The sergeant, p.27
The Sergeant, page 27
Shortly after returning to New Orleans, Witherspoon wrote a letter to the Times-Picayune, mentioning Said’s memoir and describing how “he writes in kind terms of South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama.” After persuading the South Western Presbyterian newspaper to print Said’s first chapter, dealing with his childhood in Borno, he arranged to have the entire book published by Shotwell & Co. in Memphis, Tennessee.
Said was ecstatic that his book was being published. Finally, he would have something to send his subscribers. He offered to pay Witherspoon for his help, but the preacher refused, “stating that he did it solely to oblige me, as I was a poor man a stranger and a colored man…. I shall, so long as I live, be grateful to him, not only for what he has done for myself, but especially the part he has taken, and still takes in the elevation of my race. I appreciate this above all things in this world.”
26 “Safety and Harmony”
Nicholas Said stayed in Bladon Springs as long as four years, the longest time he lived anywhere outside Borno. Now that he had settled down, he decided to once again get married.I On August 28, 1874, he signed a legal bond in Clarke County, a few miles east of Bladon Springs, indicating his intention to marry Rachel Thornton, a twenty-four-year-old single mother with a six-year-old son. But when Said got married—on September 24, in a ceremony conducted in Bladon Springs—his bride’s name was given as Mournin Jackson.
It seems unlikely that Said was audacious enough to marry two different women in two neighboring counties within a month of each other. Perhaps Rachel Thornton was the name his betrothed had been given as a slave, and Mournin (or Mornin) Jackson was the name she chose to use as a freedwoman, or maybe there was another innocent explanation. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to know the exact circumstances, since there are no known records of either woman after the wedding, which was soon overshadowed by one of the bloodiest elections in Alabama history, in which Nicholas Said reportedly played an active role in trying to keep the peace in Choctaw County.
By 1874, the Reconstruction Era in Alabama was rapidly coming to an end. Even though Republicans were in charge of the state government, this was no longer the Party of Lincoln. The party was torn between former slaves and working-class whites who disliked the wealthy Democratic elite but had no fondness for the freedmen who were now competing with them for jobs. To keep white voters from bolting from their ranks, party leaders kept Black people out of most statewide positions and soft-pedaled civil rights so much that some sought to ban freedmen from voting and supported Jim Crow segregation. “Under the guise of Republicanism, we have men in Alabama, some in high places, who are seeking to make themselves acceptable to [the Democrats],” warned one Republican newspaper. Another said that conservative Republicans and Democrats “stand both precisely alike…. There is not a pin to choose between them. They may differ somewhat in personality, but on the facts of the political schedule they [are in] exact accord.”
The infighting between conservative and liberal Republicans left a power vacuum the Democrats hoped to fill in the 1874 elections. Their chief obstacle was the Black Belt, a broad swathe of farmland that bisected the state from east to west, composed of counties where Black people were in the majority. In some counties, such as Barbour, on the eastern edge of the state, there were more than twice as many Black voters as whites, and it seemed unlikely that Democrats could gain much traction without extraordinary means. In Choctaw, the margin was far narrower, with roughly 1,740 Black citizens who were eligible to vote compared to 1,600 white citizens, and previous elections had already shown that Democrats could prevail, as long as they could discourage Black voters from showing up. “We are now on the very threshold of this important contest for white supremacy over negro inferiority and radical rottenness…,” read the Choctaw Herald. “It is now the honorable duty of every man opposed to negro rule to place himself in a condition to aid us in throwing off the carpetbag-scalawag negro yoke that our political enemies are seeking to adjust around our neck.”
