The Invisible Line (33 page)

Three months after the Freedmen's Hospital fiasco, President Hayes submitted Wall's name to the Senate for reappointment to another term as justice of the peace. The nomination did not go unnoticed. “Everyone knows he has been charged with being notoriously corrupt,” one man wrote
The Washington Post
. “Besides his corruptness, the public is well aware of the fact that many of his warrants have been thrown out at the Police Court on the ground of informality.” Even though others described Wall as having “unimpeached integrity” and a solid professional record, the Senate rejected his appointment in June 1878, along with the one other colored nominee for justice of the peace. After almost a decade of public life, Wall was left scratching out a living as what he called a “one-horse lawyer,” representing petty criminals in the police court. In his spare time he started occupying himself with a new political cause. It was about freedom, equality, and, above all, escape.
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AT THE DEPTH OF his disgrace in the spring of 1878, Wall had become president of a group called the Western Emigration Society. Its goals mirrored his work eleven years earlier in the local field office of the Freedmen's Bureau: to find the District's indigent blacks land and jobs elsewhere. One of Wall's first acts on behalf of the Emigration Society was to petition the Senate in May 1878 for $75,000 “to enable the helpless poor of our race in this section to locate as farmers on lands of the United States dedicated to homestead purposes.” He asked Oliver Otis Howard, now commanding an army in the West, to send him “some reliable information respecting the advantages offered to settlers in Wash'n Territory . . . What we want to know is with reference to the climate, productiveness of the soil, present condition and future prospects of the Territory &c., &c.” Wall's focus on migration was a focus on escape—escape from what his friend and fellow emigrationist Richard T. Greener would call the “fetid and vitiated political and social atmosphere of Washington which we have breathed so long.” The District no longer promised blacks a rising community, a pathway to equality. Blacks had lost the vote. Congress was retreating from its commitment to civil rights. Whites in Washington were expressing their racial contempt openly. Just about the only “manly and dignified step” that blacks could take, Wall supposed, was to exercise their right to move away.
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If the Emigration Society initially had modest goals, it would soon be swept up in a much larger tide. By 1878 whites had forcibly pushed blacks out of government in every Southern state, resorting to military-style campaigns responsible for thousands of murders. Terrorized blacks were stuck in sharecropping contracts and trapped in spiraling debt. Their children had little hope of getting an education. Blacks across the South had long been gathering quietly to discuss leaving for the western states or Liberia. Outraged at Southern atrocities, Northern Republicans started speaking publicly about “emigration.” In January 1879 Senator William Windom of Minnesota proposed convening a committee to explore the possibility of “a partial migration of colored persons from those States and congressional districts where they are not allowed to freely and peacefully exercise and enjoy their constitutional rights as American citizens.”
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Two months later, after the cotton crop failed in Louisiana and Mississippi, river landings were thronged with hundreds of blacks boarding boats for points north. Groups from other states—Arkansas, Tennessee, and Texas among them—were also reported to be leaving. Almost immediately the mass migration had a name: the Exodus. Within weeks
The Atlanta Constitution
was reporting, “If the negro exodus continues, St. Louis won't know whether she is in Missouri or Africa.” Most of the “exodusters”—numbering some twenty thousand—were heading onward to Kansas, where they had heard by word of mouth and from railroad circulars that jobs and freedom awaited.
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Wall recognized that the “modern exodus . . . of the colored people,” “linking their destiny for weal or woe with that of the young and thrifty States of the great Northwest,” was “really the most practical or available solution of one of the most vexed political problems which has thus far menaced the Republic.” In April 1879 the Western Emigration Society became the National Emigrant Aid Society, newly dedicated to the “immediate assistance to persons already immigrating . . . from the South to the West.” Wall assembled a group of notable District residents to serve on its board, including former mayor Sayles Bowen, First Congregational Church pastor Jeremiah Rankin, and
Daily Republican
editor A. M. Clapp. The society also gave him the opportunity to have regular contact with top Republican Party officials, black leaders including Frederick Douglass and Senator Blanche Bruce, and even his erstwhile enemy Charles Purvis. In May, Wall organized his first mass meeting at the grand downtown auditorium Lincoln Hall, where Senator Windom and Richard T. Greener, among others, appealed to a “good audience” to contribute money to pay for train and boat tickets for exodusters.
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The Exodus created an excitement that the District's blacks had not felt in years, and it restored their commitment to one of the original Republican articles of faith—what had guided Wall as a Freedmen's Bureau agent—that free labor in a free market could cure the nation of its most serious political, economic, and moral failing. In early October, Wall arranged another meeting, this time featuring John Mercer Langston. “Neither the old slaveholding spirit, nor the old slaveholding purpose is dead in the South,” Langston told a packed auditorium. “That plantocracy, with its fearful power and influences, has not passed away; . . . the colored American under it is in a condition of practical enslavement, trodden down and outraged by those who exercise control over him.” Langston was speaking like the abolitionist orator he had been decades ago, and his words took the crowd—colored and white—back to a time when it was easy to distinguish right from wrong, when the call to action was clear. “It is . . . possible and practicable to so reduce the colored laborers of the South by emigration . . . as to compel the land-holders—the planters—to make and to observe reasonable contracts with those who remain,” Langston said, “to compel all white classes there to act in good faith; . . . obeying the law and respecting the rights of their neighbors.”
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Whatever interest among the District's blacks the Exodus had sparked in the abstract, the movement entered a new phase on a November afternoon when more than fifty men, women, and children from eastern North Carolina appeared in Washington, asking the Emigrant Aid Society for train fare to Indiana. For six months they had been meeting in churches to discuss leaving for the West. In September two leaders of their movement stopped in Washington on a trip to scout out possible locations for resettling. At the suggestion of a member of the Emigrant Aid Society, they went to Indiana. The two men returned to Carolina with a circular written by a black minister extolling how “in Indiana all stand equal before the law—the black man being protected in his contracts, property, and person the same as the white.” “Thousands of good farm hands and house servants can readily find employment at remunerative wages,” went the circular, “and when you have earned your money the law will compel payment, should it be refused, which is not likely to be the case.” It was all anyone needed to hear.
