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

• 4 “With the Due Subordination of Master and Servant Preserved”: Race and Sporting Tourism in the Post-Emancipation South
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• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 109-136
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CHAPTER 4

“With the Due Subordination of Master and Servant Preserved”
Race and Sporting Tourism in the Post-Emancipation South

A great country is the South! I love every yard of it; its
straggly roads, with pigs, pickaninnies and game cocks always
in sight; its pine shake shacks, with mammy in the
door, pipe in mouth and mongrel puppy barking at you
from the porch … Some day I may settle there; or perhaps
my youngest son, whose bent is decidedly agricultural,
may buy him a plantation there in preference to
bucking the game in our cold, hard North.

— Northern sportsman Warren H. Miller, Field and Stream, 1918

By 1902, Theodore Roosevelt was America’s best-known sportsman. Cofounder of the world-famous Boone and Crockett Club and a key figure in the rise of the conservation movement, Roosevelt had hunted all over the world. Yet despite his many conquests as big-game hunter, he had yet to land one of the United States’ most famous trophies: the Southern black bear. A living symbol of sporting privilege, Roosevelt had long wanted to kill a black bear in the manner practiced by antebellum elites. “I was especially anxious to kill a bear in these canebrakes after the fashion of the old Southern planters, who for a century past have followed the bear with horse and hound and horn in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas,” Roosevelt noted in Scribner’s Magazine in 1908.¹ With this long-held ambition, and a standing invitation from Mississippi Governor Andrew H. Longino to hunt in the Magnolia State, Roosevelt at last decided to head south. Preparations took months, given the need for secrecy and security, but finally, in November 1902, the president set out by train for the famous hunting grounds of the Yazoo Delta.

The hunt took place largely on plantation lands in Sharkey County, Mississippi, and featured a “who’s who” of Northern and Southern sporting elites. The hunting party included Stuyvesant Fish, president of the Illinois Central Railroad, who organized the hunt for President Roosevelt; John M. Parker, later governor of Louisiana, who used his considerable Mississippi sporting connections to arrange the location of the hunt; John McIlhenny, Tabasco Sauce heir and former “Rough Rider”; planter Huger Foote, grandfather of Civil War historian Shelby Foote; and planter and attorney LeRoy Percy, who later served as U.S. senator from Mississippi (1911–1913). These political and financial leaders, all avid sportsmen, eagerly joined Roosevelt’s expedition, both for political reasons and to enjoy the famed spectacle of an authentic, old-style, Southern bear hunt.

Parker and his associates did everything to make the hunt a success. They scouted the best hunting grounds, chose the best laborers to accompany the president’s entourage, and, perhaps most importantly, contracted with Major George M. Helm, who would lead the hunt, to find the best sportsman in the region to guide the party. Helm chose renowned Mississippi huntsman Holt Collier, a fifty-six-year-old former slave who would become one of the most famous sportsmen in Southern—indeed, American—history.² The choice of an African American to lead a party of such important personages may have seemed remarkable to those unfamiliar with Southern hunting and fishing. But to those who understood what sportsmen of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries required for a truly “Southern” sporting experience, it came as no surprise.

African-American sporting labor and an “authentic” Southern hunting and fishing experience were in some ways synonymous for many native and visiting sportsmen in the post-Emancipation South. Aside from remaining the preferred source of labor, African Americans, as ideal servants, played a vital role in the growth and popularity of Southern sporting tourism, most notably in the elite sporting clubs and plantations of coastal and Lowcountry regions of the Deep South. These are the regions where African Americans, because of their numbers and the areas’ natural bounty, had plied their sporting skills for themselves and their white employers for generations. Wealthy Northerners and local speculators who saw the economic potential of sporting tourism eagerly bought up affordable undeveloped and unused land to attract visitors who wished to indulge in Southern field sports. Between the mid-1880s and the 1920s, largely in the coastal parts of the Carolinas and Georgia, northwestern Florida, southwest Louisiana, south-central Alabama, and the Mississippi Delta, speculators purchased hundreds of plantations and vast tracts of unused or abandoned lands and converted them into sporting retreats where visitors could relive the natural and social worlds of a recreated “Dixieland.” Here, sportsmen could experience the stereotypical trappings that made the mythologized plantation South attractive to Northern tourists— Southern hospitality, largely undeveloped natural surroundings, stately plantation houses, and sporting excursions “after the fashion of the old Southern planters.” Planters were much admired by sportsmen such as Theodore Roosevelt (his mother, Mittie, was raised in Roswell, Georgia) for both their gentility and their sporting acumen.

Essential for re-creating the social and cultural world of the antebellum South, these hunting and fishing venues required black laborers. From the 1870s, when the movement to establish such tourist retreats began, African Americans provided the best and most readily available sporting labor and, in the process, satisfied visitors’ expectations of the Southern experience. In North Carolina, black laborers worked at such places as the Pinehurst Resort, once a renowned sporting and health resort (and now famous as a Professional Golfers’ Association tour stop). In South Carolina, black labor dominated in places such as Beaufort’s Chelsea Plantation Club, managed by John Edwin Fripp, and the coastal Broad-water Club, which owned the celebrated Hogs Island preserve, reportedly Grover Cleveland’s favorite retreat. In Georgia, African Americans added “authenticity” to whites’ sport in places such as Brunswick’s Jekyll Island Club, once directed by New York’s Judge Henry E. Howland and among the most exclusive sporting clubs in the world, and stately Cumberland Island, most famous as the site of Dungeness, the getaway of Lucy Carnegie (sister-in-law of Andrew) of Pittsburgh.³ At these and other resurrections of the Old South, African Americans worked as scouts, drivers, watchmen, guides, and general laborers. They provided employers with experienced and skilled workers who fulfilled visitors’ expectations of a re-created era of racial subordination, which proved a strong lure for tourists seeking to escape from the confines of an increasingly industrialized and urbanized world to a close approximation of the romantic, antebellum South.

Robert Q. Mallard, a planter of Liberty County, Georgia, made the connection between hunting and fishing and the preference for African-American labor even more obvious.⁴ Fondly recalling his involvement in his slaves’ expeditions “churning” for fish and alligator hunting,⁵ Mallard pined for those halcyon days but more particularly lamented the loss of what those black-white interactions meant to Southern society. “It is easy to see how such a life, in which black and white, with the due subordination of master and servant preserved, shared the same sports, contributed to the familiar and affectionate relations which so notoriously from childhood bound master and servant together.”⁶ Such recollections often contained fond memories of masters and slaves interacting while hunting and fishing. Perhaps because, as in Mallard’s view, the domination and subordination in these sports mirrored the ideal of the slave regime better than any other ante-bellum cultural institution, hunting and fishing figure prominently in whites’ recollections.

The growing number of visitors who sought this idealized Southern past made tourism an increasingly important part of the Southern economy. As the presence of loyal black attendants became more closely associated with such a re-creation, many African Americans carved out an important and long-lasting economic niche by meeting those expectations.⁷ In fact, the association between Southern sporting tourism and African Americans eventually became so indelible that black laborers became a sporting necessity. In the minds of many white sporting enthusiasts, a Southern hunting or fishing excursion was not complete without the presence of blacks. Thus subordinate African Americans used hunting and fishing employment to their own benefit at precisely the time when increasing dissatisfaction with blacks’ customary rights was leading sportsmen, landlords, and legislators to work to restrict independent African Americans’ access to Southern fish and game.

