The Making of African America (19 page)

Another survivor of the transcontinental transfer of people of African descent—and one intimately connected to their embrace of Christianity—was the slaves' music. Like the slave family and economy, the music of the quarter was also transformed by the second great migration, giving rise to a sound whose deep religiosity gained it the name “spiritual” when references to it first appeared in print. Although a recognizable descendant of the shouts of earlier years, spirituals had taken a new form, which some white observers characterized as “extravagant and nonsensical chants... and hallelujah songs.” They still contained much of the same rhythmic structure, antiphony, atonal forms, and various guttural interjections and were accompanied by hand clapping and foot stomping. They were almost always performed in a circular formation with the singer moving in a counterclockwise direction. But increasingly, Christian imagery and Jesus himself became central to the new music.
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While the spirituals carried deep religious meaning and articulated multiple messages—joy and sorrow, hope and despair—as befitted a musical form that emerged from a collectivity, they also spoke both directly and in veiled allusions to the primal experience of people uprooted and forced to create place anew. The pain of separation—motherless children, for example—and the hope for a better life to which men and women might “steal away” were among the spiritual's most persistent images. Movement abounded in references to roads and rivers, chariots and ships, and eventually trains. Slaves sang of running, traveling, and “travelin' on.” They crossed rivers, forded streams, and flew “all over God's Heab'n,” affirming how enslavement and forced migration had become the central experiences of African American life in the first half of the nineteenth century. Even when such movement was wrapped in the imagery of the Old Testament, the journey of the “weary travelers” was as much a part of this world as the next. But the spirituals—in the same biblical language—also emphasized place: sometimes the nostalgia for a place lost, the desire to be “returned” and “carried home”; sometimes that other place, of final rewards. Like the improvisational character of music itself, black life amid the second great migraton was a process of continuous recreation.
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The movement and place that became so much a part of the slaves' music remained a part of the slaves' life. Black men and women continued to be sold and traded, and planters continued to move. Even in areas that were well established, planters—and their slaves—were constantly in motion. In Jasper County, Georgia, which had been settled for more than a generation by midcentury, nearly 60 percent of the slaveholders present in 1850 had gone elsewhere within the ten years that followed. While rates of persistence were generally higher for large slaveholders, even the grandees were constantly on the move. Planter mobility kept the slave community in flux, so that geographic mobility continued to be a feature of African American life. The origins of black men and women who opened accounts in the Little Rock branch of the Freedman's Bank following the Civil War provide a sense of how the second Middle Passage had scattered black people across the Southern landscape: they traced their origins to some seventeen states, 142 different counties, and three foreign countries.
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The arrival of freedom amid civil war changed black life dramatically, altering the relationship between movement and place in African American life. The revolution of emancipation destroyed the sovereignty of the master and put in its place the discipline of the market. While former slaves found that Mr. Cash could be as hard a master as Mr. Lash, they appreciated the difference. There would be no more beatings, no more overseers, and no more intrusions into the most intimate relations between husbands and wives and parents and children. They would escape the endless days of forced sunup-to-sundown labor and enjoyed the right to quit for cause or even whim. Freedpeople celebrated these changes, embracing a new order that allowed them to enjoy the produce of their own labor and promised the opportunity to remake their world—perhaps the world—in accordance to the principles they had nourished as slaves.
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Even before the shooting stopped, black men and women began the process of transforming themselves into a free people. They took new names, some of which were borrowed from former masters but most of which harked back to a lineage established by parents and grandparents in the Americas or, occasionally, grandparents and great-grandparents in Africa. They reconstructed families, searching out spouses and children who had been sold to distant parts of the South. Churches and schools that had operated clandestinely emerged from behind the veil of secrecy, and dozens of associations were created. The reinvigoration of African American civil society spawned a new politics as new men and women came to the fore and challenged old leaders. Everywhere freedpeople schemed to find new ways to put their knowledge, skill, and muscle to work to earn a living. Freedom commenced the process whereby black people would become, in the words of one black soldier, a “[p]eople capable of self support.”
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At first, it appeared that the grand hopes initiated by the war and wartime freedom would be crushed as Andrew Johnson's accession to the presidency empowered the old slaveholding class. But in the spring of 1867, the Radicals in Congress gained control over federal policy toward the South and expanded the rights of black people far beyond those defined by the Johnsonian settlement. In quick order, black men became citizens, voters, and—in some places—officeholders. Although the power of black lawmakers was limited by the covert enmity of their white Republican allies as well as the overt hostility of white Democratic enemies, they helped enact legislation providing black people with access to justice, schools, and a variety of social services. The revolution in black life would stall again, and before long, would move backward, as the Northern interest in remaking the South waned and the old regime reasserted itself. But the transformation that accompanied wartime emancipation changed the lives of black Southerners forever.
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Among the most momentous of those changes that followed emancipation was the sudden termination of the second Middle Passage. For more than a half century, black people had been forcibly propelled across the continent, separated from their families and friends, and required to remake their lives anew. Freedom called a halt to the massive, forced deportation. After decades on the move, black people could deepen their roots on the land to which they had been exiled. Movement—or at least forced movement—was no longer the defining feature of African American life. In 1860, some 90 percent of the black population resided in the slave states. That figure did not change significantly over the course of the next four decades. At the beginning of the twentieth century, nine out of ten African Americans still lived in the South and fully three-quarters of these in the Southern countryside.
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Once again, place emerged as the dominant force shaping African American society.

