The sergeant, p.24
The Sergeant, page 24
The Spiritual Magazine, an organ of Boston’s Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church, suggested that Said’s “so-called self-acquired learning and wonderful aptitude for languages” resulted from the “complete transformation of his inner nature” by the teachings of Swedenborg, although he had learned nearly all his languages before he even knew Swedenborg existed. In contrast, a Presbyterian publication praised Said for demonstrating “the native capability of many of the negro race,” but moaned that “through evil influences, perhaps originating from his former fellow-soldiers, he is inclined to spiritualism [i.e., Swedenborg]. Would that he were brought to see Jesus.”
Swinton’s article soon caught the eye of Said’s former commander, Lt. Col. Charles Fox, who had taken a desk job at the US Naval Office in Boston. While in the army, Said had given Fox a written version of his memoirs, which Fox was considering including as an appendix to his soon-to-be-published book, Record of the Service of the Fifty-Fifth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. But with Said’s name in the headlines, Fox apparently gave the manuscript to the Atlantic Monthly, which, two months after “The Negro Pundit” appeared, followed with “A Native of Bornoo”: eleven full pages written in Said’s own words, bracketed by an anonymous introduction and conclusion, presumably written by Fox. It got positive reviews across the country and even made its way overseas, with translated versions appearing in Germany and Russia. Although neither the New York Times nor The Atlantic had much circulation in the South, they must have had some influential readers in the Carolinas, because not long after the articles appeared, Said was hired away from Marshfield to become a teacher in downtown Charleston.
23 The Toast of Charleston
Sometime around late 1867, Nicholas Said moved into a boarding house in Charleston just off Calhoun Street, a broad and busy thoroughfare cutting through the middle of the city. Located on the fringe of a mostly Black neighborhood, the boarding house was owned by Gideon Cobb, a mixed-race carpenter, and his wife, Harriet, both of whom had been free before the Civil War even began.
It was an exciting time to be in Charleston, which was just beginning to rebuild from its wartime devastation. Construction crews were resurrecting warehouses, flour mills, and fertilizer factories that had been torched when the Confederate army evacuated the city, and repairing public institutions like the federal courthouse, central post office, and customs house, which had been heavily damaged by Union artillery. Most of that work was being handled by African Americans, since they represented around two-thirds of the construction labor force. In fact, African Americans dominated so much of the workforce at that time that it would have been impossible to rebuild Charleston without them.
Even during slavery days, Charleston offered opportunities for Black people far beyond the menial labor of the plantation. On the eve of the war, many of the city’s 17,700 slaves held skilled jobs as bakers, tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, shipbuilders, and sailors, which often came with tastes of freedom that weren’t available in the countryside. Some Charleston slaves, for instance, lived in independent homes away from their owners, in specially designated enclaves such as Clifford’s Alley downtown or Grove and Hester streets near the racetrack. They could worship in places like Zion Presbyterian—Charleston’s largest church, with a cavernous 2,500-seat sanctuary designed specifically for slaves—and some even got married there, with the overly optimistic hope that their owners would avoid splitting them apart if their weddings were officially blessed. Some enterprising slaves earned cash by hiring themselves out in their spare time, and some were surreptitiously taught how to read and do math, since their jobs sometimes required a rudimentary education, even if state law forbade it.
In addition, there were 3,800 mostly “colored”I freemen who ran their own businesses and formed their own churches and schools, albeit under tight restrictions from the state and local governments. Before the war, two of the city’s finest hotels were owned by freemen, freeborn entrepreneurs supplied fuel to steamboats and railroads, more than a hundred freemen owned significant real estate, and a handful even owned slaves. Roughly 70 percent of freemen were skilled laborers, such as carpenters, bricklayers, and stonemasons, which is why the state legislature, in 1860, voted to ban them from such trades—over the objections of local business leaders like Nicholas Said’s friend Wilmot De Saussure—since they were providing too much competition for white workers.
Now that the war was over and the city was under Union occupation, Black people were no longer subject to the state’s old race-based laws, giving them unprecedented rights, and because so many white residents had fled the city during the war, they now constituted a majority of the population. Under the protection of the US Colored Troops in the Union occupation forces, they could ride on streetcars without racial restrictions; walk on sidewalks without having to move to the gutter when white people walked past; hold political rallies and demonstrations that previously would have been banned; use the court system to air their grievances; and send their children to public schools, which was one of the most cherished rights of all.
By the time Nicholas Said arrived, more than three thousand Black students were attending schools in Charleston, ranging from newly built schools funded by Northern charities to private schools funded by the city’s freeborn elite, similar to the Select Colored School where Said taught in Detroit. Just two blocks west of the Cobbs’ boarding house, the newest school was being erected: the Avery Institute, a three-story edifice of red bricks topped by a white wooden cupola, which—when it was completed in the spring of 1868—would serve as a high school and teacher-training center for four hundred students, offering advanced courses aimed at enabling its graduates to launch new schools. In total, there still weren’t enough schools to accommodate half the school-age populace, but that was enough to raise the ire of the local white population. Freeborn teacher Francis Cardozo, who had been trained before the war at a private school in Charleston before going on to graduate with honors from the University of Glasgow in Scotland and then returning to help found the Avery Institute, described how one white woman, “very finely dressed, and apparently quite ladylike,” stopped near one of the new postwar schools and said, “Oh, I wish I could put a torch to that building! The niggers.”