The necessity of having skilled African Americans on hand, for practical and symbolic reasons, made conditions right for former slave Holt Collier to lead the hunting party of a U.S. president.⁸ A sporting legend while alive, Collier has again become something of a celebrity more than seventy years after his death, at the age of ninety. His exploits are the subject of two recent novels written for children, published in 1991 and 1993, and a scholarly biography published in 2002.⁹ In addition, because of Collier’s renown as a guide, a historical marker was placed at the site of his hunt with President Roosevelt and, in March 2004, an environmental education and resource management center at the Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge was dedicated as the Holt Collier Wildlife Interpretation and Education Center.¹⁰ As a guide and bear hunter, Collier had few equals. According to his testimony to the Works Progress Administration, and a recent biography, Collier averaged about 125 bears per season. His account book listed, incredibly, more than 2,100 bears killed through 1890.¹¹ Few Southern sportsmen were unfamiliar with Collier and his sporting prowess. For decades he reigned as the surest shot, keenest tracker, ablest guide, and most famous huntsman of the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta. His reputation led to demands for his services for wealthy landowners, politicians, and sporting tourists from around the country.

The 1902 Roosevelt hunt, along with an October 1907 hunt with President Roosevelt in the northern Louisiana canebrakes,¹² brought Holt Collier national attention and secured his almost mythical place among American sportsmen. Yet despite these achievements and many others in Collier’s amazing life, his wide renown remains a bit of a mystery. That an African American in the turn-of-the-century rural South could find such valuable means of support is unusual, considering the limited economic and social opportunities then open to African Americans. That a former slave could become so trusted as guide and huntsman that he would one day hunt with the president of the United States (who reportedly called Collier the best guide and hunter he had ever seen) is remarkable, given the strictures of Jim Crow. And that this African American would become so revered that he would one day be the subject of children’s novels and historical markers and have parts of a national wildlife refuge dedicated in his honor seems nothing short of astonishing. Taken together, the events of Collier’s life must represent more than just a story of how one man employed incredible sporting skill to create opportunities typically denied to people of color in the decades after Emancipation.

Holt Collier’s life tells more than a story of his sporting excellence, and white contemporaries revered him for more than his abilities in the field. Collier’s ninety years involved unending labor in the service of whites. Before becoming a legendary sportsman, Collier had been a loyal slave. His fidelity led him to go off to war as personal attendant to his master, Colonel Howell Hinds.¹³ Collier became a recognized African-American Confederate combat veteran, fighting as a scout and ranger with the Ninth Texas Cavalry, for which the Sons of Confederate Veterans honored him with a gravestone dedication in 2004.¹⁴ Thus, before becoming a faithful huntsman entrusted with the safety of a U.S. president, Collier was long a devoted slave and servant. He proved his loyalty to the Hinds family by shooting a train conductor who had pulled a knife on his former master.¹⁵ And, if rumor can be believed, he perhaps killed a Freedman’s Bureau officer, Captain James King; after beating the aging Colonel Hinds during a business dispute, King was found shot to death in a canebrake in December 1866.¹⁶ Holt Collier, while a remarkable sportsman, always remained a loyal servant.

Collier’s current fame may rest on his sporting legacy, but white contemporaries revered him just as much for his fidelity to whites during an age when slavery had ended, control over freed people remained uncertain, and whites were fighting back with a system of segregation to limit black freedoms. During that period, whites remained endlessly uneasy about their status as unquestioned masters of the Southern social structure, and, as scholars have shown, they looked wistfully to the antebellum South as a time when they were truly masters and people of color knew their place. The presence of loyal former slaves such as Collier helped resurrect Southern elites’ lost sense of control and allowed them, symbolically and concretely, to reconstruct the lost hierarchy and aristocracy of the antebellum period. Whites built their mythical reconstruction in the sporting field. Sportsmen such as Collier, then, while respected and admired for their sporting prowess, won more renown for their service. Collier’s life intersected with stereotypes of African Americans created in myths of the Old South and cultivated at precisely the time that he achieved regional and then national fame. These myths portrayed slaves as loyal, well cared for, and, indeed, happier than freedmen. Collier’s life of service, in and outside the sporting field, confirmed the myth and provided a living, breathing example of the ideal, dedicated former slave.

The presence of black sporting subordinates in the postwar South proved a key feature of the region’s hunting and fishing for visiting sportsmen. Southern sportsmen and visitors felt more like aristocrats of old when accompanied by African-American attendants. They felt more like antebellum planters with former slaves on hand. Tourists could feel they lived a uniquely Southern experience when hunting or fishing with a black laborer, guide, huntsman, or fisherman. Slavery had passed away, but visitors could recapture the mythological, highly romanticized relationship between benevolent, honorable masters and loyal, contented slaves. By re-creating a key symbol of the antebellum elite in the post-Emancipation sporting field, sportsmen insisted that the racial subordination of the Old South had not died. To put it another way, African Americans remained absolutely necessary for recapturing the version of antebellum social relationships that Southern elites wished to relive and visitors wished to consume.

SOUTHERN SPORTING TOURISM

Some chroniclers of Southern hunting and fishing have argued that the biracial sporting field foreshadowed social integration and was a harbinger of racial equality. Referring to a Southern hunting scene described by planter William Elliott in his famous Carolina Sports by Land and Water, literary scholar Jacob F. Rivers III wrote: “There are no lines of caste or class in this scene, no judges or doctors; no neophytes or veterans; no blacks or whites; no masters or slaves. Instead, through their total involvement in the magic of the chase, the men have transcended their societal positions and temporarily exchanged them for their primordial identity as predator.”¹⁷ Thus for true lovers of the chase, seeking to escape the drudgery of daily existence in a rapidly changing world, field sports might offer an opportunity to immerse themselves in nature, escape the Southern social structure, and exist only as part of the fraternity of sportsmen. The long-time editor of American Literature, Clarence Gohdes, argued that because African Americans figured prominently in whites’ hunting excursions, these events became a force for breaking down racial barriers. “Long before the advent of [boxer] Jack Johnson and [baseball player] Willie Mays, hunting was a factor which promoted integration.”¹⁸

Such statements about the leveling power of Southern hunting and fishing do not withstand close scrutiny. The biracial sporting field did not produce racial equality. African Americans had a permanent role in Southern hunting and fishing, but only because of their subordination to whites while in the field. Scholars who see social equality in the sporting field overlook the reasons that elite white sportsmen took to the field in the first place. Sportsmen sought not to erase social differences, but to idealize and more clearly define them. They intended to become members not of a larger, interracial fraternity but of a smaller, more exclusive white one.¹⁹ In the South, where the presence of African Americans had helped draw such lines for more than two centuries, native and visiting sportsmen found it even easier to immerse themselves in such distinctions.

As many scholars of hunting and fishing have noted, white sportsmen had long used these activities to demonstrate their innate class, national, and racial superiority. Hunting and its attendant methods and codes of behavior separated elite white American sportsmen from Native Americans, immigrants, and poorer Americans, whose hunting they despised. For sportsmen such as Theodore Roosevelt, according to historian Daniel Justin Herman, “hunting became more than the mystical source of American manliness; hunting became the mystical source of American national and racial identity.”²⁰ In the South, field sports served a similar goal of allowing the elite to flaunt its domination over the whole of Southern society, particularly African Americans. But unlike elite hunters of the West or the Adirondacks, who used the sporting ethos to disestablish competing traditions of Native Americans, poor whites, or the foreign-born, Southerners did not use sport solely to distance themselves from African Americans; they used black subordinates within the sport to solidify whites’ position as masters of Southern society. For Western big-game hunters, their identity as manly defenders of American democracy required rejecting Native Americans’ hunting and fishing and completely discrediting their skill and experience.²¹ But for elite Southern sportsmen, many of whom were planters and former slaveholders, mastery required the presence of black subordinates and cultivation of the idea that former slaves remained both the best and most natural sporting laborers.

The rise of sporting tourism, predicated on blacks’ service and subordination, reached its peak at the time when African Americans’ place in the Southern social and political structure reached its nadir. It encapsulated late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century racism. The inescapable connections between prevailing myths about the antebellum South, the rise of a nostalgia-oriented tourism industry, and whites’ ideas of race and racial hierarchy were manifested in the region’s hunting and fishing. To understand these connections, one must first have a better understanding of the great changes, both physical and symbolic, that took place in Southern field sports in the period. These changes made the South, particularly its romanticized antebellum version, an important destination for American tourists and sportsmen. The presence of African Americans played a vital role. For potential visitors and investors, black subordination added to the myth’s “authenticity.” Discussions of the region’s hierarchical race relations often appeared alongside descriptions of its natural and sporting advantages.

