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After War Times
An African American Childhood In Reconstruction-Era Florida
By T. Thomas Fortune, Daniel R. Weinfeld The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2014 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8767-9
CHAPTER 1
After War Times
A Boy's Life in Reconstruction Days
[NJG: July 16, 1927—Part I] [PT: July 14, 1927—Birth of the Manchild]
Marianna, Jackson county, Florida, on the Chipola river, can hardly be located on the map of the United States, it is that insignificant, and the little river flows unchartered into Appalachicola bay. There are thousands of Southern villages in the country like Marianna, and they are of the first importance, in the estimation of those born in them, ranking all other villages beyond their horizon. Marianna sits upon its own seven hills and has its own turbulent river, with associations which are green in memory after the lapse of more than a half century. To our son Timothy it will always be the most beautiful and romantic of villages, simply because he was born there, although he left it when a child never to see it again but once for a few days.
Our son Timothy was born October 3, 1856, in the morning. A tropical storm threatened to destroy the log cabin in which his mother lived, and she was removed to a safer place a few hours before he came into the world—a slave child who must follow the slave condition of his mother. Her name was Sarah Jane. Her mother was named Rachel, and she was sold South by the Bush-Allens of Richmond. Her father must have been a Jew. She was very small in stature, very beautiful and very high strung. Her mother, the only African in Timothy's family, must have been a handsome woman. It takes likely people to beget likely children and Timothy was a very likely child.
In the year Timothy was born the Nation was in great confusion and uproar about human slavery. The conflicting forces were fronting each other in a death struggle, with John Brown stirring up the fighting spirit and Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, in the Dred Scott Opinion of the Supreme Court, shocking the moral sense of the Nation. The civil war was only four years away. The elemental storm upon the birth of Timothy seems to have harmonized in some sort with the storm of human passion aroused over the slavery controversy. It may also have been premonitory of the stormy life Timothy was to live and in which he was to play a childish part, often weird in its lights and shadows. The childhood of the man is reflected always in the manhood of the child. The birth and childhood of Frederick Douglass, like those of Abraham Lincoln, were enveloped in mystery and tragedy, and these were strongly reflected in their temperaments and work as among the greatest and most useful men the Nation has produced.
Timothy was my spiritual son. He and I have been one from the beginning. What I say of him, therefore, I say of myself. Emanuel, who begat us was never a father but always a friend and companion. He was an extraordinary man and played a very conspicuous part in the Reconstruction politics of Florida. He served as a member of the Constitutional Convention and the first four sessions of the legislature authorized by that convention. He was born of an Indian mother and an Irish father. His mother was, so tradition has it, the wife of Osceola, who was stolen from Micanopy and taken to West Florida, by Thomas Fortune, an Irish adventurer, who thus caused the long and bloody Seminole war, which was brought to a close by General Andrew Jackson who conquered Osceola, near Marianna. Osceola lost his life while seeking to recover his wife, who had been stolen and kidnapped. She had three children, two daughters and a son, for Fortune. After his mysterious death she was taken to wife by John Pope, who was also of mixed Seminole blood. He was one of the best and cleanest men I ever knew. His wife, Docia, gave him three sons and a daughter, but they resembled in nothing the two daughters and son she gave Thomas Fortune. He raised them all with such care as he could under the circumstances, and they all loved and reverenced him.
Two of John Pope's sons, Madison and Hammond, ran away and joined the Union army and fought for the freedom of their race all through the civil war. Madison settled in Boston after the war and came back to visit the old folks and childhood scenes once. He remained but a short time and then went back to Boston and we never heard from him again. Hammond faded from the family picture after he joined the army.
The family picture I have drawn is a familiar one among the millions produced out of the loose morality of the system of slavery. In my family there was the African, the Indian and the Jewish women and the Irish and half-breed Indian man, with the Jewish grandfather guilty of selling his daughter by the black woman into slavery in the same villages where he was a judge. I know, and so does Timothy, that when these race crosses meet in the flesh and fight for control of the one body common to them, he has to be a superman indeed, who spiritually conquers and is able to assert his mastery of "the house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens."
The people responsible for the cross of the black, white and red races in this country are in very interesting and questionable business when they draw the race and color line on the sisters and brothers whom their fathers and grandfathers mulattoized. If they hope to do so and get away with it they ignore the spiritual responsibility they voluntarily assumed when they accepted Abraham for Father and the Bible for spiritual law.
The manchild, Timothy, came to life in a fierce storm of rain, thunder and lightning, and when the Nation was agitated in every state to the fighting point on the question of slavery and the aggressions of the Slave Power on the privileges and immunities, the reserved rights, of the Free States. It was not a small thing I have found, to have been born in such a confusion of the elements and of human passions, and we shall get something of a bird's eye view of the development of the Afro-American of today out of slavery and Reconstruction days and horrors, as we go along with Timothy from 1865 to 1874, when his years as a manchild came to an end in the Magic City of Washington, and his life as a human began.
