A brief time of hope
The period after enslavement and the fall of the Confederacy was one of hope for African Americans, particularly in South Carolina.
The Civil War ended for Charleston when the Black Union regiment, the Massachusetts 55th, entered that city in February 1865. While Whites, who largely supported the Confederacy, mostly fled Charleston, African Americans celebrated in the streets, cheering the Black troops as liberators.
The effects of the war left the city in ruins, but African Americans were optimistic about the future. Schools such as the Avery Institute were established, and many looked forward to a promise of equality. President Andrew Johnson, who replaced the assassinated Abraham Lincoln as president, pursued a lax policy of Reconstruction of the Southern states. He allowed them to enact “Black Codes” restricting the movement and freedom of the formerly enslaved, breaking the promises of equality.
In November 1865, 52 Black delegates met in Charleston’s Zion Church to formulate a position regarding their future in the post-emancipation South. Their address invoked the language of the Declaration of Independence to claim full rights of citizenship for themselves and demanded the end of the “Black Codes.”
In 1867, the “Radical Republicans” in the United States Congress embarked on a program to transform the defeated Southern states after the Civil War. Part of this transformation involved the changes in the status of African Americans in these states. Defying (and later impeaching) Johnson for opposing such reforms, congressmen such as Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania called for the disfranchisement of some Confederates, federal troops to be placed in the Southern states, and for the right of Black men and poor Whites to vote.
The freedmen quickly moved to take advantage of their new opportunities. From January to April 1868, 76 Black delegates (two-thirds of whom were formerly enslaved) and 48 White delegates met at the Charleston Club House on Meeting Street to compose a new Constitution for South Carolina.
Miracles unimagined a few years earlier took place after this meeting. This interracial coalition called for laws discriminating against Blacks to be stricken from the Constitution. State hospitals and mental institutions were established. On Jan. 23, 1868, Robert Smalls, who six years earlier freed himself and his family from slavery by sailing them aboard the Confederate ship The Planter, called for the establishment of a public school system of South Carolina. During the following 12 years, the University of South Carolina became the only desegregated school in the Deep South and two Black men, Alonzo J. Ransier and Richard H. Gleaves, served as lieutenant governor. Some 315 Black South Carolinians held political office.
It was a time of hope. But White Southern leaders led a violent uprising against these developments through groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Red Shirts. The murders and lawlessness that resulted led to the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877 that ended Reconstruction. Meanwhile, the Daughters of the Confederacy would edit out the positive results of Reconstruction from the history books used in schools, which is why such facts are not common knowledge today.
The progressive state Constitution of 1868, which granted equity among Blacks and poor Whites in South Carolina, was scuttled when U.S. Sen. “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, who had earlier served as governor, called for a convention to rework the state Constitution. In 1876, he was among the mob who massacred Blacks at Hamburg, South Carolina. He rose to power in the 1880s preaching a fair deal for the state’s poor White farmers and intense race hatred. As governor of South Carolina in 1893, he turned over an African American named John Peterson to a lynch mob in Denmark, S.C. After narrowly winning his bid for the United States Senate in 1894, he felt that a divided White vote and united Black vote nearly caused him to lose. He planned to disenfranchise South Carolina’s Black population without openly violating the 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which was passed in 1870 and guaranteed the right to vote regardless of race.
The 1895 S.C. Constitutional Convention became the major setback for African American progress. A constitutional convention proceeded at the Statehouse in Columbia to overhaul the 1868 state Constitution.
It is not widely known that six leaders tried to stop Tillman’s plans. Robert Smalls and William J. Whipper, who were part of the 1868 convention, James Wigg and Isaiah Reed, two Black lawyers from Beaufort, Thomas Miller, the founding president of South Carolina State College, and Robert Anderson, a Black teacher from Georgetown went to the Statehouse to boldly argue against the proposed Constitution. They lost 166 to seven, but their loss would plant the seeds for the Civil Rights Movement in South Carolina that was to come.
Fordham is a Charleston author, lecturer and adjunct professor of history. The History Press recently published his book, The 1895 Segregation Fight in South Carolina. You can purchase it online for $21.99.
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