The North Carolina State Board of Agriculture’s guidebook North Carolina and Its Resources, published in 1896, emphasized the fine hunting and fishing in the Old North State. Like many other Southern states that used fish and game to lure visitors, North Carolina had worked to make tourism, especially sporting and resort tourism, a centerpiece of its recovery from the physical and economic dislocation marking the final decades of the century. By the 1890s, North Carolina could be counted among the nation’s leading vacation getaways. The Board of Agriculture lauded the state’s virtues as a pleasure-seeker’s paradise worthy of visitation and investment. Yet the attractions thus broadcast, as in other guides published across the South in that period, did not end with natural beauty, mild climate, luxury hotels, and plentiful fish and game. As such literature often makes clear, North Carolina also offered the advantage of the proper ordering of the races. “The people are sociable and hospitable, and the colored people as civil as those whom they like to imitate,” the Board of Agriculture noted. Laying bare the common assertion that the South’s racial situation played just as important a role as its other attractions, the guide declared North Carolina a white man’s country with a properly controlled black population. “No part of the South offers greater attractions to the investor and the seeker for health or pleasure, or is more interesting to the student than this.” And aside from its many natural, economic advantages, North Carolina “also has the purest strain of Anglo-Saxon blood in the country, and with the possible exception of Kent and Devon the purest in the world.”²² As such appeals for Northern visitors made clear, the region had important vacation advantages that became linked to equally important racial advantages.

Of the thousands of visitors to the South in the half-century after Emancipation, the two most important groups were Northern investors, who capitalized on the region’s depressed economy, low labor costs, and abandoned or undeveloped lands, and an ever-growing number of tourists, who, as investors quickly learned, came for the South’s unique combination of natural bounty and real and mythologized history. Indeed, that combination became a godsend to those who wished to focus part of the region’s economy on leisure and tourism. After decades of waiting in vain for real economic recovery and growth, Southerners realized that such a transformation could offer, in the words of historian Edward Ayers, “a way for places that had languished for years with unpromising agriculture finally to come into their own.”²³ For the Baltimore Journal of Commerce, “the capitalist seeking profitable employment for his money finds in the South a rapidly developing country, where the growth is absolutely solid and permanent, and where money is in demand, yielding large profits, whether invested in banking, in manufactures, in railroad building, or in real estate.”²⁴ With Southern landlords increasingly frustrated over the inefficiency of the tenant system and the general problem of labor control, many Southerners pinned their hopes on outside investors.²⁵

The decline of rice-growing in the Georgia and South Carolina Lowcountry perhaps best illustrates the process whereby owners turned agricultural land to other uses. After the war, the economy of the Lowcountry, once home to the wealthiest Southern planters, fell into ruin. The migration of black labor, the widespread adoption of small farming by former slaves, a lack of operating capital caused by the war, growing international competition, and, in the 1890s, severe damage caused by intense storms—all marked the end of commercial rice cultivation in South Carolina.²⁶ By the turn of the century, according to J. William Harris, coastal plantation lands “were receding into the wilderness from which they had been created.”²⁷ When the rice lands declined, the area decayed into poverty. As landowners worked to solve their postwar difficulties, many sought alternatives to large-scale tenant labor and searched for ways to exploit the huge amounts of available land and large supply of fish and game that remained their best assets. Lowcountry elites and other landowners across the South increasingly realized that financial advancement, even survival, required finding wealthy investors. “Lord, please send us a rich Yankee,” South Carolina planter Sam Stoney Jr. declared in 1920, echoing a half-century of hopes and frustrations of area landlords.²⁸ They found such investors in the many Northerners seeking vacation destinations to combat their unease with urban life. Hunting and fishing, which by the last third of the nineteenth century were perhaps the most popular outdoor amusements for the middle and upper classes, became a key attraction.²⁹

The South entered a golden age of elite hunting and fishing. At no other time did field sports enjoy such a combination of middle- and upper-class involvement and national acceptance as in the Gilded Age.³⁰ Because so many from the upper and middle classes became devotees of the sporting field, hunting and fishing became lucrative endeavors for sporting goods manufacturers, fish and game dealers, sporting laborers, and resort owners, prompting an increasing number of landowners and speculators to turn land to sporting uses.³¹ Moreover, because that popularity put great pressure on national fish and game supplies, sporting enthusiasts searched for new regions to exploit, which became more difficult as the century drew to a close. By that time, the South ranked among the richest wildlife regions in the United States. Speculators realized that many fish and game regions, such as New York’s Adirondack Mountains, faced both depletion of wildlife and overcrowding, and Southern lands that produced a fortune in lumbering and mineral rights might also create fortunes in sporting tourism. “Dakota is shot out. Wisconsin is fished out. The Adirondacks were tramped out long ago. The tide of sporting travel is settling back on itself,” conservationist Emerson Hough declared in 1895. “There will be plenty of it turn and go in the South. The longer the South has attractions, the longer it will go.”³²

The Southern states did indeed face wildlife depletion, but the region’s natural richness, a relative lag in wildlife slaughter compared with other regions of the country, and the rise of protected club lands purchased by sportsmen and speculators made the South an attractive sporting destination. Agricultural uncertainty after the war proved another reason for the abundance of fish and game in some parts of the South. Volatile cotton prices in the black belt, combined with labor instability, declining crop yields, soil exhaustion and erosion, and boll weevil infestations, led many landlords to abandon significant acreage of cotton land. As a result, according to Mississippi planter Wirt Howe, “these plantations are natural shooting grounds. Covering, as they do, an immense acreage, they present almost every variety of cover, affording not only the best of breeding grounds for the quail, but admirable protection from their enemies and the mild attacks of a climate that is rarely severe.”³³ In other words, as agriculture declined and more lands lay fallow, the abundance of certain species of wildlife increased. “An Old Sportsman,” lamenting how “the old haunts of the North have become drained,” suggested in Field and Stream that “of late years it has become a known fact that the only ready good shooting to be had is in the South.”³⁴ Sportsman William Bruce Leffingwell put the matter plainly: “a hunt in this beautiful country will prove a revelation to the Northern sportsman.”³⁵

Hoping to reach as many potential investors as possible, many Southern landowners advertised their lands in national sporting periodicals. A 1902 Field and Stream article advertised the $20,000 Hutchinson Island Preserve along the Carolina coast, “embracing 12,000 to 15,000 acres of land” and “eligibly situated.” “It is ideal as a stock range or game preserve, and is large enough to combine both. It was a famous ante-bellum Sea Island cotton plantation.”³⁶ Some landowners did not sell their lands outright but, wanting to profit from the explosion in hunting and fishing, sold or leased the right to hunt or fish on their holdings. An Elkton, Maryland, sportsman noted that, on the Eastern Shore, “many a farmer, who cares nothing about the pleasure of guns and dog, would be glad to sell the exclusive privilege of gunning on his land for a small sum, to an association, and the price could be graduated to the amount of game on his place, which would be a strong inducement for him to feed and protect the game.”³⁷ As frustrated landowners saw their chance to blunt the effects of agricultural and labor inefficiency, an increasing number turned to selling or leasing land or use rights to the throng of sportsmen and speculators who looked to the South with increasing interest.

