Searching for Freedom after the Civil War: Klansman, Carpetbagger, Scalawag, and Freedman
248
Searching for Freedom after the Civil War: Klansman, Carpetbagger, Scalawag, and Freedman
248Overview
Examines the life stories and perspectives about freedom in relation to the figures depicted in an infamous Reconstruction-era political cartoon
The cartoon first appeared in the Tuskaloosa Independent Monitor, published by local Ku Klux Klan boss Ryland Randolph, as a swaggering threat aimed at three individuals. Hanged from an oak branch clutching a carpetbag marked “OHIO” is the Reverend Arad S. Lakin, the Northern-born incoming president of the University of Alabama. Swinging from another noose is Dr. Noah B. Cloud—agricultural reformer, superintendent of education, and deemed by Randolph a “scalawag” for joining Alabama’s reformed state government. The accompanying caption, penned in purple prose, similarly threatens Shandy Jones, a politically active local man of color.
Using a dynamic and unprecedented approach that interprets the same events through four points of view, Hubbs artfully unpacks numerous layers of meaning behind this brutal two-dimensional image.
The four men associated with the cartoon—Randolph, Lakin, Cloud, and Jones—were archetypes of those who were seeking to rebuild a South shattered by war. Hubbs explores these broad archetypes but also delves deeply into the four men’s life stories, writings, speeches, and decisions in order to recreate each one’s complex worldview and quest to live freely. Their lives, but especially their four very different understandings of freedom, help to explain many of the conflicts of the 1860s. The result is an intellectual tour de force.
General readers of this highly accessible volume will discover fascinating new insights about life during and after America’s greatest crisis, as will scholars of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and southern history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817388089 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
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Searching for Freedom after the Civil War
Klansman, Carpetbagger, Scalawag, and Freedman
By G. Ward Hubbs
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8808-9
CHAPTER 1
Klansman
... we will be free. We will govern ourselves. — Jefferson Davis
When in 1894 Ryland Randolph sat down to write his rambling and informal reminiscences — he titled them Ryland Randolph's Scribbles — he did not begin by describing his nomadic childhood. He did not begin by recounting his adventures during the Civil War, nor his gunfights on the streets of Tuscaloosa. He did not begin by summarizing his long career as a newspaperman or his short career as a Klansman. No, when Ryland Randolph began to write his reminiscences, he began with his decision as a young man to renounce God. During the nineteenth century, many others also abandoned their belief in a separate realm — whether it be Truth, Beauty, Goodness, or God. They all had their reasons: Scientists found materialism adequate. Romantic artists did not want to be confined. Randolph renounced God because he deemed absurd the Bible's claim that God favored the Jews.
Ryland Randolph was born in a log house between Eutaw and Clinton, some forty miles southwest of Tuscaloosa. This was on the northern edge of the Black Belt, a great stretch of fertile land curving southeasterly from northeast Mississippi through west Alabama to Montgomery and Tuskegee. Here was the site of the most intensive cotton production in the country. For nearly two decades before his birth in 1835, the Black Belt had witnessed a mad rush to make fortunes. Men on the make bought land, brought in slaves, planted cotton, and then sold out, moved west, and started all over again. It was wasteful and destructive — of enslaved black Americans, obviously, and of the land, obviously as well. The cycle of buy, plant, sell, and move was also wasteful and destructive in another way. Friendships were fleeting and as thin as a dollar bill, for your friend might be gone next week, never to be seen again. Individuals who left town for six months would recognize no one when they came back. With neither an enduring population nor enduring institutions, reputations were not earned but announced. A newly arrived clergyman might be a fleeing criminal, and an itinerant schoolteacher might be utterly uneducated. If anyone raised an eyebrow, a quick show of the knife would put a stop to that. People had no communities in the traditional sense of the word, only short-lived voluntary associations that they could join or leave behind on a whim. It would take decades and a Civil War before the region emerged from its frontier days. This was the world into which Ryland Randolph was born.
