CHAPTER SEVEN
The Union League
In pursuance of their schemes which culminated at the election in 1868, the carpetbag adventurers early in 1867 organized everywhere in Alabama branches of the Union League, a secret, oathbound political society, with all the mysticism of grips, signs, signals and passwords, national in scope, with grand national and grand state councils. Secrecy and obedience to commands were enjoined under severest penalties, including even death. Their meeting places were guarded by armed sentinels. The negro members were taught to disregard the feelings and interests of the whites, and told that if their former masters should obtain control of the government, they would re-enslave them; and this was an irresistible appeal to ignorant people enjoying the first delights of release from bondage. On the other hand, they were promised that if the Republicans should gain control, they would enact such oppressive tax laws that the landowners would be unable to meet the exactions, and consequently their lands would be forfeited; after which the Republicans would allot them in parcels of forty acres, together with a mule, to each head of a negro family resident thereon; they were told, further, that, in order to facilitate and expedite this process of confiscation and apportionment, they should slight their work and thus increase the difficulties under which their former masters would have to struggle to save their properties from spoliation. The student of history should not be harsh in judgment of the negro because of his susceptibility to a lure so enticing. He was ignorant, and regarded every pretentious white stranger as one of that great army which had liberated him from bondage.
Serious as was the situation, it was not without amusement in its demonstration of the negro’s gullibility. A bogus “land agent” circulated slips conveying directions regarding “preëmption of homesteads,” and the credulous negroes bought them, and, besides, painted sticks with pointed ends to be driven into the ground to mark their boundaries; they also purchased chances in a sort of lottery for the distribution of parcels of land. All of these were sold under alleged authority received from the government at Washington, all dependent on the success of the Republican party.
By request of President Johnson, General Grant in 1865 made a tour of the southern states, to learn the feelings and intentions of the people and to ascertain to what extent, in the interest of economy, the military forces there could be reduced. He reported that white troops excited no opposition: thinking men would offer no violence to them. But black troops demoralized labor, “and the late slaves seem to be infused with the idea that the property of their late masters should by right belong to them, or at least should have no protection from the colored soldiers. There is danger of collision being brought by such causes.”
The so-called abandoned lands on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia—lands from which whites had fled to escape dangers of the war—were actually seized and colonized with wandering negroes, though the lands were afterward restored to the owners. The germ of the “forty acres and a mule” idea, no doubt, originated in those colonies. The idea was of early conception, as the Grant report shows.
The first annoyances caused by the league were the neglect of field work by negroes in order to attend political meetings in daylight, and taking hard-worked mules from lots at night and riding them to league meetings. But in the course of time the organization assumed a military aspect, drilling regularly. Bodies appeared in procession, in regular company order, with arms, banners, drums and fifes, the officers wearing side-arms. At the election they were met outside the towns by emissaries and furnished with tickets, and then proceeded to the polling places and deposited them as directed. All of this appealed to the negroes’ taste for novelty and spectacle.