The Southern sporting elite eagerly broadcast the region’s advantages to Northern investors. Like many others who saw in the region’s hunting and fishing a chance to lure outside capital that might revitalize the economy and return the South to its former economic preeminence, elite sportsmen, many from the former planter class, embraced the “second Yankee invasion.” As a Forest and Stream contributor asserted in 1880, “Here, at the South, the sporting class is, as a general rule, found among the refined and cultivated gentlemen, who were formerly the large slaveholders, and who controlled the sentiment and politics of the South.” However, “since the fortune of war has gone against them, they have buried the hatchet, and will be found ever ready to smoke the pipe of peace with their Northern brethren and will go as far as any man toward maintaining the honor and glory of America.”³⁸

Railroads, including the Richmond and Danville Railroad, the Seaboard Air Line Railway, the Atlantic & North Carolina Railroad, and the Southern Railway, helped Southern landowners and sportsmen advertise available hunting and fishing lands.³⁹ The Southern Railway, based in Washington, DC, described itself in 1898 as “the Samaritan of the South” because of its role in advertising resort and sporting lands to the Northern public. “No section of the country is comparable to the South to-day in the great variety of game, … and visiting sportsmen are always welcome.”⁴⁰ Even as late as 1927, the Charleston & Western Carolina Railway published descriptions of South Carolina sporting lands, confirming that such lands were the playgrounds of wealthy visitors, not of the average, resident sportsman. “Some of the Beaufortland game preserves are not only spectacular in their acreage, but they are exceedingly costly affairs,” the guidebook asserted. “More and more every winter Beaufort is filling up, and many of them are millionaires, with men who spend the season here and who fill up much of their time in hunting, fishing and boating.”⁴¹

Avid hunter Grover Cleveland, who visited Georgetown, South Carolina, in 1894, was drawn south by reports of good sport. When he was hunting near South Island, a stiff wind threw him from his skiff, forcing his host and an African-American guide to rescue him. According to historian George C. Rogers Jr., “This gale proved to be no ill wind for Georgetown, for it also carried news of the President’s rescue. The nation thereby became informed of the fine duck shooting available in Georgetown waters. The rich Yankees began to fall in love with the ready-made plantations, all with historic pasts and with the appropriate settings for their gentlemanly sports.”⁴² Newspaper editor William Page McCarty, who in 1897 tried to sell some hunting land below Virginia Beach, noted that such lands attracted “the class of Northern millionaires who affect the sporting fad like our late ‘fat friend’ [Grover Cleveland] of the White House and think that to shoot ducks is a certificate of aristocracy that can lift a soap factor or hog packer out of the native patch of mushrooms.”⁴³

As McCarty suggested, more than just the lure of a presidential retreat or available land teeming with wildlife attracted Northerners. They were also on a quest for what McCarty called “a certificate of aristocracy.” Potential visitors fantasized not only about sport but also about an imagined South. As early as the 1870s, Northerners, especially sporting elites, members of the growing middle class, and potential capitalist investors, looked to the South as a place of welcome escape.⁴⁴ The appeal of the region thus became a key factor in sectional reunion, making the South, by the late 1880s, a favored middle- and upper-class tourist destination.

Southern locales became increasingly popular with Northern tourists in the late nineteenth century for several reasons. A mild climate, perfect for visitors suffering from maladies including “nervous exhaustion” and various respiratory ailments, provided one major lure.⁴⁵ Advertisers and resort managers made the region’s healthfulness an important part of marketing strategy, as appeals for visitors made clear.⁴⁶ The South, unlike Northern resorts and spa areas such as New York’s famous Saratoga Springs, remained unburdened by too many visitors. The region’s less well-known and less accessible tourist destinations reputedly offered more spacious and, compared with Northern retreats, more exclusive vacation destinations.⁴⁷

Population growth in Northern urban centers was yet another reason for heading south. Frustrated well-to-do Northerners saw in Southern locales a chance to venture into a wilder, less-developed part of the country and a bygone America. For some visitors, the desire to seek untamed environs, to return to a less hectic era without abandoning modern-day luxuries and refinements, and to experience the legendary trappings of entrenched aristocracy could be achieved only in the South, where time seemed to stand still. An 1881 Forest and Stream contributor, celebrating the virtues of the South, urged readers to “leave the false glare and glitter, the hollow show of a city life with a view to some weeks with nature and her charming loveliness, and he may be assured that he will find it, with fair sport added, in North Carolina.”⁴⁸ This linking of hunting and fishing with a longing for a wilder, more rural, more “primitive” past demonstrates that visitors sought more than just the region’s natural advantages.

By reputation, the South seemed friendlier to weary urban dwellers than did other destinations. Such openness to visitors—linked to the mythology of an antebellum planter class of legendary hospitality, which shaped Northern perceptions of the South—became a great inducement for tourists. “I would not change the old conservative ways of the South if I could and hope they never will change,” Emerson Hough noted, “and I know all readers of this journal will be glad to rest their future acquaintance with the South upon its unasked and unpurchaseable hospitality.”⁴⁹ Hinton A. Helper assured visitors to Aiken, South Carolina, of a hospitable local population. “Let him try this experiment of calling at some of the farm houses he may pass, and make any excuse, such as inquiring the way, or offering to purchase a glass of milk, or ask for a glass of water; and … he will be surprised to see how ready he will be met and welcomed.”⁵⁰ Northerners envisioned the South as the model of old-time hospitality; with the economic potential of tourism, Southerners did all they could to confirm that stereotype.

In short, outsiders seemed to admire Southern hunting and fishing as much for its ability to recapture lost aristocracy and gentility as for its sport. As a Field and Stream contributor writing as Halcyon Hale noted, “the average American is not insensible to the charm of historic association in his pursuit of sport. He may not deliberately choose his field with a view to its historic surroundings, yet once brought to his attention he is prompt in responding to their sympathetic appeal.” No other destination captured the Northern historical imagination as did Dixie. Despite the recent bloodshed, promoters of Southern tourism whitewashed the region’s history to the point where its violent past, including the Civil War, became quaint. As Halcyon Hale concluded of hunting and fishing in the Old Dominion, “few places in America offer so rare a combination of good sport and historic interest as the easterly part of Virginia.”⁵¹ Even the poverty of some parts of the region might be seen as worthy vestiges of the Old South. “Occasionally for the northern tourist, [vacationing in the South] meant enduring the real experience of drafty old houses and broken-down beds, but it might also mean an up-close encounter with the ruins of an old plantation, a rundown former slave cabin, or an old Confederate soldier,” historian Nina Silber writes. “In the tourists’ eye these sites were seldom problematic and they were certainly not political; they only heightened the image of Southern distinctiveness which the Northern traveler craved.”⁵² Publicists cleansed negatives from the region’s history; slavery, war, and poverty became monuments that heightened visitors’ sense that they were experiencing something uniquely Southern.

NOSTALGIA, RACE, AND SPORTING TOURISM

“Sportsmen, historians, antiquarians and nature lovers will find great delight in visiting Beaufortland,” wrote N. L. Willet, Charleston & Western Carolina Railway agent. “This section has a history that is all romantic wonderland … It has been a shining mark for wars: Spanish, Revolutionary, Indian and the Civil War with its horrible Reconstruction era. It has been the mother of crops for world use, such as silk, indigo, rice, Sea Island cotton and rock phosphate was mined in large quantities.”⁵³ The war was over and Northerners now craved remnants of the Old South. “There must be amusements, mental and physical, and inducement to out-door life and exercise,” F. W. Eldredge declared in a guidebook for Camden, South Carolina, “and certainly nothing more perfect can be wished for in a place of this kind than a quaint, quiet, old village to which nature and history have vouchsafed much that is beautiful and romantic, clinging fondly to its old dwellings, customs, and memories of the past.”⁵⁴ Sporting tourism relied heavily on such “memories,” although it must be noted that the past as tourists wished to see it had little to do with the realities of antebellum or post-Emancipation Southern life. This was especially true for one important part of a fictionalized South— the plantation experience.