In an era and region marked by transience, young Ryland's rootless upbringing was more accentuated than most. While still an infant, his family moved across the state line to Columbus after the rich lands in northeast Mississippi had been taken from the Indians. Columbus was very much like Eutaw: just another parvenu Black Belt town where cotton and fatal diseases proliferated. Before Ryland reached the age of four, his mother died. She was originally from Norfolk, Virginia, where her father had been a merchant captain and where she had met and married naval officer Victor M. Randolph. Young Ryland was bundled off to live with his grandmother Granbery and aunt in Norfolk, while his father went back to sea. Ryland never mentioned what was done with his older siblings or even how many he had.
Ryland's father and grandmother were devout Episcopalians, while his aunt was a committed Methodist. The trio raised the child accordingly: "[U]nder the strictest religious rules. ... [f]rom the sixth to the twelve year of my age," Ryland recounted, "I was forced to attend one church in the forenoons of Sundays, and the other in the afternoons or nights. I never escaped Sunday School." Along with a healthy dread of eternal damnation, he learned from his father the grievous sin of reading any book "impugning the sacredness of the Scripture."
The family never allowed young Ryland to stay put. He was sent back to Alabama to stay for awhile with his father's brother, Dr. Robert Carter Randolph. Judging from the words he later devoted to recounting this episode, the time that Ryland spent with his uncle was one of the two most influential events of his youth.
Like his brother, Dr. Randolph had served in the navy. Unlike his brother, however, this Randolph was an assistant surgeon who did not make the navy his career. In quick succession he resigned, opened a large practice in New Orleans, married a wealthy widow (who happened to be his first cousin), and relocated to Alabama. There, near Greensboro (twenty miles southeast of Eutaw and forty miles south of Tuscaloosa), he gave up medicine and took up the life of a planter. Ryland described his uncle as "the embodiment of hospitality, the prince of gracious hosts," a handsome man who "commanded the respect of everybody." His vault into wealth and prestige may seem extraordinary and even opportunistic, but it was just the sort of step that young men in the Black Belt coveted. Nor did his uncle's position seem particularly unnatural in a zero-sum world where success was built on the backs of bound black men.
Dr. Randolph lived sumptuously at Oakleigh, probably the region's finest Greek Revival mansion in a region known for its architecture. Evenings were particularly memorable. An immense Chinese gong summoned guests for dinner; and before the meal Dr. Randolph would ask someone, perhaps one of the many ministers in attendance, to offer grace. Some evenings the Randolphs held parties; other evenings the doctor would treat the family, guests, and servants to a lantern show in the parlor. "Everywhere were indications of luxurious wealth," recalled Ryland. Dr. Randolph's wife efficiently managed about a dozen servants. Life generally "was conducted in a style bordering on the extravagant."
Oakleigh was often filled with relatives — some close and others quite distant — who would stay for weeks and even months. Ryland well remembered the visit of his father's first cousin Robert Beverley Randolph. Like Ryland's father and uncle, this Randolph had also been a naval officer with a commanding appearance. While a lieutenant, he had been charged with financial mismanagement and demanded an inquiry. The examining board acquitted him of any intention to defraud, but President Andrew Jackson dismissed Lieutenant Randolph anyway. Some years later, while Jackson was stopping briefly in Alexandria, Virginia, the cashiered officer received an audience with the president and proceeded to pull the president's nose. Although authorities attempted to arrest the brazen former lieutenant, the matter was dropped. When the aggrieved Randolph recalled the incident before the family at Oakleigh, Ryland recalled that his own "young blood boiled with indignation" at his relative's ill treatment. It mattered neither a jot nor a tittle whether the insult had come from a lowly servant or the most powerful man in America, the lieutenant "did just what any impulsive, high-toned gentleman would have done who saw himself robbed of his fair name and the robber in his presence."
