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Marching
to a Different Drummer
Unrecognized Heroes of American History
By Robin Kadison Berson
Tunis George Campbell
(1812-1891)
Born free in New Jersey, his father a
blacksmith, Tunis George Campbell (1812-1891) was
educated by Episcopalians in Babylon, New York and
completed his education in 1830. Contrary to his
teachers expectation, Tunis developed into an
abolitionist and anti-colonialist. Also he gave up their
religion and became an African Methodist, organizing
churches in the slums of Brooklyn and Jersey City. He
established a reputation as an excellent speaker. During
this period Tunis made a living as a hotel steward and
head waiter in new York and Boston and so effective he
was at his profession he wrote a manual on hotel
management, the first to be published in the United
States.
Campbell was a leading speaker at a number of Negro
conventions, including the anticolonization convention in New
York in 1849; and the Colored National Convention in Rochester
in 1853. But what Campbell is particularly remembered for his
political leadership in Georgia among freedmen trying
desperately to gain independency and self-sufficiency.
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According to Berson, "He was sent by
the Department of War to South Carolina to work on the
Port Royal Experiment, the first organized attempt to
resettle displaced freedmen. . . . This was Campbell's
first contact with Southern blacks. He listened to
painful stories of past horrors and mistreatment, to
budding hopes and dreams for the future." In
1865 Campbell was appointed Freedmen Bureau
Superintendent of the major islands off the coast of
Georgia by General Rufus Saxton, military commander of
Georgia. (See photo, far right)
By the end of the summer of 1865, General Saxton was
fired by President Andrew Johnson, with the
recommendation of David Tillson, a conservative
Republican who was in charge of the Georgia Freedmens'
Bureau, "for refusing to revoke the homestead
grants he had made to freedmen." |
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Tillson, former Confederates, and other racists did not want
the freedmen and especially Tunis G. Campbell to succeed in
their experiment of self-government. There plot was to undermine
and reverse the program set in operation General
William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, who
had met with 20 of Savannah's black clergy on Jan. 12, 1865, to
discuss how to help blacks make the transition from slavery to
freedom. Sherman and Stanton mulled over
the response and four days later Sherman issued Special
Field Orders, No. 15., promising all blacks 40 acres of Low
Country property and a military mule. General
Rufus Saxton, director of the South Carolina Freedmen's Bureau implemented
the program, settling over 40,000 blacks on 40-acre tracts.
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Clearly, Campbell
represented an intolerable contradiction of everything
Tillson expounded. he had to be removed. Tillson used
federal troops to overwhelm the islands' inadequately
armed militia. He invented charges of fiscal
mismanagement against Campbell and summarily exiled him
from the Sea Islands. With Campbell off the islands,
Tillson turned with a vengeance to his program of
forcing the freemen into labor contracts with white
investors. The land grants to the freedmen were revoked;
the land was either returned to its Confederate owners or
leased to Northern entrepreneurs. Acreage the freedmen
had planted in food crops was plowed under and replanted
with cash crops like rice and cotton, thus further
weakening the blacks' hopes for self-reliance and
increasing their dependency on the white employers.
Freedmen who protested against outrageously unfair
contract stipulations and inflated prices at the
white-run company stores, or who resisted signing the
contracts, were arrested and punished. (Berson, 49)
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Campbell regroup on the mainland at an abandoned
plantation he purchased and was joined by a hundred people on the
land to form the Belleville Farmers Association. For several
years, this project was troubled by bad weather and poor harvests
and inadequate support by private agencies. In 1867 nevertheless
the Radical Republicans gained control of Congress and overpowered
the conservative president Johnson and a number of Reconstruction
acts were passed over veto.
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The former
Confederate states had to
--register
all qualified voters, under federal supervision;
--elect
delegates to rewrite the state constitution into
compliance with the united States Constitution;
--elect new
state legislatures;
--ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, which
established full African-American citizenship. |
Under these federal guidelines McIntosh County
fall of 1867 elected Tunis Campbell, and along with 37 blacks
among 170 delegates to the state constitutional convention.
Campbell developed a voting bloc to propose and enact legislation
favorable to freedmen, such as passing a bill eliminating
imprisonment for debt.. With the new constitution Campbell and two
other blacks were elected to the Georgia state senate. On 12
September 1868, Campbell and other blacks were expelled when white
racist argued that "the right to vote did not imply the right
to hold office" (Berson, 51).
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In December 1869, in
response to the steady rise of Ku Klux Klan terrorism, the
United States Congress restored military rule in Georgia.
The expelled legislators were reinstated, and for what
remained of his term Campbell served on committees on
education, the penal system, and the military. he
introduced fifteen bills furthering black rights, most of
which were unsuccessful. His great concerns were access to
voting and education.
Campbell lost his sensate seat in 1872
in an election mired in fraud. He continued to serve as a
justice of the peace; in that capacity he was most
prominent defending the rights of black sailors on the
ships docking in Darien, an active port. His vigilance on
their behalf, and his willingness to fine and imprison the
white ships' captains who abused them, incurred the wrath
of local whites.