The importance of the plantation to stereotypical images of the South cannot be overstated. Southerners had for generations touted the plantation as the seed-bed of aristocratic virtue and manly skill, where men learned command of slaves, became intelligent farmers, and engaged in sporting activities that cultivated martial skill. Joseph LeConte, Georgia native and noted scientist who served as chemist for the Confederacy’s Nitre and Mining Bureau, credited his plantation upbringing, particularly frequent hunting and fishing excursions, for his mental and physical prowess. “This kind of life is an admirable culture for a boy. It not only contributes to physical health but also to mental health, by continual contact with nature and by cultivation of the powers of observation. In addition, it cultivates in an admirable way quick perception, prompt decision, and persistent energy and patience in pursuit.”⁵⁵ Many Northerners accepted this romanticized vision. For visiting sportsmen, experiencing the grandeur of plantation life enabled them to enjoy an opulent vacation with a patina of celebrated social hierarchy that they associated with the antebellum plantocracy. The newly arrived elites did not make their fortune in plantations, but they believed such regal estates could best display such wealth. In the words of George C. Rogers Jr., “property in land was no longer the basis for power, but instead property in railroad companies, public utilities, banks, lumber companies, and rice mills. Eventually the holders of new money would wrap themselves in the old plantation myth through marriage alliances, patriotic societies, and an emulation of a style of family living that hearkened back to antebellum times.”⁵⁶

Visible continuity between idealized antebellum plantations and the postwar South became an important selling point for land and sporting rights. Buyers wanted reminders of the Old South plantation, complete with stately old buildings, scenic farmland, and African-American dependents. The Southern Railway described lands along South Carolina’s Congaree River in just such romantic terms, noting that the river “is a beautiful, navigable stream that winds its way through pine stretches, cotton fields and all manner of plantations. Picturesque is a poor word for its wooded banks, its unexpected turnings, the scenes of cotton and tobacco fields and quaint log cabins galore.”⁵⁷ According to F. W. Eldredge, these plantations carried on the rich sporting traditions of their antebellum counterparts. “The plantation life was royally hospitable and generous, and as royally reckless and extravagant. A passion for field sports was a part of its very being—an inheritance from the earliest settlers, their ancestors, the English, the Irish and the Scotch.” Eldredge declared such traditions alive and well in the New South, noting that “to-day the love of field sports is as keen as ever.”⁵⁸

Advertisers stressed that Southern sporting plantation lands both teemed with fish and game and maintained cherished antebellum traditions. Speculators made certain that Southern sportsmen became the logical inheritors of aristocratic sporting traditions in the resurrected Old South. Outing contributor Wirt Howe noted that field sports on Columbus, Mississippi, plantation lands had changed very little. There, according to Howe, the cotton-belt plantations “present practically the same appearance that they did in ante-bellum days and … are operated upon methods that have been in use for many years,” and furthermore are “unlike anything existing elsewhere in this country.” A signal feature of this preserved plantation life was the presence of African Americans, as evidenced by “the ‘quarters,’ parallel rows of log cabins where live the negro hands and their families, very much as they did in the days of slavery.”⁵⁹ Tourist literature consistently stressed this continuity between the Old South and the New. Those that benefited from the influx of Northern visitors and capital stressed that the basic social structure of the antebellum South, especially whites’ domination over a subservient black population, remained intact.

Just as antebellum planters used the presence of African Americans to mark their mastery, so white Southern sportsmen relied on former slaves to assure them of their place in the social order in the post-Emancipation South. For visiting sportsmen seeking to recapture the Old South, African Americans, ideally working for whites just as they had done under slavery, formed an essential part of an authentic reconstruction. In the sporting field, former slaves, such as Holt Collier, played as important a role in re-creating Old South mythology as had skilled slaves for antebellum planters. For Northerners such as sportsman Warren H. Miller, African Americans seemed central to the experience. “A great country is the South!” Miller declared. “I love every yard of it; its straggly roads, with pigs, pickaninnies and game cocks always in sight; its pine shake shacks, with mammy in the door, pipe in mouth and mongrel puppy barking at you from the porch.” So attractive was Miller’s vision of the South that he believed he might one day leave the North. “Some day I may settle there; or perhaps my youngest son, whose bent is decidedly agricultural, may buy him a plantation there in preference to bucking the game in our cold, hard North.”⁶⁰ Visiting sportsmen hungry for the Old South expected black servants to be constant parts of the scenery. For how could a reconstruction of Old South aristocracy be complete without those people who made antebellum planters a master class in the first place?

African Americans’ importance to reconstructions of the Old South can be seen in the advertising and descriptions of Southern locales in tourist guides, personal accounts, and national sporting periodicals. Soon after the close of the war, for example, David Franklin Thorpe, Sea Island cotton plantation superintendent, wrote to his friend John Mooney that St. Helena would make a fine destination both for its sport and for the presence of African Americans. “You would find a great deal to interest you here in the fields, in the woods, by the shore, and in the water besides what you would find of interest in the character and habits of the negroes lately come out of slavery.” ⁶¹ Julian Ralph found blacks one of the most crucial parts of his Southern experience, noting that “to me the colored folks form the most interesting spectacle in the South … As I think of them, a dozen familiar scenes arise that are commonplace there, yet to a Northerner are most interesting.” In his description of fishing along the many canals crossing New Orleans, African Americans completed the scene. “It is delightful to see them. Those open waterways flowing between grassy banks out towards the west end might seem offensive otherwise, but when at every few hundred feet a calm and placid negro man or ‘mammy’ with a brood of moon-faced pickaninnies sprawling beside her, is seen bent over the edges, pole in hand, the scenery becomes picturesque, and the sewers turn poetical.”⁶² Such quaint holdovers were essential to re-creating a past, golden age and added to the authenticity of a Southern sojourn. Elite sporting tourists therefore cherished the symbolic importance of African Americans almost as much as, in Old South mythology, benevolent antebellum planters cherished their dutiful slaves.⁶³

Yet, although visiting sportsmen needed African Americans to complete their Old South experience, they felt uneasy about them. While advertisers and speculators extolled the presence of “authentic” African Americans living as they had done under slavery, they carefully avoided the impression that the South was anything less than a white man’s country. Romantic descriptions of black life went hand in hand with assurances of a clearly drawn racial hierarchy. The message that the South existed first and foremost for white men resonated with many Americans. According to the Southern Cultivator, “there is not elsewhere upon the globe as a territory open to the Anglo-Saxon race with such varied and great resources and such propitious and easy conditions of life and labor, so abundantly supplied with rivers, harbors, and with lines of railroad transportation, or so well located to command the commerce of both hemispheres.”⁶⁴ Fred W. Wolf Jr., of the Jasmine Farms of Green Bay, Virginia, left no doubt about Anglo-Saxon superiority. “‘Virginia is heaven,’ where the white man is a gentleman—he hunts all day and never works.” And African Americans were there to do the dirty work. “The men-folks are off before daylight with their horn, ‘hosses’ and dog, for deer or fox, while the family’s boys do the chores and the plantation work. A colored man servant in Virginia, irrespective of age, is a boy. Imagine an eighty-year-old boy.”⁶⁵ Sporting tourism relied on African Americans to complete its re-creation of the Old South—provided, of course, that they remained controlled and subordinate.

Advertisers carefully assured potential Southern visitors of both excellent sport and well-behaved African Americans. Sportsman B. W. Mitchell’s description of life on North Carolina’s Currituck Sound, which noted that African Americans’ houses outnumbered those of whites by perhaps four to one, assuaged visitors’ fears by highlighting black subservience. “Darkies, darkies everywhere! Of all sizes, shades and conditions; but one and all, old or young, respectful, polite, obsequious; tacitly acknowledging racial inferiority by an extreme deference.”⁶⁶ H. F. C. Bryant wrote in a similar vein of authentic, old-style fox hunts in Alamance County, North Carolina, and particularly of loyal former-slave laborer Uncle Simon Bolick. According to Bryant, Bolick also longed for the Old South. “The old darkey was in earnest. His memory carried him back and he lived in days gone by. He scoffed at the things of the present.” Bryant believed that life had declined precipitously for Uncle Simon since his days of loyal service to Colonel William Bolick. As a slave, Uncle Simon had “hunted and traveled with his old master, who kept fine wines, blooded horses, and fast dogs. Truly, those were glorious days for Simon, and he has never become reconciled to the prosaic life of freedom.”⁶⁷ Such stories assured Northern audiences that former slaves still served as loyal retainers and that white visitors had nothing to fear from them. The South was not just a sportsman’s paradise, it was a white man’s paradise.

