CHAPTER 5
“When He Should Be between the Plow Handles”
Sportsmen, Landowners, Legislators, and the Assault on African Americans’ Hunting and Fishing
Here we are to-day, going up only because the nigger is
going down, and only by hammering on the subject is it
that we have inspired the legislators with resolution
enough to introduce a bill on the subject.
— Member of the Georgia State Agricultural Society, on the difficulty of enacting laws restricting African Americans’ dog ownership, 1876
The fight made by the Audubon Society is a fight to save
the birthright of a people, now being wrested from them
by the hireling and the lawless.
—James Henry Rice Jr., Secretary, South Carolina Audubon Society, 1909
By 1915, after half a century of controversy over African Americans’ use— or, as whites saw it, misuse—of Southern wildlife, several key components came into alignment. Landowners, who for decades had broadcast the connection between former slaves’ independent subsistence and the problem of labor intractability, eagerly sought to limit blacks’ hunting and fishing. Sportsmen, who had long charged people of color with violating elite white sporting codes and contributing to the epidemic of wildlife depletion, joined in the attempt to alert the Southern and national publics to the dangers of unrestricted environmental exploitation by African Americans. Despite these efforts, however, restrictions on hunting and fishing had evolved only slowly, through fits and starts. Then, by the early twentieth century, the pieces finally began falling into place.
With the explosion of sporting tourism in the South, which proved increasingly lucrative for landowners, resorts, and developers, many Southerners began to understand the financial motivation for better protecting fish and game. With the rise of a national conservation movement, which, by the late nineteenth century, penetrated even the recalcitrant South, sportsmen began to accept limits on their own hunting and fishing as perhaps necessary to stop abuses by immoderate, lower-class sportsmen. And with the evolution of Jim Crow segregation, which coincided with a marked increase in racism nationally, Southern and national audiences agreed that blacks’ sporting and character flaws were the root cause of Dixie’s wildlife woes. The time had finally arrived for a concerted attack on African Americans’ right to hunt and fish.
On July 1, 1915, a law requiring state hunting licenses, long sought by sporting enthusiasts, finally went into effect in seventeen of South Carolina’s forty-four counties.1 The new law, known as the Ziegler Bill, required hunters to purchase—at the cost of $1.10 for resident sportsmen and $10.25 for nonresident sportsmen—a state hunting license and a display tag for their guns that identified them as lawful hunters, and to seek written permission from landowners on whose property they hunted or fished. Hunting without a license would earn a fine of $25.00 to $100.00 or, if the offender could not pay, work on the county chain gang—one day for each dollar fined. On August 13, an excited editorial appeared in the coastal Beaufort Gazette, heralding the first conviction and sentencing of a local game-law violator: the “incident is one of the most encouraging that have come to the attention of the thousands of people in this region, who want to see game and useful birds saved from extermination.” An African-American man, who “has just been given a chain gang sentence because he hunted without the license which the law now requires every hunter to have,” became the first target of this new effort to protect fish and game in one of the South’s most popular sporting destinations.
That a person of color was one of the first to be sentenced to a chain gang for violating the new licensing law, and that this was reported with such obvious approval, should be no surprise—given the importance of fish and game in blacks’ life, their likely inability to afford a license or the subsequent fine, and the frequency with which landowners and sportsmen derided African Americans’ ability to hunt and fish. After decades of pointing out the inadequacy of Southern fish and game law and linking blacks’ sporting abuses to the problems of wildlife depletion and labor intractability, landowners, sportsmen, and sporting investors could regard the new law with satisfaction. Indeed, the Beaufort Gazette left no doubt that the law was specifically intended to combat such problems. “Throughout this region the negro hunter is one of the worst enemies of game and birds. Protective laws mean nothing to him. In season and out of season he goes out with his single-barreled shotgun and kills everything that comes his way.” Without comprehensive laws and rigorous enforcement, local law enforcement’s ability to deal with such nuisances would be limited. “It is hard to curtail his pernicious activities because if you find him in the woods with his gun in spring or summer time he will tell you that he is just after rabbits and there is no closed season for rabbits,” the editorial continued. “As a matter of fact, he is after anything and everything from a redbird to a wild turkey, and the damage that he does by killing game and wild birds during the breeding season is incalculable.”2
The structure of the Ziegler Bill left little doubt as to its intended target.3 Of the seventeen South Carolina counties covered by the law, only three had a predominantly white population—Greenville (30.5% black), Lexington (36.3% black), and Oconee (25.1% black) —according to the 1910 census. Thirteen of the seventeen counties had an African-American majority, and in eight (Barnwell, Beaufort, Calhoun, Charleston, Chester, Dorchester, Hampton, and Orangeburg) the black population exceeded 60 percent.4 Given the frequency of complaints about blacks’ sporting abuses and labor intractability, it is difficult to view these population numbers in the counties covered by the law as coincidental.
The long overdue redress in the form of a statewide licensing system, for which a variety of Palmetto State interests had been lobbying for well over a decade, had finally arrived to combat what they considered one of their biggest nuisances. “Now that this law is on the books every one of the thousands of negroes who infest the woods in spring and summer hunting ‘rabbits’ is liable to arrest unless he can show a hunter’s license and unless he has written permission from the owner of the land to hunt upon it,” the Beaufort Gazette noted. The law finally mitigated “the indiscriminate slaughter practiced by the negroes,” and “the Summerville conviction, the first of its kind to be reported, should be regarded as an incident of no small significance.”5 For many white South Carolinians, both the licensing system and its strict enforcement were tremendous victories for the state’s beleaguered wildlife. But as my discussions in earlier chapters indicate, neither such laws nor their proponents were concerned exclusively with fish and game.
The early twentieth century witnessed the culmination of elite white Southerners’ frustration with blacks’ hunting and fishing. The movement to implement fish and game legislation both specifically targeted African Americans and drew on whites’ fears of lost racial control to convince lawmakers of the need to act. Planters and landowners, angry over the possibility of blacks’ self-subsistence and resultant ability to avoid agricultural labor; sportsmen, frustrated by perceived abuses of cherished sporting codes; and owners of sporting retreats and plantations, eager to preserve wildlife for tourists—all sought to circumscribe African Americans’ hunting and fishing so that they might exercise better control over blacks’ subsistence, sport, and labor.
A shared attitude toward black independence became the critical link between these groups of complainants. In the decades after Emancipation, former slaves doggedly protected and openly flaunted their freedom, particularly through hunting and fishing. To the coalition of white interests, African Americans’ reliance on wildlife proved doubly vexing. For landlords, it created both labor inefficiency and an irksome reminder of the loss of their slaves. For elite sportsmen, abuse of sporting codes endangered fish and game supplies and former slaves’ hunting and fishing infringed on activities ideally reserved for whites. And for purveyors of Southern tourism, who depended on blacks’ sporting labor, African Americans’ independent pursuit of wildlife jeopardized the real and symbolic reconstruction of the Old South that natives and visitors craved. Threats posed by free blacks had grown more onerous over the decades since Emancipation, as agricultural employers struggled to control labor, as increasing wildlife depletion alarmed sportsmen, and as sporting tourism grew more popular. As a common solution, this conglomeration of interests sought to strengthen fish and game laws and thus circumscribe African Americans’ ability to survive independent of whites’ control. The future prosperity, wildlife resources, and racial hierarchy of the South had to be defined and dominated by whites alone.
Many white Southerners, however—some of whom were, like blacks, dependent on fish and game for semi-subsistence—were suspicious of hunting and fishing restrictions and had always rejected such legislation. Yet, when couched in appeals to racism and racial control, arguments for wildlife legislation could find a more receptive audience. It is no coincidence, then, that effective and permanent protection of Southern fish and game, seen most notably in the establishment of comprehensive licensing systems and state-level fish and game agencies, took hold at precisely the time when fears about African-American independence were becoming widespread and Jim Crow was laying siege to black Southerners’ political rights. Thus the maturation of Southern wildlife conservation became part of the larger goal of “racial conservation.” By invoking the need to circumscribe and subvert blacks’ subsistence traditions, conservationists helped to implement long-sought, and long-resisted, protective measures. And by directing such measures specifically at African Americans’ customary use of the natural environment, they worked toward greater control over African Americans’ lives and labors. Ultimately, white Southerners’ efforts to restrict blacks’ hunting and fishing must be understood both as a faithful reflection of long-standing fears about black independence and as part of the system of segregation created to assuage such fears.