Nicholas Said’s name does not appear on the rosters of any of the public schools in town. Instead, he apparently taught at one of the private schools, where his salary was paid by the type of well-to-do parents who appreciated somebody who could teach their children both English and French while sharing firsthand experiences from the outside world.
Meanwhile, just nine blocks away from the Cobbs’ boarding house, delegates from throughout South Carolina were gathering to write a new state constitution. In November 1867, during the election in which Nicholas Said had served as a registrar, voters throughout the state had voted overwhelmingly to adopt a new constitution, and in January 1868, 124 delegates chosen during that election met in the Charleston Club, an opulent brick building in the center of the city. White newspapers mocked the assemblage as “The Great Ring-Streaked and Striped Negro Convention” or the “Congo Convention,” but it was remarkably diverse, with sixty-nine Black and fifty-five white delegates representing a wide variety of views. For two months, the delegates met six days a week trying to hash out a framework for governing the state.
As an educator basking in the limelight of newfound celebrity, Nicholas Said met a number of the convention delegates, striking up especially close relationships among some of the seventeen “colored” delegates who came from the North, including Pennsylvania attorney Jonathan Jasper Wright, who came to South Carolina to teach at a freedmen’s school in Beaufort; New York doctor Benjamin Boseman, formerly an assistant surgeon for a Union “colored” regiment, who now ran a medical practice in Charleston; and Benjamin Franklin Randolph, former principal of a “colored” school in Buffalo, New York, who came South as a chaplain for a colored regiment and now worked for the Freedmen’s Bureau.
These were all well-educated men. Boseman got his medical degree from Bowdoin, after a stint at Dartmouth; Wright got his law degree at Pittsburgh’s Avery College; and Randolph was a graduate of Ohio’s Oberlin College, as was another acquaintance of Said’s, John Mercer Langston, a consultant to the convention who headed the recently formed National Equal Rights League, a forerunner to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Said felt they were all “very able men,” but the delegate he was closest to, “truly a very good and honest man,” was Alonzo Ransier, a freeborn merchant raised and educated in Charleston. Ransier, who ran a store not far from the waterfront, became active in politics as soon as the war was over, helping organize the Colored Peoples Convention in 1865 and working as a voting registrar in Charleston in 1867. As a political moderate, Ransier’s views gibed well with Said’s, although the issue they bonded over most was probably education. Ransier was one of the most vocal proponents of setting up a compulsory state-sponsored school system. “In proportion to the education of the people, so is their progress in civilization…,” he proclaimed. “Civilization and enlightenment follow fast upon the footsteps of the schoolmaster.”
Between January and March 1868, the delegates crafted a constitution that included South Carolina’s first bill of rights, reorganized the judiciary, stiffened penalties against corruption, provided new rights for women, created county governments, abolished debtors’ prisons, legalized divorce, created the State Library and Board of Education, allowed all men to vote regardless of their race or whether they owned property (previously, many poor whites had been excluded from the vote), and established the state’s first publicly financed school system (previously, many poor whites could not afford the fees to send their children to school).
The delegates strove to craft a document that would be acceptable to both Black and white citizens. Even though Black people constituted a clear majority in the convention, they picked a white doctor from Charleston as their president in an attempt to gain white support, and they rejected moves to punish former slaveholders, such as stripping them of their property. “The negro desires to forget the wrongs of the past, and has imposed no disabilities upon those who held him as a slave…,” Ransier said. “We want peace and good fellowship in the South and throughout the country. We want race lines and sectional feelings blotted out and buried forever.”
Unfortunately, most white people didn’t see things that way. Even though they agreed with much of the constitution, they chafed at its insistence that all races should be treated equally. After the constitution was passed in April, there was a wave of anti-Black violence throughout the state, which continued through the election that November. Some of the worst attacks were aimed at former delegates to the convention. White marauders burned down the house of Abbeville delegate Nelson Joiner, killed Newberry delegate Lee Nance in a nighttime ambush, and shot to death Kershaw delegate Solomon Dill in a hail of bullets that also killed his bodyguard and severely wounded his wife. Things got so bad that in the final weeks of the election Black families in some rural communities left their homes at sundown and slept in the woods, fearing that nightriding terrorists might otherwise find them indoors and attack.
For Nicholas Said, the violence hit closest to home as his friend Benjamin Franklin Randolph was campaigning for Republican candidates near the northwestern corner of the state. On October 11, 1868, Randolph was changing trains at a rural whistlestop called Hodges Depot, and scarcely stepped onto the platform when he was shot to death by three white men who then hopped on their horses and rode away without anyone trying to stop them. Although the attack occurred in broad daylight in front of a crowd of witnesses, nobody was ever tried for the crime. The sole witness who was willing to come forward was later shot by police, allegedly while trying to escape from their custody.
