Editor’s note: Investigative reporter Bill Sizemore didn’t discover that his ancestors were slave owners until 2009, when he visited a Mormon-run genealogical library in Utah. Afterward, unable to let the matter rest, Sizemore probed the family histories of his great great great grandfather Daniel Sizemore, a small-time tobacco farmer in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, as well as that of the slaves his ancestor had owned. He became close with some of these people as he recounts in a just-released book, Uncle George and Me: Two Southern Families Confront a Shared Legacy of Slavery (Brandylane Publishers).
What follows is an excerpt from a chapter on the Reconstruction, after the end of the Civil War.
When I studied American history in my segregated Southside Virginia high school, we skated lightly over the Reconstruction period. During the little time we spent on it, our teacher told us it was one of the most corrupt eras in American politics, a misguided—but mercifully brief—attempt to endow African Americans with political power they weren’t ready for.
That interpretation reflected the conventional wisdom of the day, advanced by a generation of Southern white historians. A striking example is The Negro in Virginia Politics, 1865–1902, by Richard Lee Morton, a longtime chairman of the history department at the College of William and Mary. Morton Hall, an academic building where I attended classes on the Williamsburg campus in the 1960s, is named in his honor.
Originally published in 1918 as a doctoral dissertation, the book is shockingly racist by today’s standards. It brands Reconstruction an “evil period” in which the freedmen were “but shortly removed from savagery and were utterly unfit for citizenship in a democracy.” “Politics,” Morton wrote, “with its excitement, its conventions and speech-making, was very fascinating to these childlike people.”
The truth, however, is that the pioneering African-American officeholders of the Reconstruction era, fresh from the degradation of slavery, fostered some of the most progressive and enlightened legislation in American history. And they did it in the face of implacable opposition from their former masters. Theirs is a story of indomitable grit.
The pioneering African-American officeholders of the Reconstruction era, fresh from the degradation of slavery, fostered some of the most progressive and enlightened legislation in American history.
The Reconstruction Act of 1867 was enacted by a Congress led by Radical Republicans—a faction of the party that demanded full rights for freed slaves—over the veto of Lincoln’s slave-owning successor in the White House, Andrew Johnson. The law put the Southern states under temporary military rule. In order to be readmitted to the Union, they were required to create new constitutions guaranteeing universal male suffrage and to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution granting the freedmen citizenship and equal protection under the law.
This federal law disenfranchised former Confederates and gave freedmen the right to vote for delegates to constitutional conventions in each state. A look at voter turnout in the Virginia election of 1867 illustrates the freedmen’s hunger for self-government. Statewide, 88 percent of registered African-Americans voted, compared to 63 percent of whites.
Of the 105 delegates elected to the Virginia convention, a majority were Radical Republicans. Of those, twenty-five were African-American. Some were capable of soaring rhetoric. Willis Hodges, an African-American delegate from Princess Anne County, now part of Virginia Beach, described slaveholders’ legacy in one of his early floor speeches.
“They have trampled us down into the very dirt for centuries,” Hodges said. “They have made it unlawful for us to read, to preach, or in any way to elevate ourselves. They have kept us down with a brutal and a cruel hand. The degradation, the ignorance which they presume to despise in us, is all the work of their own hands.”
Thomas Bayne, an African American delegate from Norfolk, spoke of how slavery degraded whites as well as blacks: “Every white man from Georgia to Maine, until the Emancipation Proclamation came to us, was an indirect slave. He was tied hand and foot to the dead body of slavery. The Proclamation of Emancipation came to us and set us all free.”
In the minority at Virginia’s convention were members of the Conservative Party, which had been formed as a self-proclaimed “white man’s party” dedicated to keeping Virginia’s government “under the control of the white race.” (The Conservatives later aligned with the national Democratic Party, which resisted the Radical Republicans’ Reconstructionist agenda.)
John Marye, a Conservative delegate from Spotsylvania County, reminded the convention that Jesus Christ lived amid slavery but never condemned it. “On the contrary,” he said, “there came out of those blessed lips the recognition and the endorsement of that as a legitimate institution of Christian society.”