In an undated nineteenth-century stereograph, an African-American boatman attends his white hunting party on an alligator hunt in Enterprise, Florida. The positioning of the laborer, standing at attention, oar at the ready, reinforces the common trope of white-over-black domination that elite white sportsmen worked hard to recreate through biracial hunting and fishing. (Courtesy of Florida Photographic Collection, State Library and Archives of Florida)

Even though Southern elites had lost much of their previous authority over African Americans, some mastery could be retained, both literally and figuratively, in the sporting field. No threat to white control would face “those Northerners who spend part of their winters here in hunting and resting” along the Georgia and South Carolina coasts, according to an 1894 Southern Cultivator contributor signing himself G.A.G. “The country, although the blackest of black counties, in population, is one of the most orderly in the world,” he assured potential sporting visitors. “Crime is almost unknown. This is largely due to the fact that the better class of Negroes, with that characteristic imitativeness of their race, try to copy the manners of their old masters, whom they still look upon as the best of the white race.”⁶⁸ Real estate agent E. J. C. Wood assured Northern audiences that African Americans near the resorts of Aiken, South Carolina, “are very industrious and saving, and some of them are very lazy and improvident, but all of them are orderly. Indeed, the streets of Aiken are safer than those of New York; and … I will add, as safe as any Northern village. Even vicious negroes are not disposed to commit offences against the person.”⁶⁹ Wood sent a clear message to potential sporting visitors: tractable, well-behaved African Americans could and would perform all necessary labor, and freed people, like slaves before them, knew their place.

New Yorker Henry Wellington Wack, who gained a measure of fame in the early decades of the twentieth century as a landscape artist and illustrator of hunting and fishing scenes, demonstrated both the virulent racism of Southern hunting and fishing and the degree to which Northerners embraced the ideals of domination and subordination proffered by Southern sporting tourism. Wack found black labor to be a key marker of authenticity for his trip to Florida. “To kill tarpon you require first of all an experienced ‘nigger.’ He is as necessary as bait, from which purpose however, the law exempts him. And I believe Henry Guy Carleton when he says only a ‘nigger’ will do—no colored person, or darkey or mulatto, but a genuine ‘nigger.’” With the peculiar mix of overt racism and respect for African Americans’ sporting prowess common among white chroniclers of the Southern sporting field, Wack seemed to draw as much pleasure from the presence of subordinate companions as from the sport itself. He began with advice on how to ensure that one’s guide or laborer would be awake for the journey, jokingly suggesting that the employer, to “fix the nigger,” should “hang an alarm clock around his neck and arrange with the stable boy to blast a can of giant powder under him at seventeen minutes past three in the morning. Then go to bed with the assurance that you’ll have to wake that nigger yourself about five o’clock.” Such measures might seem extreme, but were perhaps necessary. “The Florida negro is a specialist on sleep and melons; but properly ‘fixed’ he is an invaluable aid in your quest for tarpon.”⁷⁰

Neither the sportsman’s difficulties with the laborer nor his enjoyment of those difficulties ended with such precaution. Warning that, on commencing the day’s sport, you would soon “find your nigger fast asleep,” Wack proposed a course of action that suggests the degree to which many visitors accepted and desired the racial hierarchy as part of a Southern excursion. “Leave him in peace for the present, but have a club handy, for when the king of game fish starts your line for Jamaica you’ll need vigorous inducements to bring that nigger to consciousness. By lambasting his feet you awaken his head; besides, the damage is not so permanent.” Once such problems had been dealt with, the sportsman could enjoy the relaxed pleasures of Southern tarpon fishing, pleasures that revealed both an interest in black laborers and a certainty of their overall inferiority. Describing how to pass the time on an excursion, Wack suggested that “some [sportsmen] lounge back in attitudes of the surest comfort and read and smoke; some write, some beguile the wait by discovering that the nigger is an intelligent companion, teeming with ideas about tarpon and local taxes, national politics and peach brandy. I say you may learn all this if your nigger is so obliging as to stay awake.”⁷¹

AFRICAN AMERICANS AND SPORTING RESORTS AND PLANTATIONS

African Americans became so linked with Southern hunting and fishing that the two became almost inseparable. Advertising quail hunting on Shell Road on Alabama’s Mobile Bay, Edward Cave assured potential visitors that “one can secure a negro guide there at the rate of one dollar per day.”⁷² Describing a game preserve on the Virginia and North Carolina border, Herbert K. Job recounted the fine hunting to be had “accompanied by a negro servant on horseback.”⁷³ Robert Pinckney Tucker instructed R. L. Montague, caretaker of a preserve near Marion, South Carolina, that visitors must enjoy the services of “a competent boy employed as waiter during their stay.”⁷⁴ The public and private hunting and fishing clubs that bought or leased so much of the South’s abandoned and fallow plantation and woodland acreage between the 1880s and the 1920s employed large numbers of black sporting laborers.

With the uncertain future of agriculture, dissatisfaction with tenant labor, and a simple desire to make money, landowners across the South sold or leased shooting rights on millions of acres to firms and individuals interested in preserving good sport for themselves and their friends or making money by attracting visitors from across the country. These sportsmen demanded African Americans for both labor and symbolism. Happily, both for white sporting interests and for African Americans seeking employment that would provide at least a temporary alternative to regular agricultural labor, sporting preserves and plantations were typically found in old plantation areas with large black populations. These regions, including the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry, the Mississippi and Alabama black belts, and the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta, had no shortage of potential sporting laborers. Indeed, the overall popularity of sporting retreats in these areas perhaps owed as much to the ready supply of African Americans as to the availability of plantation lands. Areas that boasted large black populations could provide cheap sporting labor and more easily fulfill visitors’ notions of aristocratic hunting and fishing. Consequently, African Americans in these areas, particularly along the coasts, were better positioned than those in the Southern uplands, the piedmont, and inland cities to take advantage of such employment opportunities.

Portions of the lands purchased as sporting retreats were still cultivated after conversion from strictly agricultural uses, and black tenants or sharecroppers often remained.⁷⁵ Permitting African Americans to continue in residence had many benefits. By keeping tenant farms in working order, new owners might make enough money to help finance club operations and reduce the financial pressures on their dues-paying membership. The lands, buildings, and equipment sustaining agricultural operations sometimes became an important part of a purchase. Advertisements for the Altama and Hopeton properties in Glynn County, Georgia, as sportsmen’s retreats, for example, emphasized their potential as working plantations.⁷⁶ Restoring old plantations to working order provided crops for game, especially quail and other coveted game birds, and made lands more attractive to sportsmen. These sporting retreats, remaining much as they were in the antebellum period, helped craft the “authentic” plantation experience. And the presence of black tenants added to visitors’ sense that they had returned to a Southern golden age. Keeping African-American laborers on converted plantation lands also kept a local supply of sporting laborers, often people who had worked on those lands for years.