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Campbell had been a
major irritant to the white power structure for
years. they recognized his influence over McIntosh
County African Americans, and they despised him
for it. . . . .
Planters claimed That Campbell's opposition to
contract labor and his constant advice to the
freedmen cost the planters hundreds of thousands
of dollars. By the mid-1870s the momentum of
national politics was conservative again, and
white "Redeemer" forces, dedicated to
restoring the "'old order," were seizing
power throughout the South (Berson, 51-52).
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The former Confederates managed to marshal the
means to destroy Campbell. Judge Henry Tompkins, a Confederate
veteran sworn to destroy him. He indicted Campbell for falsely
imprisoning white men (the abusive ship captains in Darien) and
set the bail so high that blacks were not able to redeem Campbell,
who was thus forced to serve one year of hard labor in Georgia's
penal system.
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Conditions in these camps
were appalling, and the treatment accorded the men were
brutal. In the late 1870s, convicts leased to one railroad
company in South Carolina suffered a 45% annual death
rate; the death rate across the South averaged between 16
and 25%.
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There were some
attempts at exposure and reform: in one such brave
effort, a United States district judge examined
the court records of one Georgia county for one
month and disclosed that 149 people--almost all of
them black--had been sentenced to a total of 19
years at leased labor for crimes no more serious
than walking on the grass and spitting on the
sidewalk. The maverick Southern reformer George
Washington Cable published and lectured against
convict leasing. But the system was too profitable
for both the state and the contractor for reform
to have a chance. In the mid-1889s Georgia's
United States Senator, Joseph
E. Brown, held a
twenty-year lease on three hundred,
"healthy" convicts, for which he paid
the state the sum of seven cents per man per
working day (Berson, 53).
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Tunis Campbell entered that world in January of
1876 and the plantation owner who bought his contract paid the
state of Georgia $8.75. Some religious led by Wesley J. Gaines,
D.D. attempted to rescue Campbell:
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A
petition was offered Conference by the writer to appeal to
the Governor of Georgia, James M. Smith, to pardon Rev.
Tunis G. Campbell. The facts of the case seemed to warrant
an effort to obtain clemency. He was born near the close
of the eighteenth century, and had been preaching as a
minister of a sister church for nearly fifty years. He had
also been a Senator from the Second District of Georgia.
He was found guilty by the superior court of McIntosh
county of mal-administering the law of the State while
discharging the functions of Justice of the Peace, and
sentenced to the penitentiary to hard labor. Knowing the
severe treatment and hardships to which he would be
subjected, and mindful of his service to God and man, as
well as of his great age and feeble constitution, it seems
but a matter of duty to beseech the Governor to extend his
executive clemency. (Rt. Rev. Wesley J. Gaines, African
Methodism in the South (1890)
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The
Right Reverend. Wesley J. Gaines
was the Sixteenth Bishop of
the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Though some think that Campbell died in prison,
according to Berson, he was released in January 1877 and moved to
Washington, D.C. where he lobbied for federal protection of
African American rights. He returned to Georgia briefly in 1882
for a Republican convention in Atlanta and visited McIntosh County
and was received by the local colored population with
"support and affection." Campbell never returned to
Georgia and died in Boston 4 December 1891. According to Berson,
Tunis Campbell was honored and remembered for decades by the
people whose rights, hopes, and dreams he had so fearlessly worked
to achieve.
Sources:
Bell, Malcolm, Jr.
Major
Butler's Legacy: Five Generations of A Slaveholding Family.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.
Campbell, Tunis G.
Sufferings of
the Rev. T. G. Campbell and His Family in Georgia. Washington,
D.C.: Enterprises, 1877.
Coulter, E. Merton "Tunis G.
Campbell: Negro Reconstruction in Georgia." I--Georgia
Historical Quarterly 51 (December, 1967): 401-424; II--Georgia
Historical Quarterly 52 (March, 1968): 16-52.
Du Bois, W.E.B.
Black
Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. Cleveland: World
Publishing, Co., 1962 [1935].
Duncan, Russell.
Freedom's
Shore: Tunis Campbell and the Georgia Freedmen. Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1986.
Few, Jenel. "Black History
Month feature: Living with or without 40 acres and a mule." Savannah
Morning News.
Web
Posted, February 21, 2000 .
Franklin,
John Hope. Reconstruction After the Civil War. Chicago:
University of Chicago press, 1961.
Gaines,
Wesley J. "A SKETCH OF THREE
YEARS [1875-1878]," Chapter IX of
African Methodism in the
South; OR TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF FREEDOM. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
PROF. W. S. SCARBOROUGH, A. M., LL. D. ATLANTA, GEORGIA: Franklin
Publishing House. 1890.
Novak,
Daniel A.
The Wheel of Servitude: Black Forced
Labor After
Slavery. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1978.
Perdue, Robert E.
The Negro In
Savannah, 1865-1900.
Sterling,
Dorothy, ed. The Trouble They Seen: Black People Tell the Story
of Reconstruction. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1976.
Carol
E. Scott, "Joseph E. Brown: Businessman, Educator and
Politician" Source: Robin Kadison Berson. Marching
to a Different Drummer. 1994 *
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updated 22 October 2007 |