Certainly Ryland was impressed by stories of how an honorable man dealt with an unwarranted insult. Certainly he was impressed by an elegant life at Oakleigh built and maintained by slaves. But just as certainly Ryland was impressed and influenced at least as much by, of all things, his uncle's reading tastes. The library was Dr. Randolph's place of seclusion. There he would stay day and night, missing meals and indulging in his large and valuable collection of books. His hermitlike passion for reading may have seemed merely exceptional; but it was more than that, for amidst all the books ranging from history and science to politics and philosophy were those written by Enlightenment freethinkers. That Dr. Randolph was himself a nonbeliever left its mark. For the rest of his life Ryland would carry the image of a well-read, cultivated, and wealthy individual — a patron, ever sensitive to the demands of hospitality — who could ask that grace be said before meals even though he thought such observances nonsense. His uncle was living proof that doubt was not the hellish and frightful thing that his Episcopal and Methodist relatives had depicted.
His stay at Oakleigh at an end, Ryland continued to be bounced from place to place so often that the details are not always possible to reconstruct. Sometime about 1843 the boy, now eight or nine, was sent to live with other relatives in Tuscaloosa. As a student at Pratt's school there, he started to make acquaintances with others who would go on to play prominent roles in the state and significant roles in Ryland's life, especially James Holt Clanton. Seven years older than Ryland, the red-headed Clanton was then a student at the University of Alabama. The two would cross paths time and time again.
In 1846 the United States went to war against Mexico. Ryland's father served aboard the Vixen, which took part in the attack on Vera Cruz. Ryland joined his father the next year when Captain Randolph was made second in command at the Pensacola Navy Yard. That war ended in 1848; but by the summer of 1849 some three to five hundred men, many of them Mexican War veterans, set off to overthrow the Spanish government in Cuba. President Zachary Taylor declared the filibustering expedition a violation of American law and sent the captain, then senior officer in the Gulf of Mexico aboard the Albany, to end the Round Island Affair (named for the island off Pascagoula, Mississippi, where the force was encamped). Ryland again joined his father, having earlier gone aboard the sloop-of-war Ontario as a seven-year-old. Captain Randolph ended the expedition by declaring martial law, laying siege to Round Island, and threatening force. The filibusters backed down, and Ryland learned a lesson on the advantages of staring down one's opponents.
From Round Island, Captain Randolph sailed the Albany to Havana and from there up the Amazon River to the city of Para, Brazil. In the tropical climate, Ryland came down with yellow fever. Two officers and several sailors died during the few weeks there before the ship returned to the open sea. Then the Albany called at various ports in the West Indies, including Haiti, on the way back home. Ryland was soon to learn another, even more valuable lesson.
Haiti had once been the French colony of Santo Domingo, but from 1791 to 1804 the island had endured the bloodiest slave uprising in the Western Hemisphere. Calling for a West Indian version of the French Revolution, former black slaves mercilessly butchered their former white masters. Of those who escaped, many made their way to America and many of those to the rich Black Belt lands near Greensboro, Alabama, where Napoleonic refugees were building a French colony. The Santo Domingo exiles brought back horrific tales of the consequences of freeing slaves, tales that were still being recounted nearly a century later — tales that Ryland would certainly have heard.
Both Randolphs disembarked and called upon Haiti's ruler, Faustin-Élie Soulouque, who would later appropriate the title Emperor Faustin I. Many of his officers, Ryland recounted with amazement and ill-conceived delight, wore threadbare cast-off uniforms salvaged from pre-Revolutionary European regimes. The officers rode donkeys, not horses, and their feet nearly touched the ground. "The court-officials had some ludicrous titles, such as the Lord of Lemonade, Duke of Marmalade, &c. &c." But what may have made Ryland, by then about fifteen years old, see more than the ridiculous in their display came when he attended a ball. There some of the Albany's lieutenants danced with "the negresses, who flourished in the titles of countesses, dutchesses &c. &c. and a big buck negro officer waltzed with a daughter of the American consul."
Recalling the visit a decade later, Captain Randolph began, "I believe that bondage is the normal condition of the African race." Under French rule the beautiful island of Santo Domingo had been cultivated like a garden, and its exports exceeded all others in the West Indies. "Now, what is the condition of that island? The negroes on it are semi-savages," he continued. The beautiful sugar and coffee estates have been abandoned and consequently are of no value. "The Emperor, whom I know, has absolute power, and is a brute." In sum, the captain concluded, his subjects would be infinitely happier under French masters than "they can ever be under the rule of Negrodom."
