Negroes and the Gun (14 page)

The racial tensions within ranks that afflicted black troops during the war extended into the period of uneasy peace. In Wilmington, North Carolina, Sargent John Benson of the 6th United States Colored Troops came to an armed standoff
with white Union officers after attempting to arrest a white woman who had pointed a pistol at one of his soldiers. Although they wore the same uniform, Benson's superiors had less allegiance to him than to the Southern belle. After being driven off at gunpoint, Benson published a letter in the
Wilmington Herald
, protesting the episode. This got him arrested, stripped of his sergeant's stripes, and imprisoned on the charge of insolence to commissioned officers.
23

Black civilians experienced similar treatment as Union soldiers found race a more compelling bond than politics. Union commander Quincy Gilmore noted numerous clashes between white Union soldiers and black civilians in Charleston, South Carolina. Gilmore records that “street quarrels have taken place, in some instances, arising from insolence and brutality of soldiers toward the Negroes” and sometimes where blacks were reported as the aggressors.

The interracial tinderbox progressed into shots fired when a fight between white soldiers and black civilians was joined by black soldiers who waded in to aid the freedmen. Union soldiers traded gunfire along racial lines for more than twenty minutes, and brief firefights broke out around Charleston over the next several days, with disputed reports of casualties.

There is good evidence that black soldiers did not treat the returning Confederates delicately. Members of the 35th US Colored Troops were disciplined for entering the homes of white Charlestonians and confiscating guns. In other cases, black soldiers duplicated the looting and ravaging of their white counterparts.
24

In North Carolina, black soldiers exploited the threat value of their firearms to seek vengeance on a white ferry captain who could not abide the change wrought by Northern victory. Whites and blacks had always ridden the New Bern–Roanoke ferry. But blacks were barred from the upper deck. When black troops ventured into that prohibited space, the captain responded with a barrage of racial insults.

The soldiers did not leave the upper deck, and they did not forget the insults. A few days later, in the fog of dawn, they rowed out to the ferry with guns drawn. They captured the captain and his clerk and, back ashore, tied them to a sticky yellow pine and beat them bare-assed with government-issue belts.
25

In April 1865, soldiers from the 52nd US Colored Infantry descended on the Vicksburg, Mississippi, plantation of Jared and Minerva Cook. Some of them evidently had been slaves of Cook before the war. Brandishing revolvers, they demanded that Cook turn over his guns and ransacked the house. Then they demanded the silver. Before it was over, they had shot and killed Minerva Cook and wounded Jared. When their crimes were detected, the men were court-martialed, and several of them were hanged.
26

In Victoria, Texas, black troops did their own hanging, dragging a white man accused of murdering a freedman from his jail cell and stringing him up. And again
in South Carolina, black troops formed a lynch party to avenge the fatal stabbing of a black sergeant who had fought with a Confederate veteran after refusing to leave a white railway car. The black troopers tried the rebel by “drum-head court-martial” and then shot him down.
27

Almost as soon as the shooting war stopped, the Southern governments moved to reinstitute slavery through a variety of state and local laws, restricting every aspect of Negro life, from work to travel, to property rights. Gun prohibition was a common theme of these “Black Codes.”

White anxiety about free Negroes with guns was fueled by episodes like the scene Thomas Pickney encountered when he returned to his plantation on the Santee River in South Carolina. Already warned that his Negroes had looted the place, Pickney called them around to explain that he wanted to pay them wages and restore the plantation to profitability.

Pickney chose his words carefully because most of the newly minted freemen had come to the assembly armed. Their reaction to his proposal was chastening. Now unafraid to look him in the eye, Pickney's boys said they planned to work for themselves and refused to work for any white man. If they refused to work for a white man, Pickney asked, where did they propose to go? The answer brought him up short. “We ain gwine nowhar.” Their plan was to stay where they were and work the land “whar we wuz bo'n an'whar belongs tuh us.”

Although these men were surely unfamiliar with the legal principle of restitution, where without any formal agreement, assets are reallocated to prevent unjust enrichment, their instincts were consistent with that theme. And in the spirit of the common law, they were intent on enforcing their claim through self-help if necessary. One black man wearing a Union Army coat made the point dramatically. Standing in the doorway of his cabin, his hand clutched around a rifle, he slammed the butt of the gun to the floor and declared that he would work the land under his feet. And he challenged any man to “put me outer dis house!”
28

Other armed Negroes were similarly provocative. One clear-eyed veteran from Louisiana embraced the war's lessons about force, incentives, and cooperation and advised “every colored soldier, bring your gun home.” Another Negro veteran showed clear appreciation for these themes, recounting in 1865 how, “When de war ended, I goes back to my mastah and he treated me like his brother.” He was under no illusions about this evident change of heart, concluding, “Guess he was scared of me 'cause I had so much ammunition on me.”