[NJG: July 23, 1927—Part II] [PT: July 21, 1927—Part Two]
Slap in the Face and Flight
I don't know just how old Timothy was when his mother was sold to Ely P. Moore, a merchant of Marianna. Moore and his wife were a very kindly disposed couple and treated Sarah Jane and her children with unusual consideration; so also did their three daughters and son. The children were playmates and there was little in their treatment to show that they and Timothy and his two sisters were other than members of the Moore family. But the mother knew. The fact that she was a slave rankled in her young bosom and soured her amiable disposition, insofar that she appeared always to be discontented and restless, with seldom a smile or a laugh to indicate that life for her was other than a curse and burden. She was old enough to know and to feel, while her children were too young to realize the awful condition into which they had been born.
Timothy remembers very little about slavery. His first awakening was early in the civil war, when Confederate soldiers from all parts of Florida west of the Chattahoochie river gathered in and marched out of Marianna, many of them never to return. It appeared to the youngster that they made a brave and handsome showing, but there was no happiness shown by any of them. They realized that they were engaged in a very serious business. Soon after these soldiers passed on to face death in a hopeless cause Timothy picked up a big bunch of Confederate paper money. He did not know the value of it but he knew that it had value, and he promptly turned it over to his mother, who turned it over to Mr. Moore. Timothy possessed a very large bump of honesty and it grew larger with his years. Some are born honest and can't help it while others are born dishonest and can't help it, and the honest are often victimized and undone by the dishonest.
And, then a great calamity came upon Marianna and the old and youthful white ones who were not eligible to go to the front. They were the home guard. When it was rumored that a detachment of Union soldiers was marching on the village the home guard got together and determined to repel the invaders. The battle was short, sharp and decisive. The home guard was routed. [NJG: "A great"] many of them were killed, and all the countrysides were in mourning. Dead bodies and shotguns and pistols were scattered far and wide, and it was some weeks before they were [NJG: "gathered in—the bodies to be"] buried and the firearms to be treasured.
I don't know unto this day what the provocation was, but one afternoon, a few weeks after the Yankees passed through, Mr. Moore called Timothy into the Big House and was giving him a good thrashing, the first he had ever given him, when his mother came on the scene, long hair flying and eyes flashing, with a big dishrag in her right hand. Without hesitation she began to belabor Mr. Moore in the face with the dishrag, giving him a rasping tongue-lashing the while for daring to strike her child! When Moore turned on her she grabbed Timothy and made her way out. She dropped the boy at the backstairs, where he continued to pierce the air with his wailings. But she did not stop. Realizing that she had done the unpardonable thing, she kept going and was soon outside the big yard and making for the hills beyond, where she was soon lost to sight. She just seemed to Timothy to fade away. Forgetting the whipping he had received he began all over to cry aloud and louder at the flight and disappearance of his mother. She went to her husband's mother's home, [NJG: "on the outskirts of the village,"] and Mr. Moore made no effort whatever to recover her.
She remained in hiding about three weeks, when it was announced that the war was at an end and that all slaves were free. Uncle Tom and his good wife, the other help, filled in her place both as to service and caring for Timothy and his sisters. Uncle Tom was a real character. He weighed about 350 pounds and he was as jolly and good natured as the day is long. Everybody loved Uncle Tom.
As soon as freedom was declared Timothy's mother returned, packed her belongings and moved into a home of her own, provided by her husband, on land belonging to Joseph W. Russ, who sustained relations of close interest and sympathy with Timothy's father which I was never able to understand. It proved mighty helpful in the trying times ahead. The high spirited mother freed herself before Lincoln's Proclamation reached Marianna, and she refused to remain a day in the owner's house when she was free to order her own life. She knew what the horrors of slavery were and she rejoiced, as 4,500,000 of her race did, when the word reached her that she was free.
Timothy was too young when freedom came to look into the past or future very far, but events moved rapidly in those days. He was soon to wake up and take notice of the great changes which freedom wrought, automatically in the village and its people.
The community was still under the spell of the close of the war and the freedom of the slaves. I remember, when announcement of the suicide of former Governor John Milton, one of the most respected of the white citizens and planters, was made. He was not strong enough, at his age, to face the failure of the Confederate Cause and his own personal loss in slaves and other property. So, through all life runs the same double purpose; what brings joy and gain to some brings sorrow and loss to others.
—"After War Times," continues next week with the First Reconstruction Murder.
