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Summary
Summary
Reconstruction was a time of idealism and sweeping change, as the victorious Union created citizenship rights for the freed slaves and granted the vote to black men. Sixteen black Southerners, elected to the U.S. Congress, arrived in Washington to advocate reforms such as public education, equal rights, land distribution, and the suppression of the Ku Klux Klan.
But these men faced astounding odds. They were belittled as corrupt and inadequate by their white political opponents, who used legislative trickery, libel, bribery, and the brutal intimidation of their constituents to rob them of their base of support. Despite their status as congressmen, they were made to endure the worst humiliations of racial prejudice. And they have been largely forgotten--often neglected or maligned by standard histories of the period.
In this beautifully written book, Philip Dray reclaims their story. Drawing on archival documents, contemporary news accounts, and congressional records, he shows how the efforts of black Americans revealed their political perceptiveness and readiness to serve as voters, citizens, and elected officials.
We meet men like the war hero Robert Smalls of South Carolina (who had stolen a Confederate vessel and delivered it to the Union navy), Robert Brown Elliott (who bested the former vice president of the Confederacy in a stormy debate on the House floor), and the distinguished former slave Blanche K. Bruce (who was said to possess "the manners of a Chesterfield"). As Dray demonstrates, these men were eloquent, creative, and often effective representatives who, as support for Reconstruction faded, were undone by the forces of Southern reaction and Northern indifference.
In a grand narrative that traces the promising yet tragic arc of Reconstruction, Dray follows these black representatives' struggles, from the Emancipation Proclamation to the onset of Jim Crow, as they fought for social justice and helped realize the promise of a new nation.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. With this densely textured history of Reconstruction, Pulitzer Prize-finalist Dray (At the Hands of Persons Unknown) moves the first black congressmen--including Robert Brown Elliott, P.B.S. Pinchback and Hiram Revels--from the margins of American history and places their careers in an integrated context that includes not only the challenging world in which they lived [but] the stories of the men and women of both races whose actions affected their role. Particularly illuminating on local political history, Dray is equally attentive to broader issues (e.g., the rift between women's rights advocates and civil rights activists). Events frequently treated as separate African-American issues (e.g., the collapse of the Freedman's Bank, the legal entrenchment of separate but equal) are examined in the fuller milieu of contemporary history. The author asserts, [I]t is difficult to imagine another period in America's past as complex as Reconstruction, or one that has been more controversial in the telling. Dray's triumph is to have crafted a lucid and balanced narrative, thoroughly researched and well-documented to satisfy the scholarly, while consistently fascinating and fully accessible for the casual reader. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* With drama and precision, award-winning historian Dray retrieves buried aspects of a precarious and little understood period in American history, the Reconstruction, a time of hope and backlash, and vividly portrays the first African American men to serve as U.S. congressmen, groundbreaking lawmakers who faced harrowing adversity. Dray's fascination with all that he discovered, aspects of the past that illuminate the present in truly galvanizing ways, is palpable as he introduces readers to a furiously contentious world following the seismic rupture of the Civil War. A world in which one step forward in pursuit of racial equality was trampled by a stampede backward as Southern whites refused to accept black politicians. Dray isn't exaggerating when he uses the word epic in his subtitle: the black congressmen he portraits are heroes and their stories are riveting. Meet Robert Smalls. Born in 1839, he was the son of a slave woman and, mostly likely, her master. Theirs was an unusually affectionate South Carolina household, and Smalls, who never could behave like a slave, became a wheelman on the Planter, a steamer commissioned by the Confederacy. Bold and strategic, Smalls orchestrated the steamer's theft and turned it over to the Union army, becoming an instant war hero, a sure path to politics. With forays into the lives of Lincoln, Grant, and Frederick Douglass, as well as a look into the Ku Klux Klan, Dray establishes a multidimensional context for his lively and enlightening portraits of Smalls and his fellow black lawmakers, including Robert Brown Elliott, a favored slave who was so refined many believed he was English, and Richard Cain, an African Methodist Episcopal minister, the first black clergy to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, and a brilliant debater. A vigorous and groundbreaking work of character-driven history, Dray's thoroughly involving book concludes with an invaluable bibliography.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN a speech in 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, Alexander H. Stephens, vice president of the newly formed Confederate States of America, declared that the South was great because of slavery. The Confederacy, he said, had achieved "the highest type of civilization ever exhibited by man," because "its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery - subordination to the superior race - is his natural and normal condition." Four blood-soaked years later, the South was in ruins and slavery had been abolished. But the view that blacks must be kept down persisted among disgruntled ex-Confederates like Stephens, who became a leading foe of civil rights. One of the stirring episodes in Philip Dray's eye-opening book "Capitol Men" involves Stephens getting his comeuppance on the floor of the House of Representatives at the hands of Robert Brown Elliott, a black congressman from South Carolina who was riding the progressive tide of Reconstruction. In January 1874, after Stephens challenged a civil rights bill that was before Congress, Elliott eloquently defended social and political equality