. Sporting tourists saw in Southern locales not only rich supplies of fish and game but also a place where the pressures of Northern industrial life might be set aside, where life remained simpler and more natural, and where society existed as they imagined it had before the Civil War. These romantic longings, applied to the South, meant enjoying pristine natural areas unspoiled by overpopulation and modern development, a physical backdrop that included living reminders of the antebellum South, and, perhaps most importantly, the employment of skilled and loyal African Americans who simultaneously performed necessary labor and placed a capstone on white visitors’ reconstruction of a mythologized Old South. This vision connected proper sporting behavior, gentility, intelligence, self-control, and skill to racial domination.

Careful reading of Southern sportsmen’s accounts reveals the sporting field as an important site of whites’ efforts to construct and reaffirm stereotypes that both harked back to slavery and provided concrete examples of white supremacy in the contemporary United States. Significantly, this process occurred at a time when the race issue exploded onto the national scene and Southerners struggled with what the press often termed the “Negro problem.” For their part, African-American subordinate companions found working for whites a valuable source of money, equipment, and fish and game that would normally not be available to them. Beyond these advantages, which should not be understated, taking to the field with white sportsmen sometimes served a less material, though no less important, function. The centrality of black labor to the real and symbolic operation of Southern hunting and fishing sometimes created rare moments when sporting laborers used their skill and experience to counter an employer’s vision of social and sporting mastery. But ultimately, for African Americans in the rural South, being a necessary component of Southern hunting and fishing proved a double-edged sword. It provided opportunities for material and psychological benefit, but also gave white sportsmen an arena from which to celebrate white supremacy, invalidate black sporting practices, and cultivate stereotypes of black character that persisted even longer than Jim Crow.