RESISTANCE TO SOUTHERN FISH AND GAME REGULATION
The idea of using fish and game legislation to target African Americans did not begin in the twentieth century. Sportsmen, among the first and loudest to link protecting Southern wildlife with controlling recently freed African Americans, had agitated for protective measures since Emancipation. “For the last ten years I have witnessed the rapid decrease of game with feelings of disgust,” asserted a sportsman, under the name Venatoe, in Forest and Stream in 1877. “In many places where I used to get good shooting, game is almost annihilated.”6 An anonymous Louisiana sportsman likewise lamented the state of Southern hunting and fishing. “In the ancient antebellum era the hunting grounds of this State were famous throughout the South. All over the State they were preserved and worked in the shooting season, principally by gentlemen sportsmen.” But with the end of the war and the sale of surplus firearms, especially to former slaves, “the weapons which had been used in the attempted extirpation of armies were turned to the extermination of our feathered and four-footed game.”7 Since the South presented an ideal sporting location, its wildlife needed a system of laws to protect it.
As another Forest and Stream contributor suggested, the need for fish and game protection originated precisely from this point: the region’s natural abundance. “There is no other civilized land on all the globe where the supply is so abundant, and the privilege of taking it so free,” he began, echoing the common sentiment that the free availability of wildlife was connected to American democracy. The idea that the blessings of American citizenship might require accepting some restriction of this privilege found frequent expression in the pages of sporting periodicals. “The duty imposed on the individual citizen to respect the common interest of all, as embodied in the game and fish statutes,” the Forest and Stream article continued, “is a duty quite as binding as are other obligations of good citizenship. No one … may ignore this principle, set up shooting and fishing license for himself, and yet make claim to good American citizenship.”8
Eventually, planters and landowners, who were often sportsmen too, and the owners and operators of sporting resorts and preserves joined the cause. But progress did not come easy. Such efforts had for many years been met with, at best, reluctance from a suspicious Southern populace and, at worst, outright hostility from many, rich and poor alike, who viewed wildlife laws as assaults on their liberties. Southern suspicion of hunting and fishing restrictions was tied to elites’ position at the top of Dixie’s social hierarchy. Poorer Southerners generally took cultural and social cues from the planter class, but they were not willing to do so if that amounted to an outright restriction of their liberties. And they became perhaps even more suspicious of efforts to impose fish and game law because such efforts coincided with serious (and noticeable) wildlife depletion in the region. It seemed to many lower-echelon whites that well-to-do sportsmen were acting not to protect dwindling wildlife for all, but to preserve it exclusively for themselves.
So, despite efforts to reform Southern wildlife protection between the 1870s and the 1890s, criticism from a distrustful public sometimes killed measures before they could reach a vote. Moreover, the ability of counties to opt out of state-approved laws blunted the best efforts by interested parties. By the new century, nearly fifty years of effort to see Southern fish and game protection catch up to that of the rest of the United States, particularly the establishment of statewide fish and game licensing systems, had produced few lasting results.9 Hunting and fishing clubs and wildlife protection societies spent an increasing amount of time attempting to sway the sporting, landowning, and voting public, but few arguments resonated. The Virginia Fish and Game Protective Association framed the need for legislation in terms of the interrelated economic benefits of maintaining both the region’s population and its land values. The association’s treasurer, John Ott, assured the public in 1879 that “what is of far greater moment is the keeping of Virginia’s own native born sons at home,” warning that many Virginians “are attracted to the far off wilds of the West by the great abundance of fish and game reported to exist out there.” But the problem did not end with emigration. Ott also asserted that hunting and fishing restrictions would guarantee higher demand for available lands. “If anybody, even in Virginia, has a farm to sell, and there is good fishing and shooting in that locality, he will be sure to advertise that fact, and it will often bring him a purchaser.” The Virginia association confidently believed these benefits would create a more positive attitude toward wildlife legislation. “We can personally testify,” Ott asserted, “… that, in our experience, when the people of Virginia know what is right, they are going to do it.”10 But this justification proved inadequate.
Promoters of tourism, which by the late nineteenth century had become a major source of revenue for Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, and other Southern states, made every effort to convince the public of the need for comprehensive protective measures.11 T. S. Palmer, conservationist, U. S. Department of Agriculture representative, and one-time secretary of the American Ornithological Union, assured the North Carolina Audubon Society, at Greensboro, in 1904 that “the game is really an undeveloped resource which under favorable conditions can be so managed as to bring in large returns.”12 Sporting tourism could provide fabulous wealth, but only if residents had the will to take the necessary steps. “Anything which tends to increase the number of these visitors must necessarily redound [to] the welfare of the State,” Palmer declared, arguing that hunting and fishing could do just that. In 1903, North Carolina issued more nonresident hunting licenses than any other state except Illinois, Wisconsin, and Maine, Palmer noted, and this trend could be further exploited. “Under favorable conditions this travel can be increased very largely, but only by preserving the game which is the chief attraction to this class of visitors— in short by maintaining a comprehensive and well-devised system of game protection.”13
According to Palmer and his fellow field worker H. W. Olds, “well-devised” game protection provided the key. The South, like the rest of the nation, had done a fair job of enacting fish and game statutes in the late nineteenth century, but general suspicion and local exemptions and amendments weakened them. “In some States certain counties have special statutes or are partially or entirely exempt from the operation of the general game laws,” Palmer and Olds wrote. “In … Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee … there are probably more game laws for the three hundred or more counties than in all the rest of the United States.”14 Despite their numbers, such scattershot laws could never protect fish and game to proponents’ satisfaction. Virginia sportsman and sporting author John Sargent Wise agreed with the assertion that legislation and enforcement were not necessarily the same. “The Southern States still have an abundance of quail, turkeys, ruffed grouse, and in some sections deer; but, so far as legislation goes, they extend very little protection to game and the enforcement of the laws is not seriously attempted.”15
The North Carolina Audubon Society agreed with Palmer, Olds, and Wise, arguing that, until the early twentieth century, “many magistrates found it difficult to bring themselves to believe that game laws were seriously intended to be enforced, and as a result in a great many cases it was exceedingly difficult to secure convictions for violations of these laws.”16 Not only laws but the will to enforce them, and to fund enforcement, had to be created. As North Carolina naturalist Herbert Hutchinson Brimley put it, “the ‘Conservation of Natural Resources’ was unknown to us and we blindly went ahead passing additional county game laws at every session of the Legislature. So many people thought—and often still think—that all we have to do to relieve a situation is to Pass a Law.”17 Without both state action and, more importantly, a significant turn in public opinion, supporters feared Southern fish and game would all but disappear.
Finally, by 1910, states that had lagged behind in wildlife legislation, and whose citizenry had resisted bag limits, fixed open and closed seasons, and restrictions on certain hunting methods and weapons, began to catch up. Concerted efforts by state and local governments, local sportsmen’s organizations, state and national fish and game protection organizations such as the Audubon Society, and national sporting periodicals such as Outing, Recreation, and Field and Stream had at last led to limits on access to wildlife. Southern hunting and fishing law had evolved slowly as measures appeared and disappeared with the ebb and flow of public discontent, but between the 1890s and the 1920, some Southerners became more receptive. Laws establishing permanent open and closed seasons appeared on the Southern legislative agenda beginning in the early 1890s. By the turn of the century, statutes requiring written permission from landowners to hunt and fish on their property had become widespread. By the 1910s, some Southern states, including Virginia, the Carolinas, and Alabama, had established permanent state agencies to regulate and oversee wildlife, and some had even enacted the statewide licensing systems long sought by many sporting enthusiasts.
There were several reasons why Southerners finally accepted the need for more permanent, and centralized, restrictions. For one, the pressures of wildlife decline had become obvious to everyone. Like the rest of the country, Southerners begrudgingly accepted the notion that some legal protection would end the slaughter, such as had led to the extinction of the American passenger pigeon in the late nineteenth century. In addition, the profitability of sporting tourism was undeniable. The flow of well-to-do Northerners to Dixie’s sporting lands proved a source of income that land and club owners wished to maintain, as demonstrated in their public appeals for legislative action. But the third and central reason—blacks’ independence, expressed through their perceived abuses of the right to hunt and fish—has generally been overlooked.