Jacob Liggett, a Conservative delegate from Rockingham County, admitted that slaves were whipped, but argued that their treatment was no worse than that meted out to European serfs. “The cow-hide and the lash did exist; and if it was a wrong, it was a wrong which grows out of the condition of every society,” he said. “Society is not perfect, nor will it be perfect until a millennial dispensation shall arrive.”
The press heaped unrelenting abuse on the freedmen and their political allies.
Mecklenburg County, where my ancestors lived, sent two delegates to the convention, both Radical Republicans: John Watson, a freedman, and Sanford M. Dodge, a white preacher and distiller from New York. There, Dodge proposed a provision guaranteeing religious liberty to all Virginians. The constitution adopted in April 1868 included a section substantially similar to his proposal.
Ben Sizemore, Uncle George Sizemore’s father, was born a slave in 1858.
The press heaped unrelenting abuse on the freedmen and their political allies, the “carpetbaggers”—Northerners who came South after the war—and “scalawags”—Southern whites who joined the Republican cause. Editors described the convention with demeaning epithets such as “the Black Crook Convention.”
Dodge, the “carpetbagger” delegate from Mecklenburg, was the target of one such attack in the Richmond Enquirer: “A few nights since, a man named Sanford M. Dodge, supposed to be a white man, a delegate from Mecklenburg county to the late Black Crook Convention, was seen by a gentleman of this city promenading one of the principal streets with a negro woman on either arm. Dodge is one of the lowest and filthiest of the carpet bag race, and we always had serious doubts whether he was a white man.”
The new constitution ensured freedom of speech and the press, prohibited slavery and secession, prescribed voting by secret ballot, established a 12 percent maximum interest rate on debts, and extended the elective franchise to all male citizens twenty-one and over, with certain exceptions. Those who had “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States”—Confederate soldiers—would not be allowed to vote, and all those elected to office would be required to take an oath declaring that they had never borne arms against the Union.
One of the convention’s most notable achievements was a requirement that the state establish a uniform system of free public schools—the first such law in Virginia history. “Public education for all at public expense was, in the South, a Negro idea,” the scholar W.E.B. DuBois has written.
Some measures proposed but not adopted at the 1867–68 convention became law decades later and are now universally accepted, including female suffrage, racially integrated schools, and the eight-hour workday.
Unlike the more subtle forms of prejudice of our own time, the racism of the convention’s minority delegates was naked and unapologetic. The minority report adopted by Conservative members of the Committee on the Elective Franchise and Qualifications for Office was brutally blunt in its assessment of the Virginia freedmen.
“They have not the intelligence adequate to vote discreetly for the good of any class,” it stated. “They are descended, in direct line, from progenitors in Africa, who, since the flood, have held undisputed control of one of the most fertile continents of the globe, but have remained in such changeless and gross barbarism as to rank now, in the concurring judgment of mankind, lower in the scale of intellect and every moral attribute than the lowest type of the Caucasian race known to history, and quite as debased as any savage tribe yet discovered.”
The Conservatives then had the audacity to cite the freedmen’s previous servitude as a reason to deny them the rights enjoyed by whites: “Starting with this congenital weakness, the negroes of Virginia have, for two hundred years, lived under the depressing influence of constant slavery. If they had been moved by a desire for mental elevation, there were no adequate aids afforded for its attainment.” The inevitable result of granting equality to the freedmen, the Conservatives warned in apocalyptic prose, would be “that last and direst disaster which can befall the white race—the physical fusion and amalgamation of the races!”
Uncle George Sizemore, shown at right as a young man with five of his siblings, is the son of a former slave.
In an address to the people of Virginia published in the Richmond Dispatch, the minority Conservative delegates put on full display their abhorrence at the ex-slaves’ rise to political power. “It is difficult to realize the situation which we have reached in the South,” they wrote. “The mind is stupefied at the initiation of negro domination. It is a waking nightmare, whose horrible shadow cannot be pierced by the struggling faculties—a spell that neither the senses nor the reason can dissolve.”