for all Americans, regardless of race. To applause and cheers, he remarked of the Confederacy, "The progress of events has swept away that pseudo-government which rested on greed, pride and tyranny." Reconstruction had remade democracy. American society, he said, was poised to become "the grandest which the world has ever seen" because of legislation like the civil rights bill, which would bring "equal, impartial and universal liberty." Elliott's optimism proved premature. Reconstruction soon collapsed. The era of Jim Crow settled in. Was Reconstruction, then, a success or a failure? Did it bring real progress for African-Americans? Some argue that it did little good in the long run, as evidenced by its aftermath - the period between the late 1870s and the early 1950s, when advances blacks had made just after the Civil War were largely negated. Others say that Reconstruction, though ephemeral, established an ideal of racial equality that America is still trying to reach. From left: P.B.S. Pinchback of Louisiana; Richard Cain of South Carolina; Hiram Revels of Mississippi; and Robert Smalls of South Carolina. Dray casts fresh light on the positive aspects of Reconstruction and powerfully dramatizes its negative side. His well-researched book is both exhilarating and disturbing. It offers a collective biography of several black congressmen in the South during Reconstruction who bravely took a public stance against racial prejudice. But it also shows that these politicians were stymied by a rising culture of white supremacy and home rule in the South. While only two blacks, both from the North, are known to have held public office in American history up to the Civil War, hundreds of African-Americans were elected during Reconstruction as a result of Northern Republicans' efforts to refashion Southern governments and compensate for centuries of slavery. Political activity among African-Americans was especially notable in South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana, the states with majority black populations. In Mississippi alone, during the 12 years of Reconstruction, 226 black officials served in every position from county tax collector to United States senator. Dray focuses on a handful of black leaders on the national scene, bringing attention to figures often neglected in Reconstruction surveys. These politicians were pioneers. Hiram Rhodes Revels of Mississippi became the first African-American member of Congress in 1870 when he took the Senate seat once held by Jefferson Davis. Another Mississippian, Blanche K. Bruce, was also elected to the Senate, where he combated segregation. Senator P.B.S. Pinchback of Louisiana had been a riverboat gambler and street fighter before becoming a forceful advocate for the integration of blacks into white society. South Carolina elected blacks to the House of Representatives, including Robert Smalls, a former slave and Civil War hero who endorsed free public education for all children, and Richard Cain, who emphasized black economic opportunities. These and other leaders set an important precedent of political involvement for later generations of African-Americans. They also worked with forward-thinking whites who supported the 15th Amendment, which gave black men the vote; the Freedmen's Bureau, which arranged labor relations between blacks and their former masters; and several civil rights bills. Dray, the author of "At the Hands of Persons Unknown," a history of the lynching of African-Americans, demonstrates that the more powerful blacks became, the more hostility they provoked among Southern whites. Some areas in the South enforced Black Codes, which set curfews for blacks, barred them from militias and regulated their private conduct. The Ku Klux Klan enlisted whites who disguised themselves and made nighttime rides terrorizing blacks. Groups with names like the White League, the Southerns and the Flanagan Guards copied the Klan. Dray provides harrowing details about race riots that erupted in New Orleans, Memphis and other Southern cities and towns. With appalling regularity, white mobs went on rampages, massacring scores of blacks. "We are going to kill all the Negroes," a Mississippi man announced during one such spree. "The Negro men shall not live." Whites stripped blacks of power in the voting booth. Voter fraud, intimidation and bribery became rules of thumb in many Southern states. One Southerner wrote, "Every Democrat must feel honor bound to control the vote of at least one Negro, by intimidation, purchase, keeping him away or as each individual may determine." Economic ostracism also took a heavy toll. Republicans, both white and black, found it hard to earn a living when their names appeared in local papers with warnings that advised readers not to hire them or patronize their businesses. Other problems sped the downfall of Reconstruction. President Ulysses S. Grant, though supportive, lagged in enforcing its regulations. Women's rights reformers complained that federal law awarded suffrage to black men but withheld it from women. A severe financial blow came in 1874 when the Freedman's Bank in Washington, an economic hub for African-Americans, collapsed owing to mismanagement. WHITE supremacists became increasingly brazen. The South Carolina politician Benjamin Tillman declared: "We have done our level best" to disenfranchise blacks. "We have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it." Many blacks decided to leave the South. It is telling that one of the last black leaders Dray discusses at length is the former slave Benjamin Singleton of Nashville, who decided that people of color would never gain equal rights if they remained in the South. Singleton led the so-called Exoduster Movement, in which thousands of Southern blacks relocated to the Kansas frontier. By the 1880s, Southern blacks had two alternatives, both grim: leave and face an uncertain future elsewhere, or stay put, virtually without citizenship rights, under the constant threat of violence. It would not be until Brown v. Board of Education, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. that the oppressive weight of legalized segregation began to lift. Even today, Robert Brown Elliott's prophecy of "equal, impartial and universal liberty" in America seems like an impossible dream. David S. Reynolds is a distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His new book is "Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson."