White observers frequently referred to hunting and fishing when complaining about both the paucity of wildlife protection and African-American independence. According to angry Southerners such as Polk Miller of Virginia, the ante-bellum social order featured “three distinct classes of sportsmen”: elite hunters and fishermen, poor whites who hunted and fished for meat, and the “all round sportsman,” the slave. Before Emancipation, all kept their appropriate places. But, according to Miller, this social separation had “tumbled down” and the region now was in dire need of effective hunting and fishing legislation, “for there is a certain class of both whites and blacks who never leave their homes to visit a neighbor a mile away without carrying their guns along, and will shoot anything that comes their way in any month of the year.”18
Indeed, soon after Emancipation, proponents of fish and game laws suggested a connection between wildlife protection and race. Some, like a sportsman of Laurenceville, Virginia, made the connection obliquely. “As yet we have not presumed to indulge in any ‘long-range’ recreations,” he wrote, “for fear his Excellency the President might deem that we are preparing to resist the Civil Rights Bill, and send down little ‘Phil’ [General Philip Sheridan, one-time head of the military Reconstruction governments of Texas and Louisiana] … We have, however, a game association, and our county authorities have taken action to protect our small game from unlawful and unseasonable destruction.”19 Others made the point more directly.
According to Southerner “Cosmopolitan,” responding to an editorial by “F.A.B.” arguing that legislation was the best way of protecting sportsmen from vagabond “pot hunters,” mere laws could not stop such violators, because of the South’s experiments with enforced social equality. “The vilest old negro vagabond who takes an old rusty musket which he got for nothing from the United States and goes on a man’s land under pretense of shooting, but for the purpose of shooting his fowl or stealing his corn his fruit or his hogs, (as many do in Louisiana),” he wrote, echoing the common assertion that hunting masked blacks’ property crimes, “is in the eye of the law just as much a sportsman as anyone else.” For Cosmopolitan and many others, the root cause of this predicament lay with Emancipation. “F.A.B. is no doubt well aware of the great struggle going on in this country for years for equal rights and universal suffrage, until one man is just as good as another and better too. How then is the law to make distinctions between sportsmen and vagabonds?” The message was clear. Protective laws had to be strong enough to combat the basic facts of black liberation. “Equality before the law,” Cosmopolitan reminded, “don’t forget that, F.A.B.”20
For elite sportsmen and landowners, then, black liberation had to be met with vigorous legal measures to restrict, even deny, blacks’ ability to hunt and fish. “The South as a section, is sadly deficient in game laws,” a Forest and Stream editorial declared in 1874, “which are especially needed at this time, when almost every gunner one meets is an irresponsible negro, delighted with his newly acquired privilege of ‘bearing arms,’ ignorant of the value and necessity of sumptuary laws, and intent the year round on filling his bag.”21 Such complaints often found their way into the platforms of hunting- and fishing-related organizations. In 1877, “now that the public mind has become quiet, through the restoration of good local government to the several states of the South,” a group of sportsmen and landowners created the Virginia Fish and Game Protective Association to coordinate fish and game protection with local and regional groups and to lobby the Commonwealth for legislative action. Among the reasons for founding the association the group included the frightful pace of fish, game, and timberlands destruction, the need to protect wildlife and thus attract immigrants and tourists, and, not least, the need to control the conduct of African Americans. Some thought the problem too complicated to be settled by protective legislation alone. According to sportsman “M,” African Americans, ostensibly the prime destroyers of valuable Southern quail, “take entire flocks at a time, and they never set any of the captured birds free for seed … Hence they make a regular business of destroying Bob White.” To combat that problem, Southern states must combine protective legislation with a campaign “to educate him [the freed man] into the conviction that he is behaving badly, and this, I fear, can never be done as long as Bob White exists.”22
Such observers had good reason to doubt that legislation would prove a panacea. Despite the frequent linking of African Americans to problems with Southern hunting and fishing, white Southerners’ resistance to state and local efforts to limit the free taking of fish and game remained powerful. “The Southern states, as a whole, have been slow in taking a serious and broad-minded view of the problems of game protection and of the conservation of bird-life in general,” Herbert Hutchinson Brimley wrote, when describing how the legislative victories of recent years had been long in coming.23 For decades, each time a politician proposed comprehensive protection, a backlash developed. Fears of class bias and aristocratic privilege, and the trampling of the rights of the middle and lower classes, had been a part of Southern culture for generations and tended to reappear whenever elites challenged free hunting and fishing.
An editorial in Outing in 1898 noted that any proposed restrictions would meet heavy opposition “from the men who shoot for the market, and their friends; from the dealers and their friends, and from a certain class of persons who know nothing whatever about game, yet who are always ready to set up a howl against any measure which they fancy tends to give the rich privileges which are denied to the poor.” According to the editorial, political pandering created this problem. “‘Thou shalt not rob the poor man of his bit of sport’ is the burden of their cry, at which the poor man, fancying that something is being done for him, hurrahs most vigorously.” Proponents of fish and game law, particularly those eager to restrict former slaves’ independence, believed such “clamor for ‘equal rights’ and kindred nonsense” remained a primary handicap.24 Poor whites would probably not accept restrictions that smacked of attacks on their own customary rights. Landowning and sporting interests learned the important lesson that they could not limit hunting and fishing in general, and could not crack down on the sporting abuses of all non-elite Southerners, without finding a way to make such restriction more acceptable to the general public.
Starting in the 1870s, dozens of local and regional fish and game associations sprang up across the South to preserve hunting and fishing for elite whites.25 These included Goslings Hunting Club of Thomasville, Georgia, which became the Oaks Hunting Club in 1876; Currituck Shooting and Fishing Club of Deal’s Island, North Carolina, founded in the 1870s; and Otranto Club of Berkeley County, South Carolina, founded in 1872—all dedicating themselves, in the words of the Otranto Club Constitution, “to the increase and protection of game. A game keeper reports poachers and trespassers; and the Club prosecutes them.”26 The Virginia Fish and Game Protective Association, for one, expressed much optimism. “We observe a great deal of interest throughout the State on the subject” of increased protection, it declared in 1877, “and this interest is bound to crystallize into something substantial.”27 Southerners, however, particularly African Americans and poor whites suspicious of fish and game law, proved a difficult challenge.
Even when a law was passed, politicians often would repeal it in response to the cries of enraged voters. For example, a tax enacted by the Virginia General Assembly in 1873 to protect sheep from unrestrained dogs, especially those of freed persons, raised the ire of poor dog-owners by requiring them to pay a fee for each dog owned. This response guaranteed that, according to the Southern Planter and Farmer, “when the Legislature came together last winter a howl came up from the vagabond canines and their vagabond masters, demanding a restoration of their ancient rights to despoil, without restraint, the flocks of their neighbors in the counties that had voted the dog tax.” Predictably, lawmakers “heard and trembled like the kid at the donkey’s bray, in the ancient fable. They took fright and stampeded like whipped spaniels.” For the coalition of whites eager for wildlife protection, this was another example of how “the descendants of the proud cavaliers surrendered to a miserable rabble of ‘possum hunters’ and ‘coon catchers.’”28 Such barriers had to be removed before effective fish and game enforcement was possible. As James Henry Rice Jr., secretary of the South Carolina Audubon Society, noted in 1925, “whatever else of blessing may lie in democracy, there can be no denial that natural resources are uniformly destroyed when the people control.”29 Sportsmen and landowners needed a justification that outweighed traditional hostilities. And they found one in fears of black independence. By linking racial control with fish and game laws, white sportsmen and landowners finally found a way to pass protective measures and see them remain in force.
AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE FISH AND GAME LAWS
The process of developing a comprehensive system of wildlife protection was long, uneven, and directly connected to the region’s racial hierarchy. Complaints about the lack of legal protection of wildlife increased immediately following the war, when Southerners first felt the sting of freed people exercising their right to hunt and fish. Not surprisingly, then, many sportsmen looked on the end of Reconstruction as a chance both to establish “home rule” and to begin, in earnest, the work of protecting fish and game from freed people. It is perhaps no coincidence that, as one Louisiana sportsman argued, “it was not until 1877 [the year Reconstruction ended in Louisiana], we believe, that any successful steps were taken to protect our indigenous game from the perpetual warfare of the meat-seeking tyros, who slew the nesting quail and the nursing doe with as much avidity as they slaughtered the gallant five-pronged buck in the ‘blue,’ or swept away with one shot the autumnal bevies of birds in their ‘nooning’ retreats.”30 In subsequent decades, complaints connecting African Americans to perceived fish and game abuses appeared regularly, yet the evolution of Southern wildlife protection remained slow.