Extensive, albeit rare, records of sporting plantations that kept careful account of laborers’ activities provide glimpses of the valuable employment opportunities available to African Americans and their families. South Carolina’s Kinloch Gun Club, located on South Island near Georgetown, left substantial records outlining African Americans’ role in Southern sporting tourism. Owned and operated by the DuPont Corporation, headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, the club was established to provide good Southern sport for DuPont executives and clients and, like many other sporting clubs, was a functioning plantation. Indeed, a majority of the hired hands at Kinloch provided typical plantation labor, and they are listed in surviving payroll records in occupations similar to those on any Southern plantation, including “laborer,” “regular hand,” “teamster,” “gardener,” “carpenter,” and “plowman.” These hired hands were typically listed as less than full-time employees, usually as one-half- or one-quarter-time employees, and they probably served the sporting activities of the plantation as well. In addition to the farming job classifications, many other listings, including “boatman,” “watchman,”⁷⁷ “marsh hand,” “bird-minder,”⁷⁸ “driver,” and “guide” reflect the club’s sporting activities.⁷⁹

Sporting labor, whether in the service of native or visiting sportsmen, rarely provided more than supplementary income, even for laborers at the larger sporting plantations or hunting and fishing clubs. Sporting employees at Kinloch typically worked less than half the month, with some paid daily and others, apparently those who served more regularly, receiving monthly pay. Between early autumn and late winter, when most fish and game were in season and when the majority of Northern sporting tourists were seeking escape from Northern climes, employees worked larger portions of each month. Each job classification received a different pay rate, which the club superintendent recorded in his ledger. Boatmen, apparently the only sporting laborers who frequently worked full time, earned the highest rate of $10.00 for a full month’s work. Bennett Wiggins and William Singleton, for example, frequently listed as boatmen in the Kinloch payroll records for 1914 and 1915, earned $5.00 or $10.00 per month, depending, ostensibly, on the number of guests present. Watchmen, who performed the critical task of tracking wildlife and reporting its location, also received good pay at Kinloch. Nelson Anderson, Jim Mitchell, and Toby Vanderhorst earned between $2.50 and $7.50 for their month’s work. Peter and Richard Legare served as watchmen for a daily rate. In December 1915, for example, one of the busiest bird-hunting months, the Legares received 50 cents per day and earned a total of $7.50. Other jobs paid considerably less. Bird-minders, including Samuel Glover and Peter Legare (the only employee recorded in the ledger in two separate occupations), received between 25 and 30 cents per day to care for the club’s game birds.⁸⁰ Although extant Kinloch records only include accounts paid in 1914 and 1915, and changes in individual employees’ job status over time cannot be determined, it is reasonable to assume that better-paying positions went to employees who consistently demonstrated the most skill and loyalty.

Kinloch’s guides and huntsmen, who were the most visible and, since entrusted with the safety of sporting tourists, probably the most experienced and trustworthy employees, were employed under a different system. Visitors, not the club itself, paid these workers, and each guest kept account with the employee, recording the kind of excursion undertaken and how much time was expended. For a guide and boat for shooting duck and other birds, visitors paid $1.25 per day, or $1.00 without a boat. For a guide for quail, turkey, deer, or other land-game hunting, visitors paid 75 cents per day.⁸¹ Larger parties required more guides and huntsmen. In December 1916, for example, Philadelphia engineer Herbert T. Hartman and two companions spent three days at the club, employing Tommy Anderson, Sampson Edwards, Abram and John Michel, and Bennett Wiggins for a total of $18.75.⁸²

African Americans were, unsurprisingly, not the only sporting laborers available to work as guides in Southern fish and game regions. Poorer whites sometimes did so as well. In some sporting areas, particularly where black populations were relatively small, whites had a substantial presence in the sporting labor trade. Many of the sporting laborers along the eastern shore of North Carolina and in popular gunning destinations along the Chesapeake Bay and Currituck Sounds were white. But in black belt regions or areas with a majority black population, the typical sporting guide was African American. The Oakland Club in St. Stephens, Berkeley County, South Carolina, told potential visitors that “colored guides can be obtained at $1.00 per day. White guides are more expensive.”⁸³ This cost difference might indicate two things. First, in an area as predominantly black as Berkeley County, it may have been difficult to find white guides. Second, as the association between African Americans and subordinate sporting labor grew, white laborers might have refused to work for the same wage as their black counterparts, in order to preserve their sense of separation from the black population.

Records indicate that the Kinloch Club primarily relied on African-American guides and laborers. This apparently affected how the club instructed visitors to deal with their contracted sporting labor. The club encouraged guests to settle accounts at the conclusion of their visit and warned them not to offer gratuities. Echoing old assumptions about blacks’ laboring and sporting habits, Superintendent R. M. Doar assured visitors that “the guides who received [tips] became utterly and absolutely worthless for a considerable time thereafter, not only causing inconvenience and annoyance to the members and club management, but the tipping was a positive harm to the guides so tipped.” Kinloch did find some gifts acceptable, however. “There seems to be no harm in giving the guides cheap cigars and chewing tobacco, of which they are very fond,” read the club rules for 1915.⁸⁴

Gifts may or may not have been customary at sporting destinations such as Kinloch, but the records show that some visitors did give presents to their guides. Herbert T. Hartman, for example, sent guide Abraham White “a sweater as a little remembrance,” hoping it would “remind him of the sweating he did in pulling that boat through to Duck Creek.” DuPont executive R. R. M. Carpenter likewise sent his guide a gift of a sweater, asking Doar to present the sweater to “‘Boney,’ the guide whom I had when I was at the club, with my compliments.”⁸⁵ Other sources also provide examples of white sportsmen presenting such gifts. Archibald Rutledge recalled that the most prized possession of his boyhood hunting companion Gabriel Myers was a hunting horn presented to him by John Toland of Philadelphia after Myers helped Toland land a fourteen-point buck on a Lowcountry hunting expedition. “So delighted had Toland been that he had asked his dusky guide what he would like best in all the world” Rutledge recalled, “and Gabe, who had for days been casting languishing glances at the polished horn that hung over the white man’s shoulder, had indicated, with the huge shyness of a modest man, that the horn looked to him like a million dollars.”⁸⁶ After an October 1907 bear hunt in the Louisiana canebrakes, Theodore Roosevelt presented Holt Collier with a Winchester 45-70 model 1886, which became the famous guide’s most cherished possession.⁸⁷

Other types of gifts, however, were not permissible—especially liquor. “The House Committee specially urges all members not to give wines or liquors to the guides,” Kinloch’s Doar cautioned.⁸⁸ Worried about the deleterious effects of alcohol, and subscribing to the common stereotype of the drunken, irresponsible African American, clubs wished their employees to avoid the dangers of drink.

Clubs also had other restrictions on their hired workers. They worried that employees would use their extensive knowledge of club lands to destroy area wildlife on independent hunts. For that reason, the Oakland Club of Berkeley County, South Carolina, limited employees’ hunting activities as best it could. The club rules for 1908 declared: “No guide or other employee of the Club shall shoot game of any kind on lands owned or controlled by the Club, or on any lands over which Club members may, from time to time, shoot by courtesy, unless so directed to do in writing by a member of the Executive Committee.” The rules also forbade “any guide or other employee of the Club” to “shoot game of any kind within five (5) miles of any land owned or controlled by the Club, unless so directed to do in writing by a member of the Executive committee.”⁸⁹ Such restriction reminds us that, despite their employment of blacks, white sporting interests were still deeply uneasy about African Americans’ hunting and fishing and that racial control remained as important as sporting skill as a term of employment. It also illustrates whites’ continued resistance to blacks’ independent subsistence earned through hunting and fishing.