The white press vilified the freedmen as ignorant, incompetent buffoons unfit to vote, let alone hold elected office. Across the South, many African-American officeholders were victims of violence, including murder. One such incident occurred in May 1869 at Charlotte Court House, forty miles north of Daniel Sizemore’s farm, when Joe Holmes was gunned down in broad daylight on the courthouse lawn.
A freedman who worked as a shoemaker, Holmes had been a delegate to the constitutional convention. He was shot during a confrontation with a group of young white men. A coroner’s jury determined that the killer was “some person unknown to the jury.” An account of the slaying in the Richmond Dispatch reflected the ridicule to which African-American politicians were subjected in the press, even in death.
Uncle George Sizemore has lived in this farmhouse in Mecklenburg County, Va., since he was 1 month old in 1919.
“The deceased was a prominent member of the late constitutional convention—prominent rather from the merriment he created on rising to speak than from any participation in the serious work of the body,” the article reported. “Joe’s death will be regretted by all who knew him in the convention, and by those who have laughed over him in the ‘Humors of Reconstruction,’ where he figured as the ‘great fire-eater.’ ”
No one was ever prosecuted for Holmes’ murder, but three local freedmen were hauled into court for speaking out about it. Among them were John Watson, one of Mecklenburg’s delegates to the constitutional convention who was later elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, and Ross Hamilton, who succeeded Watson in the House. They were indicted and briefly jailed for conspiring to “incite the colored population of Charlotte to make war against the white population by acts of violence.”
On March 20, 1869, my ancestor Daniel Sizemore recorded his will, dividing his worldly possessions among his nine children. In 1860, his slaves had been valued at more than $11,000 altogether—the equivalent of $285,000 today, accounting for 85 percent of his wealth. Emancipation left him with just $1,500 in real estate and a few hundred dollars’ worth of household goods.
The 1868 Virginia constitution was ratified by popular vote in July 1869, but the provisions barring ex-Confederate soldiers from voting or holding office—which were voted on separately—were defeated. In elections for the Virginia legislature, Radical Republicans won in majority-black counties like Mecklenburg, but Conservatives prevailed statewide. Virginia thus became the only Southern state to avoid a period of Radical Reconstruction.
As the 1870 election approached, the Mecklenburg Herald, a Conservative mouthpiece, offered this unsolicited advice to local freedmen: “We are the colored man’s best friend—all he gets is from his own white people; if he has a shelter for his wife and children, he will get it from his own white people; if he has work for next year he must work Conservative land; if he has wood this winter it must be Conservative wood; if he gets any money for his labor he must get it from Conservatives.”
The Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, barring disfranchisement based on race, had been ratified in 1870. But once back in power, Virginia Conservatives began devising ingenious methods of limiting black voting power. The legislature enacted a poll tax as a prerequisite for voting and barred anyone convicted of petty larceny from the polls. The state also re-established whipping as a punishment for petty theft.
The Sizemore freedmen are a case study in the effectiveness of the poll tax in suppressing African-American voting.
In 1873, another Mecklenburg newspaper, The Southside Virginian, published an unapologetic justification for keeping black Virginians away from the polls and out of public office. The newspaper went on to heap scorn on Republican efforts to achieve social equality between the races: “What friendship is there in endeavoring to force upon society as equal, what society knows to be inferior, and how much reason is there in undertaking to force ignorance and culture, coarseness and refinement to commingle?”
The Sizemore freedmen are a case study in the effectiveness of the poll tax in suppressing African-American voting. The one-dollar annual tax, levied on each voting-age male, was the equivalent of twenty-five dollars today. A list of Virginians who failed to pay the tax in 1881 tells the story. In Mecklenburg County, 83 percent of unpaid poll taxes were owed by African-Americans, including many of my ancestor’s former slaves.
Excerpted with permission from Uncle George and Me: Two Southern Families Confront a Shared Legacy of Slavery, by Bill Sizemore.