Not until the second decade of the twentieth century did the combination of agricultural inefficiency, fish and game depletion, the profitability of sporting tourism, and Jim Crow make white Southerners, as a whole, begin to take heed. In agricultural and sporting periodicals, interested parties set out to convince the reading public that blacks’ contribution to their common problem had long gone understated. These parties had to persuade audiences that controlling African Americans through hunting and fishing restrictions served larger social interests than just those of sportsmen and wealthy landowners. An unnamed Virginian used a Southern Planter and Farmer editorial to link such laws to labor efficiency. Laws requiring a tax on dogs, designed to protect sheep farming by reducing the number of dogs owned by poor whites and, especially, by African Americans, failed because “some of the country people, and especially demagogues seeking office, complain bitterly of the present law, in order to get votes of the grumblers.” To overcome these concerns, supporters emphasized the connections between those laws and former slaves. “To every reflecting man these objections are groundless,” the Virginian asserted, “in the present demoralization and prostration of our labor system, and in every pursuit, which promises remunerative results for light and easy labor, [such laws] ought to be fostered and encouraged by the state.”31
The South Carolina Audubon Society used the pages of the Beaufort Gazette to remind the public, particularly obstinate landowners, of the connection between blacks’ hunting and fishing and property crime. In the push for licensing systems in Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama after Emancipation, the society reminded readers, “conditions in these states were similar to conditions in South Carolina. Negro labor was employed on the farms and in winter, negroes scoured the fields, roaming them at night with fire, often firing timber and thereby destroying both timber and fencing, and sometimes buildings as well. Stock and cattle were also destroyed. But most of all the game and fish were wiped out.”32 Supporters of more vigorous restriction presented their common problem as symptomatic of black liberation. According to sportsman G. G. Ford, the years immediately following Emancipation saw next to no game preservation in the Georgetown, South Carolina, area, “and for several years it was a common thing to ride up on a negro … sneaking through the underbrush and trying to walk up on a deer, or we would hear far into the night the yelping of a cur on the trail of some poor deer that had gotten a charge of turkey or squirrel shot.” Within a short time, “the entire country was changed, and instead of one of the best hunting grounds for all sorts of game, miles of riding were required to jump a deer or roost a flock of turkeys.”33 Linking African Americans to the South’s perceived fish and game shortage in this way became a favored technique of contributors to sporting periodicals.
Throughout the second decade of the twentieth century, a regular column was published in Field and Stream called “Unkel David’s Letter,” in which fictional former slave Unkel David meted out homespun wisdom to white readers. In January 1911, Unkel David editorialized about recent complaints linking immigrants, particularly Italian and Polish laborers, to fish and game depletion. According to Unkel David, if Americans really wanted to get at the heart of the problem, they “shood have said sumthing abowt our cullerd feller voters of the solid South, where the race problem is whitch nigger will beet tothers to the robbin pie.” In fact, he asserted, there could really be no comparison between former slaves and European immigrants. “As a gaim killer, I will bak Sambo against a dozen Spagettys & Kazookowskis & keep mi man shet up in the smoak hous haff the time.” From there, Unkel David further outlined the problem posed by black independence, framing it primarily as a threat to labor. “The time the nigger is sure deth on game is dooring the cotton seezun, & in that bizzy time a plantashun hand is too valyoobel to be shet up in jail for killing a little wild meet.” Yet, despite the value of African Americans’ agricultural labor, particularly during the cotton season, the columnist also acknowledged the value of their sporting labor, noting that “a nigger makes a good gide, becos he wunt foarse you to shoote gaim that he has a chance to kill hisself after you go bak hoam.” This was a valuable trait, despite black laborers’ tendency toward laziness. “Two (2) nigger gides is better than one (1), as you will find when it comes to enny thing like work. If they have a reputashun as hunters you will need twise that menny.”34
The broader point would have been obvious to American sportsmen. Something had to be done if the South were to be protected from this threat to both labor and tourism. But it would not be easy. Unkel David’s column concluded with a word of warning about the difficulty of eliminating African Americans’ game abuses: “to choak off a nigger you’d have to kill his dogs, take away his ax & pokkit nife, & then hogtie him with a haff-inch roap.” Even using the courts might not prove completely effective. “If you ketch him up in coart, his white boss pays the fine; & if you shet him up in the callyboos, that means a mewl withowt a driver, & a plow standing idul in the furrer.” This intersection of landowning, sporting, and tourism interests made the problem a complex one. “Something must be did,” Unkel David concluded, “if the Suthern white man hoaps to feed gaim to his pro-jinny, but I can’t say off hand what it will be.”35 Fictional former slaves were not alone in looking for solutions.
By the turn of the century, the combination of wildlife depletion, the labor problem, and the profitability of sporting tourism showcasing subordinate African Americans led to concerted efforts to restrict hunting and fishing. Southern fish and game clubs and state and local wildlife protection associations, organizations comprised of frustrated sportsmen, angry landowners, and eager investors, led the crusade. Among these groups, the Audubon Society became the most famous, and perhaps the most active, in the fight for fish and game legislation aimed at African Americans. Initially founded in 1896 in Massachusetts,36 the society rapidly became one of the most effective organs for permanent fish and game protection in the turn-of-the-century South. The Audubon Society of South Carolina, for example, was organized on January 4, 1900, the first chapter of the society in the Southern states. It worked tirelessly to win over the public, and to carry out the task it dispatched its secretary, James Henry Rice Jr. According to a 1909 society history,37 “it was urged on all sides that the cause should be carried to the people and taking a cue from this, although the society had spent two years carrying it to the people at its’ [sic] own expense, Secretary Rice was sent into the field and kept [there] throughout the year” (3). In 1900 alone, Rice spoke to many groups, including the James Island Agricultural Society, the Christ Church Parish Agricultural Society, the Farmers’ Institute at Yorkville, Farmers of Oconee, Farmers at Walhalla, Elenton Farmers’ Club, Farmers Union of Newberry County, the farmers of Lee, Clarendon, and Sumter counties at Mayesville, and the farmers of Lexington, Saluda, and Aiken counties at Delmar.
Rice traversed the state, driving home the point to farmers that “the enforcement of game laws requires something more than sentiment; it requires the stern and inflexible determination to make the offender suffer for the offense” (5). And who committed most offenses? He listed the usual suspects, including pot hunters, game hogs, market hunters, and, particularly (and unsurprisingly), African Americans. Rice and the Audubon Society cultivated general acceptance of a licensing measure of $1.00 on each hunter in the state to fund wildlife protection and discourage undesirables, who probably could not afford such a fee. “Is it better,” Rice asked, “to permit the vagrant negro and a few exuberant sportsmen in a community to kill all the game and the community get nothing but a vain regret, or make the sportsmen stay within reason and the negro go to work?” (8). Again we see the old message, proffered by landowners for decades, that unrestrained hunting and fishing by African Americans caused “vagrancy in acute form.” This threat had to be eliminated, even if “drastic treatment is required to cure it.” The state’s Audubon Society, and later other local and state fish and game protection associations, argued that African Americans’ hunting and fishing challenged future prosperity. “The fight made by the Audubon Society,” Rice concluded, “is a fight to save the birthright of a people, now being wrested from them by the hireling and the lawless” (10).
In the case of South Carolina, the phrase “the fight made by the Audubon Society” was literally accurate. Until creation of the office of chief game warden in 1912, the Audubon Society was the state’s official enforcement agency in matters relating to wildlife preservation. By 1910, the society had grown weary of this arrangement and had begun to push the state to assume responsibility for passing and enforcing laws and hiring and paying fish and game wardens. According to Audubon Society President B. F. Taylor, “the Society has been very successful in its efforts, and the reason for changing is that we believe it is better for the state to take charge of the enforcement of these laws itself, rather than to commit this work to any society or body of men.”38 That the state was willing to formally assume such responsibilities is a testament to both the effectiveness of lobbying by the Audubon Society and similar groups and the growing public awareness that the interrelated causes of preserving fish and game supplies, maximizing the profitability of Southern sporting tourism, and working to control the black population demanded institutional formalization.