To be sure, black people were not locked in place, as there was plenty of room to roam within the South. Former slaves prized nothing more than the right to travel freely, which they believed to be an essential element of their new freedom, and they exercised it at every opportunity. Everywhere, it seemed, black people were on the move, and yet their patterns of movement revealed both the extent and the limit to African American mobility during that period. Having been tethered to an owner's estate, they demonstrated their liberty by vacating their old homesteads, sometimes permanently, as they reassembled families and communities that had been shattered by slavery and then further dispersed in the turmoil of the Civil War. Former slaveholders and some federal officials complained loudly about the freedpeople's “wandering propensities” and the seemingly endless comings and goings, which they interpreted as evidence of anarchy in the countryside and confirmation of the chaotic character of black society. They could do little to stop it.
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In the years that followed, black Southerners continued to churn, as men and women tested their freedom of movement, challenging efforts of both former masters and federal officers who would deny them an essential attribute of a free people. For many, it was a desire to leave the place where they had been known as slaves or to escape the presence of former owners who never surrendered their sense of proprietorship or simply to appraise the meaning of their freshly proclaimed liberty. For others, it was the hope of better wages or working conditions and the chance for a new start. Even those who remained on the old plantation or hunkered down in their old neighborhood continued to be on the move. No longer needing a master's permission to travel, they ranged freely over the Southern landscape, visiting relatives and friends, tending to their own business, and exploring a world that they had known previously only on someone else's terms.

When white authorities—whether former slaveholders or federal officers—attempted to constrain their mobility, blacks reasserted their freedom of movement, voting with their feet. No element of the Black Codes enacted by planter-controlled legislatures that had been impaneled under President Johnson in the years immediately after the war met with greater resistance from freedpeople than the vagrancy and anti-enticement laws that had been designed to freeze them in place. They protested with equal vehemence the attempts that federal officers, eager to restore cotton production and fearful that former slaves might migrate to the North, had designed to immobilize them.
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The search for new opportunities propelled some black men and women to distant places. Like other Americans, black Southerners drifted toward the underdeveloped periphery—both west and south—as some freedpeople and their children migrated to Florida, the Mississippi Delta, and Texas, where new, unbroken land provided possibilities for working the land or higher wages in the mines, sawmills, and timber camps. The proportion of the black population residing in Southern cities also increased, and some black people moved northward, sparking a small spike in the Northern black population.
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Occasionally, this steady flow turned spectacular, particularly as the repressive planter-controlled governments took power. In 1877, following the collapse of Reconstruction, several thousand former slaves fled Mississippi for Kansas in a movement they compared to the biblical exodus. These “Exodusters” marked the most spectacular flight from the failure of racial democracy in the South. A decade later, frustration with the failure of Reconstruction sent many black Southerners to the unorganized Western territory, where they established some two dozen black towns. While some gazed west, others looked east, giving new life to the American Colonization Society's design to remove black people to Africa. Henry McNeal Turner, a former Union army chaplain and AM E Bishop, promoted yet another exodus to Liberia. But, all totaled, these and other migratory escapes attracted only a tiny fragment of black Southerners. In the forty years following the Civil War, only 2,500 African Americans settled in Africa. The settlements in Kansas, Oklahoma, Liberia, and dozens of other migratory schemes spoke to the desperation of black Southerners, but many could not leave. Most would not.
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Thus, even the most mobile black people did not move far. The number of black people leaving the South for other parts of the United States during the late nineteenth century remained small. Less than 3 percent of black people born in the South—a mere 150,000—lived beyond its borders in 1870, and that proportion changed little over the next three decades. Indicative of the stability of the Southern-born black population, a higher proportion of Northern-born black people lived in the South than black Southerners resided in the North. Only a tiny fraction of the black population—less than 350,000 between 1870 and 1900—left the region of their birth, most in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The vast majority of these derived from the upper South, especially Virginia. In short, between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the twentieth century, the regional distribution of the black population between North and South hardly changed.
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Within the South, the vast majority of black Southerners resided in the state of their birth; this was even more evident in the black belt. In portions of the seaboard South, from which the mass of black people had been forcibly extracted, connections to that place were much deeper among those who had remained. Five hundred of the 584 depositors of the Wilmington, North Carolina, branch of the Freedman's Bank had been born in North Carolina, with more than three hundred of them born in the counties adjacent to Wilmington. At the turn of the century, of the some 132,000 Georgia-born black men and women who lived outside of the state of their birth, only 12,000, or roughly I percent of all black Georgians, resided in the North. A decade later, almost 90 percent of black Louisianans had been born in the state of their nativity. The proportion was a bit lower in the upper South, where nearly three-quarters of black Kentuckians resided in the state of their birth, but Mississippi matched Louisiana's total. The demographic pattern in other states followed suit.
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Black Southerners also remained in the countryside. Although the number of black city dwellers grew rapidly in the years after emancipation, the proportion of black Southerners residing in cities or towns remained small. At the turn of the new century, better than eight of ten African Americans remained in the rural South. In the states of the lower South, the proportion was much higher, reaching nearly 95 percent in Mississippi. Even in states of the upper South, which had more substantial urban centers like Richmond, Louisville, and Nashville, the black population remained disproportionately rural.
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