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Wall met with the refugees, talked with them about conditions in North Carolina, and negotiated a group rate with the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad—nine dollars a head, with a one-dollar “drawback” going to the National Emigrant Aid Society. The society contributed $270 to send them to Indianapolis. Two weeks later 164 more arrived in Washington. Wall created committees to organize another mass meeting, a fund-raising lecture, and a benefit concert by local church choirs and to solicit donations from the District commissioners, churches, federal workers, and more. The goal was to raise $1,000. Soon after, another three hundred people arrived.
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As the Exodus got more and more attention, Wall started receiving letters from people in Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio expressing their willingness to employ “Exodusts Emigrating to Our Western States,” as well as testimonials from emigrants describing Indiana as a place with “a greate meny friendes” where blacks could “meate with suckses.” At the same time the newfound prominence of Wall and his cause drew attacks from blacks and whites. Some opposition in the colored community tracked the views of Frederick Douglass, who routed large contributions to the society but warned that the Exodus was “an abandonment of the great and paramount principle of protection to person and property in every State of the Union.” Others, particularly blacks who remained leaders in the South, railed against the disappearance of communities and constituencies that still had some strength. A newspaper editor in North Carolina gave a speech advocating that “our righteous indignation and censure should be unsparingly poured” on Wall and Richard Greener, whom he identified as “the original promoters of the exodus movement.” “We say to Professors Greener, . . . Wall, and to all others engaged in the nefarious work of deluding the negro by misrepresentation and falsehood—stop; hands off; let us alone,” the editor said. “You do not represent us, you have no constituency, you have nothing but impudence, cheek, and cunning, and an inordinate greed for filthy lucre.” For a third group, the opposition was more personal. At the end of December 1879 a small number of prominent local blacks gathered to denounce the Exodus. One attendee, reported
The Washington Post
, “made allusions which were assumed to be attacks on Mr. O.S.B. Wall,” describing him as someone who “believed neither in God nor Heaven” and who had “arranged with the railroad companies for a drawback of fifty per cent. on the fares, which went into their own pockets.”
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Among white Democrats north and south, the Exodus was a sham, a naked plot by Republicans to “ship negroes enough to doubtful States to change their political complexion.” Beyond the political machinations, the causes of the emigration, according to Democrats, were simple: unscrupulous railroad agents eager to drum up business and other outsiders who profited by sowing discontent. Wall was not a hero—he was the “colored manipulator of the Exodus movement.” As Democrats saw it, life in the North was inevitably terrible for the emigrants, and conditions in the South were perfectly fair.
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AT THE START OF the hearing on the Negro Exodus, Senator Voorhees asked Wall to list everyone he knew who was helping thousands of Negroes leave the South for points north and west—their names, the names of their organizations, how the groups operated, whether and how regularly they communicated with one another. Wall parried even the simplest questions with artful indirection. Asked if the Emigrant Aid Society—the group he had founded—had any branches, Wall answered, “None that I know of.” Asked if there were “other similar societies . . . in the United States,” Wall said he had learned of some “by the papers and by hearsay,” but he never actually named a single one. Was the Emigrant Aid Society's correspondence secretary “white or colored”? Wall answered that the young man holding the position was a “very handsome mulatto.” Who kept the Emigrant Aid Society's records? “We have been going on very much as the English Government does,” Wall said, “without any written constitution.”
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Testifying at the Freedmen's Hospital hearings two years earlier, Wall had been prickly, defeated—pathetic, but for the ugly accusations against him. Now he was a different witness. Facing a hostile committee ready to charge him with luring blacks to lives of misery in order to rig the 1880 presidential elections, Wall was nimble and defiant. His confidence reflected his commitment to the Negro Exodus. Once again he had a cause worth fighting for.

Senator Voorhees, for one, was convinced that the Exodusters had no rational reason to leave their homes in the South. “Do you not know,” he asked Wall, “that North Carolina has been more friendly toward the colored race; has been more kind in its treatment of them; more liberal in its legislation in their behalf; and has actually done more for their benefit than any other State, North or South?”
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Wall could barely contain himself. “Now, Mr. Senator, that is a very nice little eulogy on North Carolina,” he said. Gesturing toward the North Carolina senator at Voorhees's side, he continued, “Governor Vance, there, himself could not have done it up any better.” Wall's passive protest—his refusal to give clear answers to Voorhees's questions—was over. The witness proceeded to take over the hearing. First, Wall preempted Voorhees's point by appearing to concede it. “Seriously, Mr. Senator, I will agree with you that North Carolina has been one of the mildest and most considerate slave States in the Union,” he said. “Since emancipation she has treated her colored population as fairly as could be expected of a master class toward their ex-slaves.”
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Then Wall slammed the door: North Carolina, he insisted, was nevertheless a “grand good State to emigrate from.” “If I were a white man and were able to do so; that is, if I had the wealth so that I could, and the privilege of doing so,” he said, “I would go down to North Carolina and would educate and instruct those negroes, not with reference to politics or religion or social systems, but I would say to them if you want to educate your children to be men, to imitate the white race, to own property, to become successful in life in any respect, you must leave this poor, wretched, God-forsaken country, where the soil does not seem able to sprout blackeyed peas, and go out into the broad, rich, fertile West, where they can buy farms on those alluvial prairies at a less price per acre than the rent that they pay every year down there.”
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