For all of the above reasons, the Audubon Society urged decisive action in locating offenders. “My orders to all wardens are to arrest any men found hunting without a license,” Rice wrote in a 1908 Beaufort Gazette, “and to bring a case against him for the offense which is a misdemeanor under our laws, punished by fine up to $100 and imprisonment for 30 days for each day’s hunting without license.”39 M. G. Vinson, a sportsman of Medoc, North Carolina, argued that a lack of enforcement of existing laws remained the key problem. “We have enough laws for the protection of game,” he declared, “but with no one to enforce them they amount to nothing … Not a permit has been written; nor has a shot the less been fired. The negro makes war on the squirrel and rabbit, and the white man plays havoc with the quail and turkey.”40 For sportsman “T.H.W.” of Kyle, West Virginia, the lack of enforcement played into blacks’ tendency toward lawlessness. “Most of the Southern States have excellent laws, made by our fathers, but they are not enforced,” he lamented. “The negroes know that it is illegal to trap quails or to dynamite fishes, but they realize the indifference of the authorities and seldom hesitate to break the laws.”41
For many white observers of blacks’ sporting habits, taxes on firearms ownership became a logical partner of the Audubon Society’s quest for licensing systems and stricter enforcement of existing statutes. This idea, which had been tried with mixed success across the South since the 1870s, led to hot debates among advocates of wildlife protection. As with many other restrictive measures that met with public disapproval, supporters employed the race issue to make the tax more palatable. They hoped that Southerners, particularly poor rural whites who would probably consider such a measure an attack on their liberty, might begrudgingly consider a tax if born of the need to restrict African Americans’ firearm usage. “The negro has a childish love of firearms,” attorney Thomas P. Devereux declared in an 1867 letter to the North Carolina State Assembly, “the indulgence of this passion provokes the ill-will of the whites, and to see a negro parading the country with a revolver in his belt has a tendency to produce bloodshed.” For Devereux, “the remedy is a heavy tax upon all arms not used in militia drill. Some tribunal might be allowed to license guns for the protection of crops from vermin at a reduced taxation; but a revolver, as an article of dress, is more than useless to a negro.”42 Unfortunately for Devereux and others, resistance to such measures remained high throughout the post-Emancipation period, despite supporters continually returning to the “Negro question” to garner support.
By the early twentieth century, proponents had learned to carefully couch such measures, particularly measures that would affect resistant whites, in the language of race. According to K. H. Schuricht of Cobham, Virginia, the lack of a tax on guns and dogs put all farmers at a disadvantage and led to mischief on the part of the poorest blacks and whites. “As long as every colored and white man is allowed to keep, untaxed, as many curs as he likes to feed upon game … and which dogs are compelled by the pangs of hunger to despoil chicken-houses, every farmer must suffer. Is this fair— is this charity, or something worse?”43 Likewise, the South Carolina Audubon Society reminded voters that the absence of such restriction helped only the very richest and very poorest. “It has been shown time and again that unrestricted hunting and fishing bear with particular hardship on the poor man and the man of average means,” the 1915 annual report declared. “The vagrant and the idle rich can spend all their time in woods and fields; the hard working man cannot. He has to trust the State to preserve fish and game, or he will have none.”44 Here the Audubon Society spoke directly to working-class Southerners long suspicious of fish and game law. “The vagrant” meant the independent African American and poor white whose lack of both steady employment and firm guidance from white betters gave them privileged access to fish and game that most whites could not enjoy. Proponents of wildlife law wished to make clear that such measures were not aimed at hard-working whites, but primarily at an increasingly indolent and independent group of people who used hunting and fishing to avoid work. Elite sportsmen, mindful of the perceived sporting excesses of “vagrant” whites and blacks, found in calls for racial control a way to possibly restrict the sport of both groups, while blunting the expected public backlash by claiming to protect working whites. It is likely that proponents relished this opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. They hoped to win support from lower-class whites to simultaneously remove both African Americans and the poorest whites from the Southern sporting field.
Thus advocates of hunting and fishing restriction made clear that farmers and hard-working poor whites had not been targeted, while simultaneously assuaging the fears of sportsmen. Laws requiring written permission from landowners for hunting or fishing on their property, enacted across the South between the 1870s and 1920, seemed to aid both rich and poor landowners. “One of the best game laws which has been passed in our State is the law making it a misdemeanor to hunt on any man’s land without his permission,” the North Carolina Audubon Society asserted in 1907. “The law was not made with a view of giving trouble to every hunter who goes into the field with a gun, but was made in order that our farmers may have redress under the State game laws when they wish to prevent people from hunting on their lands.”45 Likewise, Polk Miller pledged to sportsmen that “farmers never objected to shooting on their premises by men of respectability, but when these ‘game hogs,’ as they are called, go prowling about with guns… it is but natural that they should ask our legislatures to pass the most stringent laws with regard to trespass.”46 Such statements assured concerned “true” sportsmen that the laws did not threaten them. They targeted false sportsmen, a “worthless class,” who, according to Alabama Fish and Game Commissioner John H. Wallace, “would patrol the farmer’s lands, and, while ostensibly they were in quest of game, they would knock up the crops, shoot up the cattle, and purloin every species of small stock and poultry that could be easily transported.” The regulations did not restrict law-abiding white sportsmen’s access to sporting lands, but in fact protected and nourished it.47
It is perhaps impossible to know to what degree poor white Southerners found such assurances persuasive. But by about 1905, elite Southern sporting interests could write to national periodicals bragging about the passage of fish and game laws and their use in stopping African Americans’ hunting and fishing abuses. Looking back on the actions of his Georgetown, South Carolina, sporting club in the decades since its inception, G. G. Ford noted several accomplishments. “The organization of this club has already put a stop to pot-hunting, and to-day there are more deer in this country than there has been since the close of the war.” Yet the club’s work could not truly begin until it addressed the African-American question. “A negro is not allowed in the woods with a gun,” Ford concluded, “and a negro’s dog is not permitted in the woods even if his master carries no gun.”48 By the first decades of the twentieth century, sporting periodicals seemed to have become more critical of African Americans’ hunting and fishing than ever before. Northerner T. N. Buckingham’s description of a sporting trip to Aberdeen, Virginia, shows how Southern sportsmen continued to unite in support of the notion that blacks’ sporting activities had to be restricted. While he was quail hunting with a planter acquaintance named Joe, they encountered a black huntsman stalking prey normally reserved for local whites. Joe explained that, at one time, this situation did not pose a problem, asserting that “we don’t mind how many rabbits they kill, but that’s just an example of how well the colored brother is learning to shoot when he grabs a chance.” Echoing the many complaints that African Americans increasingly went beyond exclusively “black game,” Joe noted: “believe me, they never overlook many bets when it comes to killing out a covey [of birds] with one shell.” The end result was a cycle of both reckless game slaughter and dangerous behavior on the part of African Americans. “Many a nigger takes a train to town with his battered suit-case full of birds and comes home with one box of shells and the rest in liquor. And that one box will kill many a bird.”49
Yet, despite the specter of game slaughter, market hunting, killing of “white game,” and drunkenness, Buckingham’s friend did not turn to legal remedies. Joe had his own solution. When asked if African Americans engaged in similar mischief on his land, he boasted: “my niggers don’t shoot our birds unless they take a long chance.” He could instill such fear because he learned to “sorter control their dog harvest, not only by a cabin-to-cabin inspection but… [through] a terrible hound dog sickness [that] breaks out on my place every fall about open season time.”50 Stories of the growing threat of blacks’ independent hunting and proud tales of actions taken to correct it appeared frequently in the sporting periodicals. Many white landowners refused to wait for legislative changes and took immediate extralegal action.
According to some sources, even landowners’ common practice of posting their land as off-limits to sportsmen was related to the need for action against blacks’ unrestrained hunting and fishing. Writing to inform Forest and Stream readers of sporting conditions in the Old North State, Frank A. Heywood asserted that “most lands in North Carolina are posted, but this is chiefly for the purpose of keeping off the negroes, who with a gun in their hands are as dangerous as cans of dynamite. Permission to shoot can be obtained of any owner by any gentleman.”51 Such declarations, with the typical mixture of concern for the sporting privileges of white sportsmen (especially tourists), unease over blacks’ sporting practices, and, not the least, fear over blacks’ possession of firearms, typified late-nineteenth-century sportsmen’s eagerness to broadcast the problem while creating at least a partial solution. Marguerite Tracy, describing restricted lands near Petersburg, Virginia, also indicated that African Americans’ excesses drove legal prohibitions. “The laws governing the pursuit of game and protecting the lands from trespass are very rigid as you read them, and penalties for their violation are seemingly severe, but,” Tracy pointed out in Recreation, “they are necessary, owing to our peculiar population, and are never enforced against gentlemen sportsmen. Personally, I have never had any difficulty in obtaining all the shooting I wanted, either for myself or friends.”52
The market hunter, who destroyed fish and game for money, remained a common source of complaint for wildlife law advocates. Indeed, hunters who preferred profit to sport had for a long time been targets of gentlemen sportsmen, which accounts for the many state laws enacted to curb market hunting, beginning in the late nineteenth century. Yet white observers often interpreted even these efforts as being partially directed at African Americans. According to an 1897 Charleston Evening Post article, a recent law designed to decrease the sale of terrapin at the Charleston markets proved effective mostly because it deterred African Americans. “Perhaps the darkey, who has a wholesome fear of the law, may hesitate about offering the reptile on the home market,” the article theorized, “but of one thing we are sure, and that is the people of this section never saw less terrapin offered in this market than there has been in the last year or two.”53
Supporters of tougher legal restriction tried to reassure an uneasy public, but the slow pace of transforming that ill ease into action remained vexing. Some frustrated sportsmen, landowners, and tourism interests grew tired of waiting and opted for more extreme measures. “W.L.J.” of King William County, Virginia, writing of a proposed 1875 tax measure targeting African Americans’ dog ownership, asserted that he liked the plan for a heavy tax but had a much cheaper idea than “pleading with our lawmakers” for remedy. According to W.L.J., “every twentieth lock of a fence around my sheep pasture is a negro path” on which “my sheep have been depredated on several times, but fortunately none have been killed.” His solution to this problem, like that of Buckingham’s planter friend, was more direct. At each gap in a fence, he suggested, “have a small piece of meat, placed with about one grain of strychnia on it in a very secure place, so that nothing will be apt to see it but a dog.” With time, this poisoning would deter trespassing. “Any person who has a valuable dog, if he will keep him chained during the day and perfectly fat, will not leave his premises during the night.”54 Since state and county governments remained reluctant to halt marauding by trespassers, more-extreme private action became, for many, a necessity.