Choice Review
The Reconstruction story has been told often; seldom has it been told from the perspective of African American politicians, and seldom so well. Dray writes an important history, weaving biographies of those who represented their states in the nation's Capitol, such as Robert Smalls, Hiram Revels, P. B. S. Pinchback, Richard "Daddy" Cain, John Roy Lynch, and Blanche K. Bruce, with focused accounts of the incidents that came to define Reconstruction and its aftermath. These include the Colfax Riot, the founding of the Ku Klux Klan, the emergence of Benjamin Tillman in South Carolina, the disputed elections of 1876, and the Exoduster movement. The narrative connects state politics with national developments. The author chronicles the triumphs of Reconstruction and the challenges and ultimate demise of what some have argued was the first civil rights movement. Working from an extensive secondary literature and numerous contemporary resources, Dray reminds readers that his is an important voice in fostering understanding of some of the most difficult issues of American and African American history, including Mississippi in 1964, the lynching of far too many Americans, and now a rethinking of Reconstruction. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. T. F. Armstrong Louisiana State University at Alexandria
Kirkus Review
Impeccably written study of the brief post-Civil War period in which African-Americans were admitted to Congress--with the door subsequently closed to them for the next century. From a white Southern loyalist's point of view, writes Dray (Stealing God's Thunder: Benjamin Franklin's Lightning Rod and the Invention of America, 2005, etc.), military defeat was bad enough, let alone what a Union sympathizer called "the elevation of the free negro to equal political power." The first to be so elevated, at the local and then national level, were a fascinating lot. Some of them, such as South Carolinian Robert Smalls, had engaged in acts of resistance during the secession and courted death for their crimes of sedition; others were of mixed race and comparatively well educated, such as the Mississippian reformer John Roy Lynch, "distinguished in appearance, possessing an innate gentlemanly reserve"; others were freed slaves with few advantages aside from a willingness to take on the job. None were the illiterate sock puppets of anti-Reconstructionist myth. Bringing them into power was a complex and daunting task, opposed by many in both the North and the South. In that light, Dray writes sympathetically but critically of Andrew Johnson, the Unionist Southerner, "a stubborn loner never adept at conciliatory politics," under whose watch Reconstruction disintegrated. The denouement of Dray's story is dispiriting. It finds Smalls, that great hero, ordered to sit in a segregated Jim Crow train cabin, a "dirty coach with cigar stubs on the floor and broken windows," and the other freshmen congressmen not much better treated. The humiliation of Smalls took place in South Carolina in 1904. But then, as Dray notes, the same had happened to him in Philadelphia during the war--racism was not the exclusive domain of the South. A welcome addition to the literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction Era, and important for students of the civil-rights movement and its origins. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In 1870, Rep. Joseph H. Rainey (1832-87) of South Carolina entered the U.S. Congress as its first black member. In 1901, Rep. George H. White (1852-1918) of North Carolina left Congress as the 20th black to serve. Focusing on these 20 men, Pulitzer Prize finalist Dray (At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America) fleshes out the circumstances in which these early black congressmen lived and worked. He portrays these men as confident, courageous, eminently decent, exceptional individuals who advanced public education and other reforms for social justice. Casting Reconstruction's efforts as crucial to mid-20th century civil rights successes, Dray emphasizes parallels between the periods. His sourcing of quotations shows his considerable research, but this is not so much a scholar's book as one for general readers. Dray's compelling narrative offers sharper focus and argument than Maurine Christopher's Black Americans in Congress or former Rep. William L. Clay's Just Permanent Interests: Black Americans in Congress, 1870-1991. Dray develops a poignant story of racial hope--and resentment--and of America's ultimately reneging on its promises to blacks. For collections on the U.S. Congress, civil rights, Reconstruction, and black politics or politicians.--Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 Boat Thief A person gazing out across Charleston Harbor in the predawn quiet of May 13, 1862, would probably have found it hard to believe that the Civil War had begun at this very spot only a year before, with the thunderous shelling of the federal garrison at Fort Sumter. Certainly the signs of war remained, most noticeably the rebel cannon that guarded the harbor and pointed seaward from numerous shore ramparts, their sights fixed on the ships of the Union blockade positioned three miles offshore. But all was now perfectly still, and the only discernible movement took place aboard the Planter, a small Confederate transport that appeared to be preparing to depart. Hours before, the Planter 's white captain, C. J. Relyea, and his officers had gone ashore for the night, leaving the vessel in the hands of its mulatto pilot, Robert Smalls, and creating the very opportunity that Smalls and his fellow slave crewmen had been waiting for. Having discussed in detail their plan to use the boat to make a break for the Union blockade, they stealthily began their chores between 1 and 3 a.m., maneuvering the Planter to a nearby pier to pick up Smalls's wife and two children as well as four other black women, a child, and three other men. Because the punishment for what they were about to do would surely be death, Smalls had told the others that if caught, they would not surrender but would destroy the boat, along with themselves and all the Confederate guns and ammunition it carried. Two of the crewmen had heard Smalls's warning and elected to stay behind, disembarking as the new passengers came aboard. At about 3 a.m. final farewells were whispered and the Planter eased back from the pier. Despite the hour and the darkness, the city defenses were on alert against Union raiding or reconnaissance parties. Charleston, known for its cultured antebellum society and its leadership in the Southern secessionist movement, formed the emotional and political heart of the Confederacy; it was also a strategic Atlantic port, and its defenders knew that the federals, having been driven from Fort Sumter in the war's first action, dreamed of recapturing it. To escape the harbor, the Planter would have to pass directly under the guns of several formidable batteries, including those of Fort Sumter itself, which was now in Confederate hands. The fort, set strategically in the middle of the harbor's entrance, was a manmade island, a pentagon-shaped fortress with walls sixty feet high and six feet thick and guns protruding from all sides, emanating "an aura of doom and menace." As the Planter moved toward the gauntlet, some on board suggested racing past the rebel installations, but Smalls reminded them that such a panicky move would likely be fatal: their best and only hope was to pretend nothing was out of the ordinary. He was banking on the likelihood that sleepy rebel watchmen would not be suspicious of a work ship nosing its way out of the harbor before dawn, nor would they be inclined to imagine that slaves were stealing it. With this audacious act, Robert Smalls was exploiting a lifetime of trust and privilege placed in him by his white masters -- first as a favored house servant, then as a semi-independent laborer and skilled sailor. Born on the South Carolina Sea Islands in April 1839, he was the son of Lydia, a slave woman, and either the Charleston merchant Moses Goldsmith or John McKee, who was Lydia's master. As a girl, Lydia lived and worked on a McKee plantation on Ladies Island, adjacent to the Sea Island town of Beaufort. Because of the dread fear of malaria, the wealthy planters of Beaufort visited their landholdings on the nearby islands only occasionally. One Christmas, when Mr. and Mrs.McKee toured the plantation, distributing oranges and other small gifts to the slaves, Lydia was precocious enough to compliment her mistress on the dress she was wearing. Mrs. McKee, charmed by the youngster's remark, asked her age. "I was born the year George Washington got president," Lydia replied. When John McKee next returned to the plantation, he asked after "the little girl who knew about George Washington," and took Lydia with him back to Beaufort to serve as a housemaid. Beaufort was the capital of Port Royal Island, which, with the nearby islands of Ladies and St. Helena's, held a prominent position in the lush coastal region Carolinians call the low country. With its endless bays, rivers, tidal estuaries, and broad wetlands, its vast open distances, swarms of shore birds and marsh cranes, and the ancient live oak trees whose "fingers" almost scraped the ground, it seemed a faraway, otherworldly place. In the seventeenth century it had become a rice-growing mecca after the planters selectively imported West African slaves who had knowledge of rice cultivation; these slaves introduced the complex methods of irrigation, seeding, and flood control that made the Carolina rice plantations profitable. By 1860, the South was exporting 182 million pounds of rice per year, two thirds of it from