Climbing Up to Glory (16 page)

After the first, spontaneous celebrations of freedom, urban former slaves staged parades and organized formal events. Rural freed slaves flocked to the nearest town or city to participate in these emancipation celebrations that continued throughout the years of Reconstruction. Perhaps the most impressive parade was the one held in Charleston on March 29,1865, and organized by the black leaders of the community, when four thousand marchers moved through the streets cheered on by a crowd of thousands. About two weeks later black Charlestonians, freedmen from outlying areas of the city, and Northern white dignitaries assembled at Fort Sumter to witness the ceremonial raising of the U.S. flag. Since the Confederates' successful attack against the fort had ushered in the start of the war, now the raising of the U.S. flag over it signaled the Union's triumph in the conflict. Some of the best-known participants in the celebration included Major Robert J. Anderson, the commander of Fort Sumter at the time of its capture, Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt, Supreme Court Justice N. H. Swayne, Senator Henry Wilson, Henry Ward Beecher, William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Tilton, Judge William D. Kelley, George Thompson, General E. D. Townsend, Captain Robert Smalls, and Major Martin Delany and his son Toussaint L'Ouverture Delany of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts. When Major Anderson hoisted the flag, “the bay thundered with the roar of cannon from ship and shore, every band burst into full-throated sound, every drum came alive, and the thousands of keyed-up celebrators shouted and screamed for joy.”
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Other urban black communities were not long in following the example of Charleston. Just four days after the entry of Union troops into Richmond, the city's blacks assembled at the First African Church on Broad Street for a Jubilee meeting. More than 1,500 blacks, including a considerable number of soldiers, sang hymns and shouted their joy.
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In South Carolina, blacks in Columbia organized an emancipation parade on July 4,1865,
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and in Aiken, on the same date, blacks held a picnic, prayer meeting, and dance at a hotel.
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Former slaves in Athens, Georgia, sang and danced around a liberty pole to celebrate freedom until white residents cut it down.
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An emancipation celebration was witnessed by Sergeant William A. Warfield, a black soldier from Company D,119th U.S. Colored Infantry, at Fort Nelson, near Lexington, Kentucky, also on July 4,1865. Present were several regiments of black soldiers and thousands of blacks from Fort Nelson and the surrounding areas. “Such an assemblage of colored people on the ‘sacred soil of Kentucky' was never before beheld,” wrote Warfield. The “exercises consisted of martial music, songs, speeches, and declamations, with an interlude of a good dinner.” He concluded that “almost boundless enthusiasm prevailed throughout.”
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Many of these celebrations were greatly tempered, however, because news of the assassination of President Lincoln only a few weeks earlier by John Wilkes Booth had a devastating impact on black communities. The day that witnessed Lincoln's death, April 14, 1865, would long be remembered by blacks as one of profound sadness. They associated Lincoln with their newfound freedom. Scholars can continue to debate the merits of the Emancipation Proclamation and argue over the president's true intentions in issuing it, but it is an undeniable fact that former slaves held Lincoln in the highest regard. Indeed, the testimony of many former slaves underscore this point. Turner Jacobs maintained that “we all thought Abraham Lincoln was a young Christ come to save us.”
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Lewis Jenkins captured the view of many when he said, “I think Abe Lincoln was next to Jesus Christ. The best human man ever lived. He died helpin' the poor nigger man.”
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The stature most befitting Lincoln from the standpoint of the majority of freedmen was the one accorded to Moses in the Bible. As Frank Hughes said, “What do I think about Abraham Lincoln? I thinks about him jes like I did about Moses. I think it was de will of de lawd to talk to Abraham Lincoln through de spirit, to work out a plan to set the niggers free. I think he carried out God's Plan.”
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Echoing similar sentiments, Julius Jones wrote that “Mr. Lincoln was sure a wonderful man. He did what God put him here to do, took bondage off the Colored people and set them free.”
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Given the fact that Lincoln represented the personification of freedom to most blacks, it should not be surprising to learn that many freedmen feared that his death meant their return to bondage. On St. Helena Island, South Carolina, a freed black asked schoolmistress Laura M. Towne if it were true that the “Government was dead”;
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and in Mississippi, James Lucas recalled that “us all got skaired ... fear us hab to be slaves agin.”
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The uncertainty about their future persuaded some freedmen, particularly those in cities such as Mobile, Alabama, and Charleston, South Carolina, to seek revenge on Southern whites for Lincoln's death and at the same time to ensure the maintenance of their newfound freedom. The black threat of violence against whites was so real that whites in Mobile became alarmed and urged Thomas W. Conway, the general superintendent of the freedmen in the Department of the Gulf, to use his influence to keep blacks in the area under control. It is also possible that violence would have broken out in Charleston had it not been for the calming influence on the black population of Major Martin Delany.