Cities like Charleston, which still had Union troops patrolling the streets, were insulated from those kinds of attacks. Despite the violence in the countryside, a number of Black candidates won elections, including Nicholas Said’s acquaintances Benjamin Boseman, elected to the first of three terms as a state representative; Jonathan Jasper Wright, elected as a state senator; and Alonzo Ransier, elected as a state representative, later to become the state’s first Black lieutenant governor and then a US congressman. As for Said, he became so entrenched in the community that in October 1869 he was called to become one of the first Black people in the South to sit on a courtroom jury, which back then was considered a prestigious assignment. But when the mail carrier showed up to the Cobbs’ boarding house to deliver the jury summons, Nicholas Said was nowhere to be found, since he had left the city at least a month before.
After two years of teaching the children of the well-to-do, Said apparently decided to return to teaching at rural schools, offering education to students who, unlike those in Charleston, had few options for getting it otherwise. At the Georgia headquarters of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Savannah, he discovered there was a school in the far southern fringe of the state that needed a substitute teacher. By October, he was already settling into a region that would become the launching pad for the next stage of his career: wandering lecturer.
I. In this chapter, the word “colored” reflects the division in Charleston between the mostly Black current and former slaves and the wealthier, mostly mixed-race freeborn. In Charleston County in 1860, 75 percent of freemen were of mixed race, compared to 8 percent of slaves.
24 The “Anti-Radical”
It was early autumn in 1869 when Nicholas Said alit from a stagecoach in the tiny town of Grooverville, about four miles north of Georgia’s border with Florida. Built along the crossroads of two stagecoach routes, Grooverville consisted of several small stores and offices, two churches, a couple of blacksmith shops and gristmills, a tavern, an inn, and the Grooverville Academy, a private school for the children of wealthy white families. In the countryside around the village were plantations and orchards where hundreds of former slaves tended to crops of cotton, corn, yams, beans, peas, pecans, and peaches, but the downtown—such as it was—was primarily intended for white people.
In much of rural Georgia, it was a dangerous time to be teaching Black children. “In one half of the state there is little opposition to freedmen’s schools, and respectable citizens give them countenance and support,” wrote Col. John Randolph Lewis, assistant superintendent of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Georgia. “In many counties, however, there still exists great bitterness of feeling against all those engaged in the work, and bands of K.K.K., armed and disguised men, have committed most atrocious outrages.” In one incident, Klansmen burst into a teacher’s home, dragged him from his bed, hung him by a noose until he was nearly dead, and then threatened to kill him if he didn’t leave town. In another, they shot a teacher in the face before issuing the same threat. In another, they chased a teacher out of town and whipped the man who had rented him a room. “These murders and outrages are committed by organized gangs, generally in the night, and the civil authorities seem to be unable to prevent them,” Lewis wrote.
Fortunately for Nicholas Said, the Klan violence was mainly in the northern half of the state. At the Brooks County seat in Quitman, eleven miles east of Grooverville, civic leaders declared that even though they believed in “the supremacy of the white race,” they would “do all in our power to elevate [Blacks] socially, by placing the means of education within [their] reach.” In Grooverville, several plantation owners launched small schools on their farms, but the general feeling among most local white people was said to be that “Negroes cannot learn [so] they should not learn.” So in 1869, Black laborers pooled their own meager funds to build a one-room schoolhouse about five miles out of town, on a parcel of land owned by former slave William McGraff.
Judging from other schools in the area, the Grooverville school was likely a sparse wooden cabin, with no blackboard, no maps or posters on the walls, and no desks, other than a roughly hewn table for the teacher. Initially, it was taught by Lizzie Patten, a seventeen-year-old former slave whose mother, Lydia, led a similar school about eleven miles to the north. Despite Lizzie’s young age, the Freedmen’s Bureau rated her as “a good girl [who] will do moderately well with her people.” Parents paid her 50 cents per month to teach their children, or about $9 in today’s currency. Although that amount could be daunting for former slaves, Lizzie managed to attract thirty-one students. But that brought in only $15.50 a month (less than $300 today), which was less than what most unskilled laborers earned at the time. For a couple of months, Boston’s Peabody Foundation donated an additional 25 cents per student, but that ended when the foundation reached its annual limit, prompting Lizzie to take a more lucrative job tutoring workers on a plantation owned by philanthropic Union army veteran John Cutler. And that, in turn, created a job opening for Nicholas Said.
Sitting behind the teacher’s table, Said was half-surrounded by a semicircle of students sitting on backless benches of oak or pine, with hornbooks on their laps so they could have a hard surface for writing, since they had no desks. Thanks to donations from Northern publishers, the school likely had a dozen or so copies of books like Webster’s Elementary Spelling Book and Elementary Reader, meaning each textbook would have to be shared among several pupils, as well as single copies of Primary Arithmetic and First Steps in Geography, reserved for the most promising students. Just as Said had learned to read the Koran by rote, his students now learned English, listening to him read sentences aloud from the textbooks and then writing them down: “We burn oil in tin and glass lamps…. We make ropes of hemp and flax…. To filch is to steal; we must not filch…. Strong drink will debase a man…. Good men obey the laws of God…. God will destroy the wicked.”