Dr. Lavender, speaking before the Georgia State Agricultural Society in 1876, lauded such measures because they seemed the best solution in the absence of real legislation. “I kill every dog that I find prowling on my plantation,” he began, “when his master is not with him. I have killed within the last two or three years, about three hundred dogs on my plantation. [Laughter and applause.] They have learned and their owners have learned not to let them come about me.” A member of the convention identified as Colonel Howard agreed, noting that private action often forced lawmakers’ hands. “Here we are to-day,” he asserted, “going up only because the nigger is going down, and only by hammering on the subject is it that we have inspired the legislators with resolution enough to introduce a bill on the subject.”55
But would the spread of such sentiment—even, as Dr. Lavender and Colonel Howard hoped, among lawmakers—lead to the adoption of effective legislation? Would the widespread antipathy toward African-American independence translate into greater public acceptance of measures Southerners had distrusted for decades? According to many sportsmen, much more was needed to protect Southern fish and game; but popular resistance always tempered such calls to action. “Our game laws are very loosely drawn and are a dead letter upon the Statute Book,” North Carolinian “J.E.W.” noted of the situation in the Old North State in 1874, pointing to the general reluctance to accept such laws.56 Efforts to enact long-overdue protection often failed, even into the early twentieth century. The voting public, legislators, landowners, and even some elite sportsmen were too uneasy over the perceived loss of cherished sporting freedoms and remained, at best, lukewarm. According to Herbert Hutchinson Brimley, each time backers proposed a law, lower-class Southerners asked, “‘How are we goin’ to git fresh meat in summer if we kaint go out and kill us a deer,’ or ‘There alius been plenty of chub in the crick and we aim to keep on ketchin’ ’em when we damn please.’” Such sentiments, according to Brimley “represent the attitude taken by many of the old-time hunters and fishermen of those days.”57
Proponents tried numerous means to advertise the positive benefits and benign operations of legal protections. The Virginia Fish and Game Protective Association assured the public in 1878 that “the game laws are founded on the laws of nature, and are not arbitrary in spirit, nor designed to deprive any person of any right that he may possess.”58 A Forest and Stream contributor declared that restrictions only hurt those sportsmen “of least advantage to the community,” namely, individuals who exploited wildlife for food or profit. “The game supply which makes possible the general indulgence in field sports is of incalculable advantage to individuals and the nation,” he concluded, “but a game supply which makes possible the traffic in game as a luxury has no such importance.”59 According to the South Carolina Audubon Society, “it is ridiculous, but true, that the game seasons in South Carolina are practically as long as they were thirty years ago, when game and fish were everywhere abundant and hunters were few.”60 Stacked against ageold hostility to wildlife restrictions, such statements often failed to convince.
Even the idea that laws could control the black population or regulate its sporting abuses sometimes did not resonate. That elites would use the “race card” to convince voters of the need to pass an unpopular measure is not surprising, and legislators and voters knew this time-honored practice well. “Every time a man does some foolish thing politically, he gives as his excuse the fear of the nigger!” declared the South Carolina Lowcountry’s Georgetown Times in 1905. “It seems to us that certain people will never recover from the fright we all had twenty and thirty years ago. In our opinion, there is no more danger of negro domination in these days than there is of another improbable thing.” Frustrated with attempts to sway legislators by cultivating fears of black independence, the editorial reminded readers that “the negro is used to scare everyone into accepting other people’s views and opinions as to the expediency of doing this, that and other things they would not think of doing were it not for this bugaboo of nigger.” For the editor of the Times, such threats had long proved irrational. “We are no longer afraid of the nigger in the woodpile.”61 Yet not all observers shared this view. For many, the need for racial control outweighed the need to preserve the unfettered freedom to hunt and fish at will.
FROM WILDLIFE CONSERVATION TO “RACIAL CONSERVATION”
Advocates of Southern economic and labor reform missed no opportunity to broadcast the dangers of black liberation. “Here are a million negroes who can not claim the roof that shelters them as their own, and yet they are more independent than the richest man in the country,” Charles H. Otken declared in his 1894 book The Ills of the South, reasserting that African Americans’ independence and whites’ control of labor were mutually exclusive. “A vast number of them would rather work by the day than by the week, and so on through the other time periods … They believe in the blessings of procrastination … Do the work as they please, quit when they please, begin when they please—this is the Hamitic idea of labor.”62 To some, this intractability might be traced to the freedom to exploit the natural environment. In 1906, for example, in a Field and Stream article entitled “The Fishing of Mr. and Mrs. Bias,” sportsman B. W. Mitchell commented on the behavior of “dusky old guide, philosopher and friend of many a camp, Joe Bias,” since Emancipation. Although Bias was still an excellent sporting laborer, freedom had made him “a bit more crafty and canny, just a shade more unreliable, and had added vastly to his self-respect—which with him was a mild term of vanity.” This change had even made Bias begin to insist on forms of address typically reserved for whites. “The key to old Joe Bias’ heart, the best and only way to win to your service all his ancient energies, was never to forget the ‘Mr.’” If addressed as “Mr. Bias” the former slave “would willingly perform the most irksome tasks that Joe Bias would have resisted with all the inertia of his race, a well-known form of inertia best spelled l-a-z-i-n-e-s-s.”63
Whites had for decades used hunting and fishing activities to confirm the most common stereotypes of African Americans. The idea that blacks’ sporting practices reflected their idleness illustrated a cherished belief about black life during and after slavery. In the decades following Emancipation, the idea that hunting and fishing guaranteed idleness became a fixture of Southern cultural and sporting mythology. Sporting gospels such as Forest and Stream asserted that while true sportsmen ranked among society’s best men, those who hunted and fished for survival or profit could be counted among its worst. “The poacher will never work,” a contributor declared in 1873, “and is always ready and willing to take his chances in private preserves, to kill game and fish in all seasons. For what benefit? Certainly not for his poor wife and family.”64 For sportsmen, landowners, and, with time, legislators, this unrestrained hunting and fishing posed a common problem. African Americans’ ability to make a living for themselves from fish and game challenged the control of labor on which white Southerners depended.
For their part, sportsmen carefully linked concerns about wildlife depletion with concomitant labor issues that spoke to frustrated farmers and landowners. John Ott, treasurer of the Virginia Fish and Game Protective Association, called for vigilance among Virginians and carefully gave a nod to the need for labor, reminding readers that people of the Old Dominion were “addicted to forest and stream and rod and gun and horse and hound in the intervals of a hard-working life, and so long as the eye is not dim and the natural force not abated, we shall continue in that practice, and teach our children so.”65 Maryland’s Cecil Whig also asserted the common interests of sportsmen and agricultural employers, noting that fish and game laws were particularly useful in stopping “the race of Arabs, who lead a vagabond life of hunting and fishing at all seasons and in the most destructive manner,” and in curtailing “irresponsible and ignorant parties, who would rather fish and gun than do honest, profitable labor.” The article warned that if those who would not perform regular labor were “allowed to work their own pleasure without a wise restraint being placed upon their actions,” then “the entire species … of wild game and fish will be sacrifice, and none left to propagate.”66 Fortunately for sportsmen and landowners, some proponents of restricting African Americans’ hunting and fishing believed they knew precisely what needed to be done.