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As expected, blacks throughout the country participated in large numbers in the funeral services held for the slain leader. And they were present from beginning to end. Many of the 25,000 people who filed through the East Room of the White House on April 16,1865, to view the body of Lincoln were black. On the following day when the coffin was carried to the Capitol, thousands of blacks followed the procession. “Wearing a dejected aspect and many of them in tears,” wrote
Harper's Weekly,
these colored marchers bore a banner inscribed, “We mourn our loss.” Indeed, blacks were prominent among the 60,000 spectators who lined the sidewalks and filled every roof and window along the mile of the march. On the morning of April 21, the funeral cortege left Washington and headed for its destination in Springfield, Illinois, the final resting place of Abraham Lincoln. At every stop on the journey, the train was met by thousands of people who wanted to pay their respects to the fallen president. A crowd of nearly 350,000 in Philadelphia filed past the mahogany coffin. Among this number was an elderly black woman in tears who laid a wreath on the casket and cried, “Oh, Abraham Lincoln, are you dead? Are you dead?” At New York 2,000 blacks showed up to pay their respects, many of them dressed in army blue.
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Blacks in the South joined in the grief. Typical of the Lincoln memorial exercises in the coastal regions was that held in Beaufort, South Carolina. The mourners assembled in a schoolroom draped in black. Some emblem of sorrow was worn by everyone—a black headband, or a black bow on a topknot.
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One young black woman “begged us for some strips of black cambric, which she basted around the bottom of her gown and up and down the front with white cotton,” wrote Elizabeth Hyde Botume. A girl tied a black band around her head, and another made a bow of black cambric and wore it as a topknot. One man had turned his coat inside out to show the black lining. Those in attendance listened attentively to prayers and chants, one leader ending with: “Massa Linkum! Our ‘dored Redeemer an' Saviour an Frien'! Amen!”
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Blacks in Michelville, South Carolina, wore crepe on their left arms until the end of April.
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And the Reverend Richard H. Cain held a memorial service for Lincoln at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, where there was not a dry eye.
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Black drapes in memory of Lincoln were left hanging from the walls and pulpit at Zion Presbyterian Church in Charleston for an entire year.
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Moreover, on the day of Lincoln's burial, hundreds of blacks in the pews of the First African Baptist Church in Richmond prayed in silence for their deliverer. Throughout the city, black streamers and banners darkened freshly whitewashed shacks, and those who had no black cloth are said to have dipped flour sacks in chimney soot as a substitute. Indeed, mourning was in every heart and on every face.
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In the days and weeks following Lincoln's assassination, black organizations in the North and South passed resolutions honoring his memory. The Colored Men's Convention of Michigan, held in Detroit in early September 1865, spoke of “the noble, patriotic, philanthropic and humane deeds of our much beloved and ever to be praised late Chief Magistrate.” At the first annual meeting of the Equal Rights League, held in Cleveland in mid-October, the delegates expressed joy that Heaven permitted “so good and great a man to live so long among us.”
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Mourners at the Third Street African Methodist Church in Richmond passed a series of resolutions on the sorrow of the city's black community at Lincoln's untimely death, and they offered their condolences to his bereaved family.
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The largest observance by blacks of Lincoln's death took place in New Orleans one week after his assassination. It was sponsored by the city's one hundred benevolent organizations, which pooled their resources and called a mass meeting. Ten thousand blacks paraded down the main streets of the city—Rampart, Canal, St. Charles, Poydras, and Camp—to assemble at Congo Square. Here they drew up resolutions expressing their indebtedness to Lincoln and vowing to wear mourning bands for thirty days. A line in the
Black Republican,
the city's black newspaper, summed up the sentiment of those who signed the resolutions: “in giving us our liberty, he has lost his own life.”
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Not only did blacks hold services and pass resolutions to show their respect for Lincoln, but, although many were nearly penniless, they also eagerly contributed whatever they could to help finance monuments in his memory. In an open letter written a few days after the assassination, Martin Delany, who had recently been commissioned an army major, asked blacks throughout the nation to each contribute one cent toward a memorial for the president.