South Carolina, and the crop's success had helped make both Beaufort and Charleston prosperous towns, with grand white-columned mansions, high-steepled churches, and the Southeast's most cosmopolitan society. Robert Smalls grew up in the McKee household, childhood playmate to his master, Henry McKee, who was likely his half brother, while his mother, Lydia, served the McKee family. So comfortable was the arrangement that after several years Lydia began to worry that her bright, energetic son might come to difficulty in the town someday by failing to understand his true status. To forestall such a problem, she took the unusual step of forcing Robert to watch the slave auctions and whippings at the arsenal building on Beaufort's Craven Street, reminding him that only good fortune kept him from sharing the fate of the wretched people he saw there. Her strategy was not, however, entirely successful, for at age twelve Robert was caught defying the local slave curfew and soon after told his mother that he had listened with interest as another slave read a passage from a book by the abolitionist Frederick Douglass -- the kind of proscribed acts she feared could get him cast out of the McKees' Beaufort house to toil on the family's island plantations, or worse. South Carolina rice plantations by no means presented the worst work conditions. Because the owners relied greatly on African ingenuity, the slaves had managed to negotiate somewhat more favorable work conditions than prevailed elsewhere in the South. Rather than labor from sunup to sundown, they were expected each day to execute assigned tasks; once they had completed them, they were free to hunt, fish, or cultivate their own crops. Still, work in the fields was strenuous; slaves labored long hours in knee-deep water, and there was an ever-present danger of snakes, insects, and malaria -- the very risks that kept the white planters on Beaufort's higher ground. Lydia wished to spare Robert from such a fate and finally appealed to theMcKees to send her rambunctious son to Charleston, where the family maintained another home and where she believed Robert's insubordinate streak would be less apparent. In contrast to Beaufort, Charleston was a metropolis, a place of hub- bub, splendor, and riches. Carriages with liveried servants traversed the palm-tree-lined boulevards and waited under the lamplights of impeccable mansions and hotels. Gentlemen strolled the Battery, talking politics and business, as ladies in crinoline window-shopped along fashionable King Street. Beyond the busy central market, with its fish stalls, vegetables, spices, and colorful rows of textiles, hundreds of large-masted ships lined the waterfront, taking on pallets of rice, tobacco, and other foreign-going cargo. The city ran on the energy of thousands of slaves like Robert Smalls, as well as a substantial community of free blacks, many of whom were small tradesmen or skilled artisans such as roofers or carpenters. Even free blacks, however, were made to wear identity tags and have a white "guardian," for the ongoing political agitation over slavery in the 1840s and 1850s had made local whites jittery. South Carolina, and Charleston in particular, had experienced at least two significant slave rebellions -- the Stono Rebellion of 1739, which broke out only twenty miles from the city, and the aborted Denmark Vesey uprising of 1822. In the Stono disturbance, one hundred slaves trying to escape to Florida ravaged plantations and killed two dozen whites before encountering the militia, which slaughtered them and placed their severed heads on posts by the roadside. In response to the affair, the colonial legislature enacted the Negro Act of 1740, severely restricting slave behavior and mobility. The Vesey rebellion, planned for July 14, Bastille Day, 1822, was the brainchild of a fifty-five-year-old carpenter, Denmark Vesey, a former slave who had purchased his own freedom. Before Vesey could strike, however, two house slaves alerted the authorities, and he, along with several comrades, was arrested and put to death. The threat of slaves' being fired to revolt by conspiracies led by free Negroes remained very real in the minds of white Carolinians, perhaps because after 1820 blacks began to outnumber whites in the state, and free blacks, because of their greater worldliness, were believed to be more likely to stir the embers of discontent. Although slave-control measures were carefully observed in Charleston as secession and war loomed, Robert Smalls managed to win increased trust and freedom from his white family. He arranged with the McKees to hire himself out as a day laborer and later as a town lamplighter, paying fifteen dollars a month to his owner. In 1856, at age seventeen, he married a thirty-one-year-old slave named Hannah Jones, who worked as a hotel maid. From his modest earnings, Smalls began