Even the state Audubon Societies, long-time champions of natural resource conservation in the South, realized the discursive power of laying the region’s wildlife woes at the feet of independent African Americans. The South Carolina chapter, for instance, had grown increasingly frustrated with the slow evolution of wildlife protection through the early twentieth century. Its resultant transformation into a standard bearer for confronting the “Negro problem” is a good case study of the way race became a larger part of such organizations’ appeals in the early twentieth century.
By 1908, the Palmetto State’s chapter of the Audubon Society, commenting on “Existing Conditions” in the Deep South, noted with alarm that “game birds and deer were constantly killed out of season” and “fish were being slaughtered in immense numbers by means of traps and dynamite.” Overworked officials, “owing to inadequate pay, lack of State supervision, and for other causes, … had been practically inactive, one of them only reporting two convictions for violation of the Game Laws for the year previous.” Such a situation raised two issues. First, “the game of the State is being exterminated and that extermination is going on very rapidly.” Second, the racial component of wildlife usage, particularly African Americans’ use of hunting and fishing to avoid regular agricultural labor, to flout white codes of sportsmanship, and to engage in unregulated market-related activities, had to be fully appreciated and then addressed by both fish and game interests and state legislatures.67
“The second fact that impressed me was that negroes and other irresponsible vagrant hunters are responsible in large measure for the disappearance of game,” the society’s Secretary Rice noted. “A case is known where thousands of ducks have been killed in one day by rice field negroes and these ducks were sold to markets and shipped.” Worse than that slaughter, however, the same African Americans “supply town patrons with game in return for ammunition and other supplies furnished. This goes on to an extent that no one would suspect that had not investigated the subject as the Audubon Society has done.” The society promoted the dual realization that African Americans’ hunting and fishing was a wide-ranging and serious problem and that strong laws must be adopted to directly and specifically target that threat. To protect game from the “great number [of] idle field hands in the fall and winter and their wide dispersion over the State,” Rice proposed “the laying of an annual tax of one dollar ($1.00) on every shotgun in the State … Such a tax would add a fund to the schools or roads, over and above anything that might be required for enforcing the law, of several thousand dollars in each county.”68 These restrictions would provide revenue for future enforcement, take money away from the detested market hunters, and discourage pot hunting (and, when similar measures were later taken, fishing) by those who could (so it was hoped) neither afford a license nor risk punishments by breaking the law.
From that call in 1908, the Audubon Society stepped up its efforts to implement a licensing system in South Carolina. By the following year, campaigns launched in sporting periodicals and in speaking tours undertaken by Rice and others began to have an impact. In 1909, the society could report that all states except Georgia, Oklahoma, and Nevada required nonresident licenses and that twenty-four states, including “in the South, Alabama, Tennessee and Louisiana,” had adopted a licensing measure for all resident sportsmen.69 Yet South Carolina still lagged behind. To redress this situation, the state society redoubled its efforts to, according to a 1910 report, “keep the question of bird and game protection alive in the press … [which] has proved a powerful means of enlisting public sympathy.” To do that, the society returned to the common theme of race. An incident in September 1908 underscored the threat from illegal sportsmen. Game warden L. P. Reeves was murdered near Orangeburg by an attacker lying in wait in the woods near the Edisto River, “without excuse, except that Warden Reeves had determined to enforce the law and had thereby incurred the hatred of certain criminals.” The society reminded the public that, given such disorder, the failure to act decisively “at the present time, with hunters multiplied by the score, and the negro hunting along with the white hunter, thus bringing another destructive element into play, is so unwise and wasteful that a mere statement ought to be enough to put a stop to it.”70 The report did not claim that African Americans murdered Warden Reeves, but the implication hung in the air. Suggestions of violent outcomes such as this grew stronger, however, as the fight for a state licensing system intensified and the Audubon Society increasingly used race to press its agenda.
In its fifth annual report (1915), the society noted: “Under the lack of system prevailing for fifty years in South Carolina, the laws had the practical effect of putting a premium on vagrancy, for the major benefit of all natural resources was enjoyed by the vagrant alone. The wage-earner and the busy professional man were tied down by the responsibilities, while the vagrant hunted and fished at will.” Such appeals resonated with agricultural employers angry over decades of abuses by African Americans who distanced themselves from whites’ control through customary activities carried over from slavery. Thus the clarion call to act against such abuses included more than just an appeal to white Southern sporting ethos, conservationist sensibilities, or economic interests; it cried for redeeming and strengthening core social values. “In other words, there will be more liberty, fuller life, for all, and the great principle of American citizenship, ‘the greatest good to the greatest number,’ will be in operation. This is the only true liberty. The rest is license and lawless living, out of which only the idle and vicious may reap temporary benefits.”71 While the Audubon Society was the loudest voice in decrying “the idle and vicious,” it neither did so alone nor only in South Carolina.
By the second decade of the twentieth century, with efforts at implementing state licensing systems developing across the region, proponents celebrated such measures as important not only for the economy, the protection of sportsmen, and the benefit of future generations, but also for protecting white supremacy. In 1912, Virginia conservationists distributed a pamphlet in support of the Moncure and Rutherfoord Bill, which would guarantee the rights of landowners to hunt and fish on their own property, make it more difficult for non-landowners to hunt on another’s land, and enact a licensing system requiring all persons to pay a $1.00 county and $3.00 state licensing fee. This bill was “supported by the farmers and sportsmen of the State, the game protective association of Virginia, the Virginia Audubon Society, the National Audubon Society, the American Game Protection and Propagation Association, the United States Department of Agriculture, the Virginia Department of Agriculture, and the Press of Virginia.” It had originated in Alabama in 1907 and “in the space of four years, has been copied by twelve States of the Union, Georgia putting it into effect September 1, 1911.”72 Supporters hoped the Alabama law, held up as a model for other states, would spread throughout the South, making clearer the connections between statewide licensing measures and racial control.
The champions of the new law in Virginia and Alabama claimed it would have three distinct results. It would conserve important economic resources. It would bring capital into the state from nonresident sporting tourists. And, most tellingly, it would provide for the “disarmament of a multitude of town and negro loafers, forcing them to legitimate pursuits during the hunting season.” The protection of fish and game remained a driving force behind such legislation in the South, but these measures also possessed an inherent racial component. The long-standing connection between African Americans and hunting and fishing—particularly how those activities had, for half a century, helped people of color maximize and (in the eyes of whites) flaunt their freedom—provided an impetus for such legislation that has generally been overlooked.73
In an essay appended to the Virginia conservationists’ pamphlet, Alabama’s Fish and Game Commissioner Wallace wrote that “the farmer … has the right to pursue the wild life found on his premises, without license, and, in order for anyone else to hunt, legally, on his lands, a written permission to do so is imperative.” Such restriction “keeps out of the fields a class that should not, under any circumstances, have the right to hunt.” According to Wallace, African Americans should never have that right. “The sale of single-barrel shot-guns has been cut down at least five hundred per cent, as has the sale of black powder shells, the kind that pot-hunters and negroes used.” For Wallace, it did not really matter whether African Americans lost much of their ability to hunt, because, as sportsmen had claimed for decades, they never truly hunted in the first place. They merely used customary rights as an excuse to loaf or commit property crimes against whites. Moreover, if such restrictions were passed, rural African Americans would have fewer subsistence options, a condition that employers had sought since the end of slavery.74 Even if Wallace oversimplified blacks’ sporting practices, his zeal in promoting the bill suggests the evolving commitment to using fish and game legislation in the cause of racial control.
Through such state-by-state action, a conglomeration of agricultural and sporting interests gradually embedded in the minds of Southerners a link between fish and game depletion and black independence. The biggest victories, especially the adoption of the Alabama law by other states, came later. In South Carolina, the state government, most notably its game warden, took up the cause. When A. A. Richardson became the first chief game warden in 1913, he found that, although local wardens had been employed in many areas, “in most localities of the State the game laws were looked upon as a joke, and that the wardens had lost interest.”75 To fix this situation, he suggested more money, more wardens, and, most importantly, a resident licensing system. The scheme Richardson endorsed became law on July 1, 1915, and was implemented as described at the beginning of this chapter. He proposed requiring the purchase of either a resident or nonresident fish and game license and a fine of between $25.00 and $100.00, or time on the chain gang, for hunting without a license. To convince doubters, Richardson avoided both vague appeals to Southern values and American democracy and oblique references to the perils of vagrants. Indeed, he went beyond reminding the public of the problems posed by, in the words of the Audubon Society, “hunters multiplied by the score, and the negro hunting along with the white hunter.” For the final push to enact a licensing measure, he appealed bluntly and directly to the “Negro problem.”