As the election approached, there were acts of violence throughout the Black Belt, including assassinations of several Republican activists near Choctaw County, as well as arrests of Black leaders on trumped-up charges. “Simply voting for the Republican ticket was enough to get someone indicted,” according to historian Mary Ellen Curtin. In Choctaw, Republican political activities were spearheaded by Jack Turner, an illiterate but charismatic former slave with a powerfully built six-foot-two frame. That summer, frictions ran so high that at one point a gun battle nearly erupted near the county seat in Butler between a white posse organized by the local sheriff and Black Republicans led by Turner. After a few warning shots, both sides backed down and nobody was hurt, but Turner and several associates went into hiding, fearing they would be jailed or lynched. “Colored men have been assaulted, threatened, driven from their homes and families and otherwise mistreated, simply because they had expressed their desire to support Republican candidates,” Turner and an associate complained to Republican governor David Lewis, a former slaveholder who was embroiled in his own uphill reelection battle and was hesitant to defend Black rights. After hearing similar concerns from elsewhere in the state, however, the federal government sent a regiment of troops into the Black Belt, including Choctaw County, where a company of soldiers bivouacked in Butler.
Bladon Springs was just thirty-two miles south of Butler, but in a way it was a different world. Unlike the plantation lands where Jack Turner did his organizing, the Black community in Bladon Springs was dominated by craftsmen and artisans with deep ties to the tourism industry, who were reluctant to rock the boat. In the 1872 election, a year before Nicholas Said appeared on the scene, Republicans received only twenty-two votes in Bladon Springs, with most Black residents choosing to refrain from politics. Once Nicholas Said arrived, he reportedly spread the notion that “the road to peace and harmony between the races lay in voting the Democratic ticket”—or, more likely, in refraining from casting any vote at all.
When Election Day finally rolled around on November 3, 1874, there were acts of violence throughout the state as the White League—a successor to the Ku Klux Klan—tried to keep Republicans from voting. In Mobile, White Leaguers on horseback fired into a crowd of Black citizens lining up to vote, killing at least three of them. In Barbour County, a White League mob raged through the county seat in Eufaula, killing at least seven Black voters, wounding seventy more, and driving more than a thousand Republicans from the polls. They then turned to the Republican enclave of Spring Hill, where they rampaged through the central polling place, destroyed the ballot box, and killed the fourteen-year-old son of a white Republican judge who was trying to protect it. After seizing ballot boxes throughout the county, the White League conducted its own vote count and, despite the fact that there were more than twice as many Republicans as Democrats in the county, declared that Democrats had won every race. Although US troops were stationed in Eufaula to keep the peace, they stood by as the mob rampaged, under orders not to use their weapons unless federal officials or facilities were threatened.
In contrast, the federal troops in Choctaw County reported that the local elections occurred without “a disturbance of any kind,” perhaps because the Democrats realized they could get what they wanted without resorting to mob rule. In Choctaw, Democratic gubernatorial candidate George Houston defeated Republican incumbent Lewis by 1,421 to 986. Those numbers suggest that instead of voting Democratic, hundreds of Blacks didn’t vote at all, and if the 1872 election was any indication, most of the fence-sitters were in Bladon Springs. Republican-backed independents in local races fared better, with one judicial candidate losing to his Democratic opponent by just three votes. But in each race, the Democrat prevailed, despite the county’s Black majority.
As it turned out, 1874 was one of the most pivotal elections in Alabama history. Even though Black candidates won some elections in the Black Belt that November, within a year the Democrat-dominated legislature would rewrite the state’s postwar constitution and begin the process of disenfranchising Black voters. In 1876, Alabama Democrats became further entrenched as their presidential candidate, Samuel Tilden, easily trounced Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in statewide elections. Tilden actually won the nationwide popular vote that year, but Hayes secured a one-vote victory in the Electoral College after promising to pull the last remaining Union troops out of the South and let the South decide how to deal with racial issues without any Northern interference, thus putting an end to Reconstruction.