saving to buy his own and his wife's freedom, as well as that of their daughter, Elizabeth, who was born in 1858. His fortunes brightened considerably when he attained work in the town's maritime trades. From his boyhood in coastal Beaufort he was already familiar with boats and their operation, and he proved a quick study, learning the myriad channels, currents, and shoals of Charleston Harbor. John Simmons, a white rigger and sail maker who took a liking to the young man, mentored him in shipboard work and navigation, and by 1861 Smalls was the wheelman (blacks were not allowed to hold the title of pilot) aboard the Planter, a cotton-hauling steamer plying the rivers and inlets between Charleston and the Sea Islands. One hundred fifty feet in length and able to carry fourteen hundred bales, it was, because of its four-foot draft, ideal for maneuvering in the shallow coastal waterways. When war broke out, the boat was quickly commissioned by the Confederacy. Guns were installed on its foredeck and afterdeck, and it was immediately put to use ferrying troops, laying mines, and servicing the work crews building the harbor's fortifications. Smalls's travels at the helm of the Planter frequently brought him into the vicinity of his old home at Beaufort, although after fall 1861 no Confederate vessel could approach the place. On November 7, Union naval forces seeking a Southern anchorage for their blockade had bombarded and then invaded the Sea Islands, one of the first portions of the Con- federacy to be conquered by federal troops. The South chose not to defend the outlying region, and local plantation owners fled the arriving Union forces, leaving behind their crops, stately homes, and as many as ten thousand slaves. The Union toehold on the Sea Islands was of great military value, but the area became another kind of beachhead the following spring, with the arrival of two shiploads of Northern abolitionists. These missionaries, men and women from Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, perceived in the abandonment of the blacks of the coastal islands an unprecedented opportunity to demonstrate that, with the proper guidance, former slaves could exercise the virtues of citizenship and free labor. "The Port Royal Experiment," as it became known, was meant to prove the adaptability of free blacks, their eagerness to be educated, and their viability as wage laborers, so as to ease Northern concerns about emancipation. The endeavor proved more complex than anticipated. Though the departed slaveholders were not missed, their sudden exit was wrenching to the social hierarchy of the islands and raised difficult questions: how to restart the islands' agricultural economy, bring in crops, open schools, and decide whether the former slaves would own land or what civil rights they might enjoy. Indeed, events in the Sea Islands had raced well ahead of the formulation of the federal government's own policy toward slaves liberated from their masters by advancing Union armies: were the slaves to be regarded as other people's property or as free human beings? If federal authorities continued to wrestle with such matters, there was for Robert Smalls little confusion. It had been no secret to him, or most other slaves, that the victory of Abraham Lincoln in the election of 1860, and the outbreak of war itself, held the definite potential for freedom. Looking out on clear evenings from the pilothouse of the Planter, Smalls could see the lights of Beaufort and marvel at the fact that his mother and other relations and friends there were already free. By spring 1862, with the federal lines so close, Smalls and the other slaves on the Planter began talking of crossing over, perhaps using the boat itself as a means of deliverance. Any slave caught plotting such an act, let alone carrying it out, would be killed, and Smalls understood that neither his connections to a good Southern family like the McKees nor his usefulness as a ship's pilot would save him. But he agreed with his mates to discuss the notion further and to watch for an opportunity to escape Excerpted from Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen by Philip Dray All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
| Preface | p. ix |
| 1 Boat Thief | p. 1 |
| 2 A New Kind of Nation | p. 23 |
| 3 Daddy Cain | p. 40 |
| 4 "The Whirligig of Time" | p. 59 |
| 5 Kukluxery | p. 77 |
| 6 Pinch | p. 102 |
| 7 The Colfax Massacre | p. 135 |
| 8 Capstone of the Reconstructed Republic | p. 151 |
| 9 Divided Time | p. 180 |
| 10 The Eternal Fitness of Things | p. 211 |
| 11 Black Thursday | p. 229 |
| 12 A Dual House | p. 258 |
| 13 Exodusting | p. 273 |
| 14 A Rope of Sand | p. 300 |
| 15 "The Negroes' Farewell" | p. 333 |
| Epilogue | p. 352 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 377 |
| Notes | p. 380 |
| Bibliography | p. 421 |
| Index | p. 438 |