Mississippi minister Samuel Agnew exhibited the worry of many Southerners,
writing in late 1865 that “our Negroes certainly have guns and are frequently shooting about.” It signaled conflicts to come that local freedmen were in “high dudgeon” over recent efforts by roving gangs of “regulators” to disarm them. The blacks, according to Agnew, were now demanding that they had “equal rights with a white man to bear arms.”

A Freedman's Bureau agent from Florida lamented the wide practice among freedmen of traveling armed. And a Bureau agent operating in the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina reported that the Negroes under his charge were widely armed and “these guns they prize as their most valued possessions next to their land.”

In North Carolina, appeals to the governor's office displayed a simmering fear among defeated rebels about Negroes with guns. One correspondent wrote candidly of his worry that “the design is to organize for a general massacre of the white population. Nearly every Negro is armed not only with a gun [long gun], but a revolver. . . . The meeting of a thousand or two of Negroes every other Sunday, with Officers and Drilling, I think a serious matter.” In October 1865, Mississippi planter E. G. Baker similarly complained in a letter to the state legislature, “it is well known here that our Negroes through the country are well equipped with firearms, muskets, double barrel shotguns and pistols.”
29

These sorts of fears fueled overtly racist gun laws like Mississippi's Act to Regulate the Relation of Master and Apprentice Relative to Freedmen, which prohibited blacks from owning firearms, ammunition, dirks, or bowie knives.
30
Alabama prohibited “any freedman, mulatto or free person of color in this state, to own fire-arms, or carry about this person a pistol or other deadly weapon.”
31
An 1865 Florida law similarly prohibited “Negroes mulattos or other persons of color from possessing guns, ammunition or blade weapons” without obtaining a license issued by a judge on the recommendation of two respectable citizens, presumably white. Violators were punished by public whipping up to “39 stripes.”

The federal government, with an occupying army still in place, countermanded much of the discriminatory arms legislation. In January 1866, General Daniel Sickles, commander of federal occupation troops, issued a general order that “the constitutional rights of all loyal and well disposed inhabitants to bear arms will not be infringed.”
32

Black Code drafters also faced the problem that has always afflicted weapons embargoes. Even for ruthless postwar lawmakers,
saying
that guns were banned to blacks was different from actually prying them away. The assessment of a black trooper assigned to the Freedman's Bureau in Mississippi is instructive here. In a letter to a Bureau commissioner, Private Calvin Holly described an incident in Vicksburg involving armed black men. He noted, “they was forbidden [by the Black Code] not to have any [guns]
but did not heed
.”

Attempts to disarm the freedmen appeared not only in state statutes, but also in local ordinances and private contracts. In a report to President Andrew Johnson, General Charles Schurz described a series of local ordinances in Louisiana that prohibited blacks from owning any type of weapon without permission from their employer and separate approval by the mayor. In other cases, petty plantation tyrants put conditions in long-term labor contracts prohibiting blacks from possessing firearms.
33

The Black Code and labor contract restrictions were a piece with violent attempts to disarm blacks perpetrated by local police, white state militias, and Klan-type organizations that rose during Reconstruction to wage a war of Southern redemption. The formal Ku Klux Klan emerged out of Tennessee in 1866. But across the South, similar organizations cropped up under names like the White Brotherhood, the Knights of the White Camellia, the Innocents, and the Knights of the Black Cross. Black disarmament was part of their common agenda.
34

Many black veterans left military service with their issue weapons or war prizes and probably were better armed than the general black population. But the public conversation shows that arms for self-defense were a particular concern of the broad swath of black civilians. This is evident in the reaction to occupation-army commands affirming freedmen's right to keep and bear arms. These orders were widely reprinted in black newspapers along with commentary that spoke to the community's concerns. A good example appears in the
Christian Recorder
published by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which editorialized:

We have several times alluded to the fact that the Constitution of the United States guarantees to every citizen the right to keep and bear arms. Gen. Tilson, assistant Commissioner, for Georgia, has issued a circular in which he clearly defines the right as follows: . . . “The Constitution of the United States gives the people the right to bear arms and states that this right shall not be infringed. Any person, white or black, may be disarmed, if convicted of making an improper and dangerous use of weapons; but no military or civil officer has the right or authority to disarm any class of people, thereby placing them at the mercy of others. All men, without the distinction of color, have the right to keep arms to defend their homes, families or themselves.” We are glad to learn that Gen. Scott, Commissioner for this state, has given freedmen to understand that they have as good a right to keep firearms as any other citizens. The Constitution of the United States is the . . . law of the land, and we will be governed by that at present.
35

The black newspaper the
Loyal Georgian
reprinted General Sickles's Order No. 1, followed by an editorial explaining that that blacks were now citizens who had a right to have guns for self-protection.

Have colored citizens a right to own and carry firearms? . . . Almost every day we are asked questions similar to the above. We answer certainly you have the same right to own and carry arms that other citizens have. You are not only free but citizens of the United States and, as such, entitled to the same privileges granted to other citizens by the Constitution of the United States. . . .