Richardson specifically brought up the central issues of African Americans arming themselves and avoiding regular labor through unrestricted exploitation of the natural environment. He sought a law that would be “constitutional” and would “give every decent citizen of South Carolina the right to hunt and bear arms,” but would also “stop the irresponsible drunken Saturday night negro from firing promiscuously up and down the public roads and in front of our homes at all times of the night.” Tightly controlled licenses would accomplish both goals. “By refusing to issue a license to such a character he could not lawfully carry a gun,” Richardson asserted. By calling for restrictions on hunting and gun ownership, and indeed hinting that state agents should refuse to sell permits to African Americans, Richardson drew on—in fact, counted on—the relationship, in the minds of Southerners, between customary sporting activities, people of color, and ownership of firearms, “which becomes so deadly in the hands of the lawless negro.”
Warden Richardson claimed to have personal reasons for being angry over the issue of firearm ownership. In May 1914, three of Richardson’s friends were killed in Barnwell County by “the negro outlaw Richard Henry Austin.” While reluctant to summarize the incident in his report to the state, Richardson took the opportunity to point out “that had there been a hunter’s license, and had each gun been required to be tagged, the chances are that Austin would not have been able to carry a gun in South Carolina, or that the gun would have been taken from him by a game warden before he had committed these terrible crimes.” While serving on the posse that chased Austin for twenty-nine days, Richardson was stunned to discover just how many African Americans in the region possessed guns. “I saw negro houses through Hampton and Barnwell counties searched by the posse, and in all these houses were found guns. In some houses only one, in some others two, three, or four, and in some instances as high as six guns, and in nearly all instances they were guns of the latest improved type. In fact, much better guns than those that were carried by the majority of the white men that were on this man-hunt. In this part of the State the negroes are vastly in the majority of the white people. Therefore, you can readily see what I mean when I say that I found conditions that were alarming.”
In his report, Richardson summed up these fears by posing a simple question. “I ask you, gentlemen, is there a man in South Carolina who would not be willing to pay one dollar to reduce the number of those guns?” He counted on an affirmative response from a long-suspicious sporting public, a response that would counter traditional objections to such measures. “I wish it understood that I am by no means trying to disarm the negro as a race or in general,” Richardson insisted, “but there are certain classes that should be stopped from carrying guns, and as far as I can see the hunter’s license is the only constitutional way that you can do it.”
Richardson also emphasized other threats posed by African Americans’ hunting and fishing, particularly to the South’s economic prosperity, as a way of convincing the public of the need for a strict licensing system. The chief game warden reminded his readers that “the greatest destroyer of game out of season, and also of the insectivorous birds, is the negro, who is continually hunting at the very season of the year when he should be between the plow handles” (emphasis added). Invoking the decades-long association between hunting and fishing rights and labor evasion, Richardson reminded Southern whites that African Americans “would be abusing a hunter’s license if they had one. Therefore, you will further see that the resident hunter’s license law will in a great measure improve laboring conditions.” Here, proponents of licensing legislation found their most resonant argument. “I feel sure that every farmer in South Carolina will welcome such a law,” Richardson declared.
As tenaciously as the Audubon Society had stuck to its essential message since the turn of the century, South Carolina’s chief game warden now stuck to his. The following year, Richardson continued to push the need to restrict black liberties as the essential reason for enacting a statewide licensing system. He asserted that three-fourths of South Carolinians favored strong fish and game laws and those supporters “constitute the better element of the people,” and that both legislative action and game wardens had their enemies. This was aptly demonstrated by three acts of violence against game wardens in South Carolina in 1914. “A warden in Aiken County was badly beaten whilst making an arrest, another in Dorchester was seriously shot in a battle with eight negroes, and the Chief Game Warden was cut and stabbed nearly to death whilst fighting for his life in Barnwell County.” Such incidents helped convince a recalcitrant public and an unresponsive legislature to act in the name of wildlife conservation and “racial conservation.”76
Once state officials such as South Carolina’s Richardson and Alabama’s Wallace began to lobby for increased funding and legislation, lawmakers began to act. Licensing measures that had previously failed now passed. In South Carolina, the Ziegler Bill (based on the Georgia and Alabama measures), which had failed in the state house by five votes in 1907,77 finally passed in July 1915. Thus South Carolina joined similar states in enacting statewide systems, such as the Moncure and Rutherfoord Bill passed earlier in Virginia. With establishment of state organizations to protect fish and game and the implementation, in many states, of licensing requirements, proponents of protection laid the foundation for further wildlife regulation and greater restriction of blacks’ self-subsistence. “Now that we have an undoubtedly constitutional State-wide Hunter’s License Law [the state’s] business during the current season is growing by leaps and bound,” W. H. Gibbes, then South Carolina’s chief game warden, asserted in 1919. Passage of this law presented an opportunity to go farther. “If our game fish are to be saved we must have a State-wide Fishing License Law, and this will double the activities of our Wardens and enable us to pay competent men to specialize in the work.”78 Thanks to the concerted efforts of sporting periodicals, fish and game clubs, semi-official protection associations such as the state Audubon Societies, and, by 1920, the states themselves, sportsmen, landowners, and tourism interests could look at the status of Southern fish and game with growing satisfaction.
Objections to blacks’ subsistence and sporting practices, like other criticisms of African Americans’ behavior lodged by uneasy whites during Jim Crow, did not end with establishment of state fish and game departments. But such objections seemed to be voiced with a greater hope that they would be answered. N. B. Landy of Lynchburg, Virginia, acknowledged that, while abuses remained a problem, they could be addressed. “Aside from an occasional severe winter,” he wrote in Field and Stream in 1919, “the greatest hindrance to the birds of our State is the immense number of mongrel dogs around every Negro cabin and tenant house, but these we are gradually ‘weeding out’ by State laws, more efficient game wardens, and county officials.”79 African Americans’ sporting, laboring, and subsistence habits had frustrated white Southerners since Emancipation, but by the early decades of the twentieth century there was much for long-complaining whites to celebrate. The struggle for fish and game protection, while unfinished, had produced tangible victories that provided for the future protection of wildlife and the continued restriction of blacks’ customary rights.
While African Americans did not, and indeed never would, abandon hunting and fishing, it became harder for them to use such traditions to provide food for themselves and their families, engage in marketing activities of their own design and control, and escape dependency on regular agricultural labor in the service of whites. Through private-property and posting laws, written permission requirements, comprehensive licensing systems, and stricter penalties for fish and game violations, whites made it more difficult for African Americans to draw a considerable portion of their livelihood from practices they had cherished and protected for generations. Indeed, a brief yet telling comment from former Kentucky slave Samuel Sutton to his WPA interviewer illustrates that wildlife reformers had perhaps achieved some of their desired results. When asked whether he and other former slaves still hunted as in the old days, Sutton responded: “No huntin’ no mo … They aint’ wuth the price ob a license no mo.”80 At first glance, such a statement may seem like a simple financial decision to abandon a once widely used means of acquiring food or money. Yet when considered in the larger context of the more than half-century of whites’ complaints about African Americans’ hunting and fishing, Sutton’s decision might be seen as the culmination of a long process that many white Southerners would have viewed with satisfaction. Indeed, it was a state of affairs that many whites had worked for since Emancipation. As Alabama’s fish and game commissioner, John H. Wallace, wrote, African Americans “have become, completely disarmed under the game law, and must now pursue the avocation of an honest and industrious life.”81
The restrictions lauded by Wallace circumscribed African Americans’ ability to freely use the South’s natural environment. With fines, licensing fees, and jail and labor-gang sentences, and the many other legal and extralegal methods employed to combat unrestricted hunting and fishing by African Americans, the weight of public attention and the legal system was brought to bear on deeply rooted cultural traditions that had served slaves and former slaves for so long. By the time Southern race relations reached their nadir in the 1920s, African Americans’ free use of the natural environment, not coincidentally, had also declined. The long assault on blacks’ customary hunting and fishing rights, occurring at precisely the time when whites were stripping black Southerners of their civil and political rights, must be seen as part of the broader evolution of efforts at racial control. For just as whites hoped to divide Southern society into white and black, so sportsmen, landowners, and lawmakers hoped to impose a similar division on Southern hunting and fishing. In the end, the long campaign to disrupt blacks’ time-honored traditions became part of a larger strategy that included disfranchisement, chain gangs, lynchings, and segregation, all of which were deployed to erode African Americans’ control over their lives and labor.