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They did not need Delany's urging. Charlotte Scott, a newly freed woman from Campbell County, Virginia, declared that she would “give five dollars of her wages,” an astronomical amount. Donations began to come in at a rapid rate, and enough funds were secured to build the memorial paid for entirely by blacks. It was unveiled in Lincoln Park in Washington, DC, on the eleventh anniversary of the martyred president's death. Blacks were estactic about their accomplishment, and they had every right to be. A group of people, many of whom were only a few years removed from slavery and were living on the brink of poverty, had nevertheless, financed a magnificent statue. It reveals the Great Emancipator as the freedmen envisaged him: holding the Emancipation Proclamation in one hand, with his other hand outstretched above a slave whose face, “lighted with joy, ... anticipates the full manhood of Freedom.”
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Black regiments also gave $8,000 of the total of $27,682 contributed by the U.S. armed forces to build a Lincoln monument at Oak Ridge. In fact, the greatest single contribution, except for those of the states of Illinois and New York, was given by the Seventy-third U.S. Colored Troops in the amount of $1,437. Even among the white regiments, a black giver occasionally could be found. For example, in one Illinois company the last name on the list was “Anthony E. Carter—Captain's cook, colored man—$10.00.”
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That black men, women, and children would make sacrifices to honor the memory of Abraham Lincoln is understandable. In their eyes, he had given his own life to deliver them from slavery.

Not surprisingly, blacks throughout the South continued to hold emancipation celebrations well into the post-Civil War period. Sometimes on an annual basis they would honor the day that Union troops liberated their town or city, or they would choose either January 1, June 19, July 4, or August 4 on which to stage commemorations. While the dates of January 1 and July 4 are understandable, it is difficult to ascertain why blacks would select either June 19 or August 4. These celebrations were festive occasions, attended by hundreds or even thousands of freedmen. For example, on April 3,1866, blacks in Richmond celebrated the anniversary of that city's fall to Union troops. A huge parade, organized by secret societies, took place in which the marchers walked together in ceremonial garb. Observers noted “a banner with a concentric tobacco plant and an eccentric inscription”; one group wore striped sashes; another group was decked out in broad black scarves tipped with white, carrying a banner inscribed: “Union Liberties Protective Society, organized February 4, 1866—Peace and Goodwill Toward Men.” The parade, two thousand strong, proceeded to Capitol Square, on the grounds of the former Confederate capital. The message was clear: Out with the days of the Old South of slavery, and in with the days of the New South of freedom. At Capitol Square the marchers were joined by fifteen thousand observers. Amid songs, dancing, games, food, speeches, and prayers, the celebration continued well into the evening.
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Disgruntled whites often did more than stand by quietly or merely complain about the noise while celebrations took place. Sometimes they expressed their opposition in violent ways. For instance, on the eve of the Emancipation Day celebration in Richmond in April 1866, the Second African Baptist Church burned to the ground in a mysterious blaze, certainly the handiwork of whites determined to undermine black plans for the celebration.
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They failed to do so; as noted above, the celebration took place and was a resounding success. Moreover, the attitude of the church's congregation was clear: you have burned us down, but we will not be deterred. As further evidence that white violence would not sway them, Richmond blacks again took to the streets on July 4 in a massive emancipation celebration. Blacks wholeheartedly enjoyed themselves, but whites stayed off the streets.
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The celebrations that took place in Richmond—and the whites' response—were typical of those that occurred in Charleston, Memphis, Raleigh, Atlanta, New Orleans, Savannah, Wilmington, Baltimore, Vicksburg, Louisville, Columbia, and other towns and cities throughout the South during the post-Civil War period.

Although there is no evidence that Chickasaw freedmen observed Emancipation Day during the Reconstruction period, an abundance of evidence suggests that the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole freedmen did observe it. For example, about five hundred people attended the Emancipation Day celebration held by Cherokee freedmen in Tahlequah (in present-day Oklahoma) on August 4, 1876. A well-anticipated event, preparations went on for several weeks. The parade participants, all fashionally dressed, assembled in the morning and marched about two miles north of town, where a large crowd had assembled. Barbecued beef was offered, and people came in wagons with boxes of delicacies. Speeches were given by prominent Cherokee politicians and several freedmen. The large crowd continued to enjoy themselves until five in the afternoon.
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Not to be outdone by the freedmen of Tahlequah, those of Delaware and adjoining districts also held a massive celebration on August 4,1876. This event was billed several days in advance as “a grand horseback tournament together with speaking and a barbecue.” Among the speakers were Arthur William and Joseph Rogers, who both spoke against colonization and encouraged the blacks to demand their birthright. To the tune of “John Brown's Body” and “Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys,” groups marched and countermarched around a red piece of bunting set on a pretty knoll, which symbolized the tree of freedom.
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