During the 1876 election, Nicholas Said allegedly recommended that Black voters support Tilden, who, unlike many Democrats, had opposed slavery before the war and whose stance on racial issues was not very different from Hayes’s. By then, many Black people were having qualms about the Republicans. Within the next decade, the once solidly Republican Frederick Douglass would tell Black voters to “follow no party blindly. If the Republican Party cannot stand a demand for justice and fair play, it ought to go down.” The young W. E. B. Du Bois, on his way to becoming one of the nation’s leading civil rights activists, would suggest that instead of confining themselves to “political serfdom” in the Republican Party, Black citizens should find ways of establishing ties to the Democrats. “Our interests are not antagonistic,” he wrote. “They are one and the same, and to blind yourselves to any party in spite of these bonds of mutual interest… is to keep alive the smoldering coals of Race antagonism.” Du Bois later rejected that idea, deciding that no alliance with racist Democrats could work, but his suggestion indicates how deep the frustration with Republicans had grown, and his idea about focusing on “bonds of mutual interest” sounds like what Nicholas Said was hoping for.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to criticize Said and other Black conservatives for standing aside while openly racist Democrats regained their power, but Said’s main concern was maintaining enough “peace and harmony” so that Black people could continue advancing in the classroom and the workforce without being disrupted by political disputes. He failed to see that the Democrats’ policies could weaken Black educational advancements.
On the other hand, there’s no indication that if Said had adopted a more radical stance he would have improved the situation. Judging from the story of Jack Turner, it’s possible things would have gotten worse. Turner spent much of the next decade inspiring hundreds of Black farmworkers in Choctaw County to vote Republican, even as the party edged further from its emancipationist roots. Partly thanks to his efforts, a Republican congressional candidate carried Choctaw County in 1878, although his Democratic opponent won the seat anyway, thanks to prevailing in other areas of the district. In 1880, Democrats got less than half the vote in Choctaw, but still won because the opposition was split between the Republican and Greenback parties. The race was so close that the Choctaw Herald threatened that “Jack Turner and a few other tenth-rate local politicians… will have to be taught by some means or another, that they cannot run rough-shod over the white men in this county in their dishonest and revolutionary purpose of controlling our county affairs. If gentle means will not deter them, severer measures will be brought into requisition.” It was an ominous warning that came to fruition just two years later.
On August 15, 1882, just as that year’s election season was ramping up, a young white boy discovered a bundle of documents lying at the gate to his house, purportedly written by Turner and several associates detailing their plans to massacre all the white residents of the county—men, women, and children. It would later become clear that the documents were a hoax. Some, for instance, were supposedly handwritten by Turner, which would have been impossible since he was so illiterate he had barely mastered writing his own name. Plus, they were signed “Captain Jack Turner” or “General Jack Turner,” even though there’s no evidence he ever used such titles. Instead, his white detractors sarcastically called him “captain” to mock his role as a leader. Besides, if Turner was cunning enough to clandestinely plan a massive conspiracy of this type, why would he be so stupid as to put the plan into writing so it could be accidentally dropped in plain sight in the heart of a white neighborhood?
Nevertheless, Turner and six alleged co-conspirators were immediately arrested, and four days later, Turner was subjected to a public “trial,” conducted not by judge and jury but by a mob of roughly a thousand people, crowded in front of the county courthouse in Butler. Turner’s defense attorney asked for copies of the purported massacre plans so they could be compared to each defendant’s handwriting, but the mob rejected his request and, after a two-hour debate, voted to hang Turner. Resolutely declaring his innocence, he was strung up from the limb of an oak tree, and his alleged co-conspirators, including schoolteacher Fred Barney and minister Willis Lyman, were jailed pending trial.