[NJG: July 30, 1927—A Boy's Life in Reconstruction Days—Part 3] [PT: July 28, 1927]
First Reconstruction Murder
The entire county of Jackson was upset by the close of the war and the emancipation of the slaves. Nobody had his bearings. The freed people were looking the present in the face, with new and untried responsibilities thrust upon, with no previous preparation to meet them; with no homes and no names except such as they inherited from their owners, which they very generally adopted. They were in such a frame of mind as not to know whether to rejoice and be glad because they were free at last or to be sorrowful and cast down at their new condition of freedom, responsibility, and homelessness. They were just like so many children thrown upon their own resources. Nothing could be more pathetic. It would take them sometime to realize what had befallen them.
The Negro population of Jackson county was not very large. The plantations were large but not numerous, and a community of interest subsisted between them which was intimate, as far as owners and slaves were concerned, the owners marrying among themselves and the slaves doing the same after the rules governing their sexual alliances. These intermarriages, had resulted in most of the whites being related to each other, with the same thing happening to the slave people; the latter having, withal, a large cross of the original Indian and Spanish in the African ground work of them. They were a very intelligent and self-reliant lot. Very few of them had been sold out of the county and few new ones had been brought into it. At the close of the civil war, therefore, nearly all of the whites were related by marriage and all of the freed people were related in the same way by the loose slave relations they had contracted. When the Freedmen's Bureau of the Federal Government was established among them shortly after the close of the war, the slave marriages were legalized by the Federal officer commanding the district. Most of the freed people took immediate advantage of the opportunity to legalize their unions. We have yet in our family the Bible furnished by the Bureau in which the marriages and births were properly entered by the Federal officer.
If the close of the war and the coming of freedom had demoralized the freed people and made them anxious and uncertain of the present and the future, it had demoralized the whites far more. The Lost Cause was dear to them, and their slave and other property was affected disastrously by the defeat of the Confederate armies. The richest of them found themselves reduced to poverty, with their slave property confiscated and their landed property depreciated beyond calculation by the loss of their slave labor. No wonder that most of them were made sour and vindictive by their great losses and the changed relations of master and slave.
But none of these things affected Timothy in the least. He was conscious that a radical change had taken place in his life but he was too young and inexperienced to analyze the change or to allow himself to be worried.
And then, as if a thunder bolt had descended out of a clear sky, the Marianna people were thrown into a very high state of excitement. Something had happened which had never happened in Jackson county, a thing no one dreamed possible, so even and smooth had the relations of the people theretofore been. A former Confederate soldier, a stranger in the county, had shot to death young John Gilbert, a popular Negro, on the common highway. Gilbert had a load of wood, drawn by a stout team, coming to town, when he was confronted by Sergeant Barnes, who commanded him to turn out of the road. This he did, as far as possible but it did not satisfy the sergeant who, cursing like a trooper, drew a service revolver, and shot the young man to death in cold blood.
The news of the tragedy swept through the county like a prairie fire. Negro men and women from every direction swarmed into the village, fighting mad and determined to be avenged. The village and nearby swamps and forest were thoroughly searched for the bloody miscreant, all of the afternoon and the night, but he eluded capture. It was good for him that he did, as the Negroes were outraged and thoroughly aroused and would have torn him from limb to limb if they captured him. It proved a great pity that they failed, as this one man eventually organized the worst elements of the young whites of the county and in the course of time brought about a horrible reign of terror. His organization became a part of the Ku Klux Klan organization in West Florida, and if he had been caught and slain when the Negroes were determined to avenge his murder of young Gilbert, it is possible no such organization would ever have gained a foothold in Jackson county. One bad man can easily corrupt a whole community; so also one good man can often convert a wicked community from the errors of their ways. The bad man often has the courage of his convictions while the good man seldom has the courage of his and is often dragged into the wrongdoing and destroyed by his cowardice.
The murder of young John Gilbert and the fierce uprising of the Negro people in their wrath made a wonderful impression on the budding mind of Timothy.
"After War Times" continues next week with the "Soldier School Masters."
Part 4 The Soldier School Masters [NJG: August 6, 1927] [PT: August 11, 1927]
The people of Jackson county reacted but slowly to the new conditions, and they are to be pitied rather than blamed that the Negroes had more trouble in getting their bearings than the white people. They had been expecting freedom for a long time, and praying for it as they expected, but when it came to them of a sudden they were so surprised and stunned that they did not know what to do with it. The changed attitude of the white people towards them, the hostility which was everywhere evident, gave them a great deal of concern. The readjustment of their labor relations was a problem with which they were in no wise prepared to cope, and yet it was the one which forced itself upon them most persistently.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from After War Times by T. Thomas Fortune, Daniel R. Weinfeld. Copyright © 2014 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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