A Black Belt Anomaly: Biracial Cooperation in Reconstruction-era Perry County, 1865-1874

A Black Belt Anomaly: Biracial Cooperation in Reconstruction-era Perry County, 1865–1874 IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE CIVIL WAR, Alabamians wrestled with the transformations that accompanied the Union victory. Like the rest of the South and the nation, sociopolitical, economic, and cultural issues beset Alabama during the state’s nine-year reconstruction from 1865 to 1874. This period was traumatic for most Alabamians, but it was particularly hard for blacks living in the racially divided and often violent Black Belt. Situated in the south-central region of the state between the Piney Woods, the Coastal Plains, and the Wiregrass subregions to the south and the Central Piedmont subregion to the north (see Map 1, p. 5), the Black Belt’s dark, fertile soil and the dark-skinned slaves who had worked it before the Civil War enabled the Black Belt to become one of the wealthiest and most productive cotton-growing areas in the United States.1 B E R T I S E N G L I S H Bertis English is an assistant professor of history at Alabama State University. The author thanks the editorial staff and the outside reviewers of the Alabama Review for numerous helpful suggestions. He also thanks Richard Bailey, Kendall Dunson, Johnny Green, Michael Fitzgerald, William Harper, Sharron Herron, Christopher Pitts, Cleophus Thomas Jr., and Joyce Yette for commenting on a previous draft of the essay; Patience Essah, Wayne Flynt, and Larry Gerber for guiding the dissertation from which the article is drawn; the public-service staff at the Alabama Department of Archives and History—especially Rickie Brunner, Nancy Dupree, Norwood Kerr, Willie Maryland, and Frazine Taylor—for helping to locate many of the sources that are cited in the article; and Elizabeth Wells at Samford University Special Collections. 1 Acts of the Session of July, September and November, 1868, of the General Assembly of Alabama: Held in the City of Montgomery. . . . (Montgomery, 1868), 38, 64, 477; Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries, Agriculture of Alabama (Birmingham, 1930), 54, 58; Charles S. Davis, The Cotton Kingdom in Alabama (Montgomery, 1939), 1–2, 6–8, 42–43, 45; John Witherspoon DuBose, “Chronicles of the Canebrake,” Alabama Historical Quarterly 9 (Winter 1947): 475–76; Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston, 1974), 44, 198–99; James B. Sellers, Slavery in Alabama (Tuscaloosa, 1950), 129, 163, 222–23, 225, 251. T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 4 Confederate Gen. Richard Taylor’s surrender to Union Maj. Gen. Edward Canby in Mobile County on May 4, 1865 (almost one month after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox) ushered in a new day for blacks and whites alike. Whereas most blacks anticipated legal and psychological freedom, nostalgic whites yearned for the days of old, when the lowest white was higher in society than the most privileged black. Reminded daily of the Confederate defeat by military occupation and facing political uncertainty, embittered whites refused to fathom, let alone accept, the legal status guaranteed to African Americans by the Thirteenth Amendment.2 Although most Black Belt counties had emerged from the Civil War intact, the war nonetheless altered the centralized, highly productive , slave-dependent plantation system for which the subregion had been known before 1861. No longer able to rely on slaves to produce such staple crops as cotton, postbellum planters and other white employers compensated black workers in cash, foodstuffs, clothing, medical attention, shorter workdays, and similar prewar perquisites. Additionally, whites had to deal with inclement weather, which caused considerable agricultural hardship, and the oversight of local labor relations by the federal Freedmen’s Bureau. Upset by the changed economic and political structure of the immediate postwar era, numerous whites vented their frustrations by harassing, intimidating, or physically assaulting blacks. Other whites made it difficult for African Americans to buy land and homes, secure employment, or gather socially. And once the Fifteenth Amendment granted black men voting privileges, conservative whites tried to sabotage blacks’ attempts to organize and attend political meetings, register to vote, or hold important political offices—often using violence...