African Americans worked in many capacities across the richer hunting and fishing regions of the South, leaving an indelible mark on the region’s sporting tourism. While serving as overseer for the Chelsea Plantation Club, John Edwin Fripp employed an African-American man named Kit to help him manage club lands and report incursions of poachers and trespassers.⁹⁰ In Virginia, Northerner Frank A. Heywood asserted that preserve lands near Virginia Beach proved fruitful provided one had a guide, “an absolute necessity to a stranger.” Fortunately for Heywood, guides were plentiful. “Guides can be obtained at all these places, and good horses will be furnished at moderate prices,” he recalled. Heywood described one laborer in particular: “Sam Shavender, who appears to have been built after sketches by ‘Porte Crayon,’ drove me eighty two miles with the rain pouring torrents in eleven hours, changing horses but once. For this service he charged me but $5.”⁹¹ In South Carolina, Northern visitors to the Charleston and Georgetown County lands of the Santee Gun Club, founded in 1901 and host to many sporting tourists, enjoyed the option of hiring “the negro Henry Snyder as master of the hunt. His language and grammar are worth the price. He also understands driving.”⁹²

All across the South, then, white sportsmen called on the services of black subordinates, and such accounts abound. Harry F. Lowe, on a hunt just south of Washington, DC, took to the field with “our negro guide [who] led the way for our party,” and greatly enjoyed such “common purpose between black and white kin.”⁹³ When hunting with the Oakland Club’s famed African American—trained hounds, Archibald Rutledge witnessed the exploits of renowned “dusky scout” Henry Washington, “a Negro who knows horses, dogs, and deer; who has a voice that carries miles; and who would rather hunt than sleep in the sun—the utmost compliment for any activity that can be paid a negro.”⁹⁴ A. S. Salley Jr. described white sportsmen’s pleasure at being led through the old rice fields of the Santee Country by Isaac, a preacher and sporting laborer “who spends his week days guiding for hunters and his Sundays guiding the spiritual welfare of an ebony-hued congregation of the neighborhood.”⁹⁵ Nash Buckingham described duck hunting along the Mississippi Sound’s Ship Island, especially “with Horace, colored factotum of our Beaver Dam Duck Club,” who had charge of white visitors to the island.⁹⁶ At these and scores of other hunting and fishing destinations across the South, white sporting tourists eagerly set off with their black subordinate companions. Hunting and fishing activities in post-Emancipation Dixie—integrated, but not bastions of social equality; sources of valuable income for many African Americans, but only because visitors equated black labor with the region’s racial legacy—demanded black hunters, fishermen, drivers, and guides who remained loyal, dedicated, skilled, and, above all, subordinated to their white betters.

African Americans’ customary attachment to hunting and fishing, and sporting tourists’ idealized visions of the South, both of which made black labor indispensable, did not vanish with the turn of the century. The Medway plantation of Berkeley County, South Carolina, perhaps best illustrates the longevity of black sporting labor. Owned before the war by rice planter Peter Gaillard Stoney, Medway was renowned as a hunting plantation. In 1906, Stoney’s nephew Samuel Gaillard Stoney converted the property into a well-known tourist retreat. For manpower, he relied on African-American laborers whose families had lived there for generations. Two in particular, a descendant of area slaves named David Gourdine (born at Medway) and Cy Myers, men “whose families have lived and worked at Medway for more than a hundred years,” became the plantation’s two leading huntsmen and drivers. This multigenerational service did not end there; two of Gourdine’s sons, David Jr. and Walter, later worked as laborers, drivers, and huntsmen at Medway.⁹⁷ They were followed by David Jr.’s grandson, Sam Washington, who, as late as 1999, still worked at the sporting plantation.⁹⁸ Such generational continuity was common. Titus Brown and James Hadley compiled the oral histories of sixteen African-American families that lived and worked on and near Pebble Hill Plantation in Thomasville, Georgia, a popular sporting destination in the first half of the twentieth century. Some Pebble Hill employees worked there for generations, passing on both jobs and important requisite skills from father to son, mother to daughter.⁹⁹ Such continuity demonstrates both the degree to which Southern sporting resorts depended on black labor and the desire of some African Americans to preserve long-term employment opportunities.

African Americans drew substantial material, economic, even psychological benefits from sporting labor in the service of whites. But that employment remained sporadic and could never be guaranteed. The steady employment provided by long-term, sometimes multigenerational, service to a sporting club or plantation proved much more valuable, allowing some to use this as a starting point for their family’s future economic betterment. Far beyond the first two decades of the twentieth century, which were the true peak of Southern sporting tourism, African Americans continued to play a critical role. Some of the Pebble Hill families, for example, worked at area sporting plantations for more than fifty years. Sam Green, born in 1914, spent thirty-seven years at Pebble Hill (1934–1970), working in the dog kennel and flower garden and driving a hunting wagon. His brother Sidney Green worked there for thirty-six years (1942–1978). Dock Hadley worked at the nearby Fair Oaks plantation for forty-four years (1941–1984), serving as huntsman and working with the plantation’s dogs. His long years on a sporting plantation allowed him, on his retirement, to use his savings to buy land, build a house, and live, in his own words, “just like Alice in Wonderland.”¹⁰⁰ African Americans such as Hadley remained key sources of sporting labor across the black belt well past World War II.

When W. Ancrum Boykin founded the Boykin Hunting Club near Camden, South Carolina, in 1948, its members relied on black laborers, as Southerners had done for centuries. These employees included Uncle Jimmy Boatwright, who “became a friend of the hunters from across the river”; Little Boy, who was “a welcome addition because he was a good cook and ‘help’ around the camp”; and three drivers, Spaniard, Rabbit, and Bootie. In describing the work of these valued drivers, Henry D. Boykin II, with a touch of nostalgia, not only called to mind the history of skill that made black labor attractive to white sportsmen, but also showed a clear appreciation for the tradition of service that made African Americans’ presence symbolically indispensable. “Listening to the drivers’ voices echoing through the swamp, I knew that one day there would be new ways and new drivers, but what makes a driver good?” Boykin wrote. “For me, the talents of Spaniard, Bootie and Rabbit, the fine quality of their voices and the sounds of their horns could never be surpassed. The thrill of many ancient hunters must surge up from the shadows to join the sweet song of those three dark experts. Maybe those good drivers were more of Dad’s time than mine. He expected to hunt with the help of his black friends, as he had always done.”¹⁰¹

Boykin’s comment reminds us that, despite the high praise meted out to African-American sporting laborers by white employers, the other side of the dependence on black labor cannot be ignored. While some former slaves, their children, and their children’s children carved out lasting advantages by turning hunting and fishing traditions cultivated under bondage into opportunities for regular employment, such opportunities also permitted white Southerners and visiting sportsmen to make the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century sporting field fit their notions of antebellum social and racial relationships. Ultimately, black sporting laborers—such as Archibald Rutledge’s companion Gabriel Myers, Kinloch Club’s Abraham White and Boney, and Pebble Hill’s Sam and Sidney Green—although credited with impressive, sometimes legendary skills, in the end received as much praise for their loyal service to whites. African-American laborers helped Southerners reconstruct the racial hierarchy of the Old South and allowed a variety of sporting and tourism interests to use the long tradition of the biracial sporting field to sell symbolic reconstructions of a vanished plantation South.

Returning now to Holt Collier, the most famous of African-American sportsmen: if African Americans’ subordination in the sporting field overshadowed their skill at hunting, fishing, or boating, then we are compelled to ask, again, Is there more to the widespread regard Collier received than just his sporting talents? Did Collier become a legend simply because he killed so many bears? Or was it because he demonstrated, from his days of Confederate service to his hunting trips with Theodore Roosevelt, a ceaseless devotion to white superiors? Did he become such a renowned and respected figure among the white residents of Greenville, Mississippi (and, eventually, the entire region), simply because of his many years of unparalleled sporting excellence? Or was it because during that time he remained, in many ways, a holdover of idealized Old South social relationships that so moved and reassured white observers? Collier never failed to demonstrate the kind of unwavering loyalty that, for white Southerners, characterized the masterslave relationship and, for white visitors to the South, made their sojourn more authentic. He simultaneously showcased what sporting visitors thought idealized African Americans had become and what native Southerners wished they would always be—perfect servants.

In the end we must conclude that while no one can deny Collier’s exceptional skill in the field or his remarkable life, the fame he and many other sporting laborers achieved cannot be separated from the fact that white sportsmen valued African-American sporting companions at least as much for what their skilled service symbolized as for that skill itself. While sporting laborers sometimes earned respect and admiration as skilled sportsmen, they also drew praise as loyal servants who exemplified the highest achievements of the Old South. Both native Southerners and sporting tourists frequently lauded and definitely depended on African Americans’ skills and experience, but they never saw that role as anything but inherently subordinate. No matter how skilled their laborers, no matter how kindly or admiringly they spoke of them in the field, the hallmarks of these relationships remained service to whites and subordination of African Americans.