The Americans left Haiti and sailed on to Cuba, where Captain Randolph, now commanding both the Albany and the Germantown, each with twenty-two guns, faced a new problem. The Spanish navy was bringing into the Havana harbor two captured American merchant ships, presumably for piracy or filibustering. Captain Randolph tried to persuade the Spanish authorities to release the vessels because they had been captured on the open sea. When that failed, he informed the Spanish that he was sailing out to reclaim the ships by force and would set free the American crew by sundown. The Spanish captain-general replied that Randolph was risking war. "Then let it be war," declared Ryland's father. The two American ships sailed out and within an hour or two sighted two Spanish naval vessels followed by the two American merchant ships. The Albany and the Germantown prepared for action while Havana's citizens lined up on shore to watch. As the American ships bore down, their big guns primed and ready, another American naval ship, the Saranac, steamed toward them at full speed. Captain Josiah Tattnall ordered his close friend Captain Randolph to break off any engagement with the Spanish, who sailed past them into the Havana harbor. "I never saw a madder set of men," recalled Ryland who witnessed the entire episode, "than those who reluctantly left their guns, and my father was terribly disappointed." And so the Americans returned to the navy yard at Pensacola. Captain Randolph spoke of the incident in later years as his greatest misfortune, having missed the opportunity to rescue the Americans and sink their lawless captors. "This would have made of him a hero in the eyes of his countrymen, who were tired of the outrages perpetrated by Spain, and would have welcomed war."
All in all, the voyage had been instructive in ways that Mr. Pratt's classroom could never have been. Ryland had seen his father face down insurgent filibusters. He had been ushered into the court of black Haitians trying to emulate white Europeans. And he had witnessed an arrogant and remote government in Washington stand in the way of his father's glory. The world was a brutal place — out of joint with the order and gentility of Oakleigh — and when not brutal, then ridiculous. His behavior as an adult suggests that he learned his lessons well: Men of integrity stand alone and unafraid, whether in the face of Spanish ships of war, or the Haitian emperor, or even President Andrew Jackson. And men of integrity are not distracted by illusion, whether of social equality or of a supernatural being prescribing dos and don'ts. Another person, needless to say, would have drawn different lessons from these experiences: that the older Randolph was out for glory, that his proposed actions were more drastic and impulsive than those allowed by his superiors, and that his extremely prejudicial judgments were based on superficial observations. Could it be, for example, that beneath the aristocratic robes and diamond-encrusted crown lay a clever and effective ruler of Haiti?
In keeping with the pattern of his youth, Ryland did not stay in Pensacola long but headed back to a succession of schools: In Alabama at a plantation school in Greene County and then at the renowned Professor Henry Tutwiler's Greene Springs School north of Greensboro and on to Archibald's school in Eutaw; in Virginia at Pike Power's school near Staunton and then in Alexandria; and finally back in Florida at the Pensacola Navy Yard. "[T]oo many schools for my own good," Ryland later concluded. By this time the year was 1853, and he was seventeen or eighteen years old. Commodore Tattnall, under whom Ryland's father served directly, suggested that Ryland leave school and offered him the job of clerk at a substantial salary of $80 a month. Ryland took him up on the offer.
Ryland did not last long in Pensacola either, for he entered the University of Alabama as part of the class of 1855. The year before he graduated, he then took up the station of planter in Greene County. Ryland did not stick with that, but in 1858 sold out and moved into his father's home in south Montgomery, just six miles from another plantation belonging to his father. The Montgomery home, which the elder Randolph had purchased from the same red-haired James Holt Clanton whom Ryland had first met in Tuscaloosa, was located on Ferry Street only a few doors down from William Lowndes Yancey.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Searching for Freedom after the Civil War by G. Ward Hubbs. Copyright © 2015 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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