As news of Turner’s alleged conspiracy spread, it initially stoked fears of Black rebellion throughout the South, but the more the case was scrutinized, the flimsier it seemed, even to some Democrats. “[Turner] was murdered, and under circumstances that afford mendacious enemies of our people and section a pretext for attributing his death to political or race antipathies,” wrote Robert McKee, private secretary to Democratic governor Rufus Cobb. Nevertheless, the co-conspirators spent the next five years in jail, withstanding torture to make them confess. Farmworker Peter Hill contracted tuberculosis in jail and was released on bond so he could die at home. Schoolteacher Fred Barney suffered a suicidal depression so severe he was temporarily sent to a mental hospital. In the meantime, prosecutors couldn’t muster enough evidence to bring the case to trial. Finally, on October 24, 1887, the case was dismissed and the defendants were released, but it remained a cautionary tale of what could happen when Black citizens pushed too hard against white rule.
Which brings us back to Nicholas Said. If he had joined with Jack Turner, would he have ended up like Fred Barney, who returned to his work as a schoolteacher but was so scarred that he never took a noticeable role in politics again? And even if he had helped Jack Turner turn Choctaw County into a Republican stronghold, would that have had any lasting impact? By 1882, the Democratic Party was so strong in Alabama it could easily crush any Republican enclave that stood in its way, and the national Republican Party was so acquiescent it would do nothing to interfere. The Republicans were still marginally better than the Democrats, who would harbor politicians that openly espoused white supremacy through the mid-1960s, when the two parties began to switch roles. But by the mid-1870s it was clear that the national Republican Party would rather compromise with white Democrats than stand up for the rights of Black Republicans, which may explain why Nicholas Said felt—however naively—that Black people would do better to build ties with their white neighbors in the South than rely on the promises of politicians in the North.
I. There’s no indication that Said divorced his first wife from South Carolina, but marriages involving former slaves before 1866 had such little legal standing that laws on bigamy didn’t apply. And since they rarely came with documentation, it would have been hard to obtain a divorce anyway.
27 Journey’s End?
In 1877, Nicholas Said left Bladon Springs to resume his lecture tour, this time laden with autobiographies to sell to his listeners. No more would he have to solicit subscriptions from the public. No longer could his critics accuse him of hawking a book that did not exist. Billing himself as Mohammed Ali ben Said, which added an exotic flair to his lectures, he toured Mississippi and then turned north to Tennessee, where—reverting to his Christian name—he settled in rural Haywood County near the western edge of the state.
Said was in his early forties when he arrived in Haywood County around 1878, settling about fifteen miles southeast of the county seat of Brownsville. Located in the fertile delta of the Mississippi and Hatchie rivers, the county was home to some of Tennessee’s most productive cotton plantations. At harvest time, the fields were full of Black sharecroppers, wearing homespun clothes, straw hats, and burlap sacks for collecting the cotton. Often living in conditions that were little better than when they were slaves and laboring for the same people who once owned them, each family tried to gather 200–300 pounds of cotton per day at the peak of the season, as well as bushels of corn and other crops at other times of year, with children as young as four or five working alongside their parents. Although two-thirds of the people in the county were Black, the plantations and the profits they generated remained largely in the hands of the white minority.
Said boarded in the home of Cincinnati Jordan, a twenty-nine-year-old Black laborer with a wife and three young children. Said was by himself, with no trace of his Alabama bride, whether she fell victim to one of the diseases that periodically ravaged the region (a bout of yellow fever killed three hundred people in Haywood County in 1878) or they simply went their separate ways.
It was a simple dwelling—likely a former slave cabin—on or near a 343-acre plantation owned by former Confederate army lieutenant Stephen Hotchkiss. Although Hotchkiss was a former slaveholder, he apparently saw some value in Black education. In 1867, for instance, he sold an acre of land to a group of Black clergymen and craftsmen who were pooling their money to build a school in Brownsville. They had been turned down by other white landowners, but within months of buying Hotchkiss’s land, they built the Brownsville Colored School: a two-story clapboard building large enough for more than a hundred students in eight classrooms. It served as a springboard for education efforts throughout the county, since many of its graduates continued their studies in Black-friendly colleges in Nashville—Fisk University, Central Tennessee College, or Roger Williams University—before returning to Haywood County to teach.
