Cheesy Grits: "What Did You Do During the Civil War, Grandpa Howard?"

Oh Robert Howard Robert Howard you're really breaking my chops here. As hard as it has been to get my head around the idea that former slaves would turn around and become slaveowners, I now am faced with a document you put your signature to the day after cadets from the Citadel fired on a Union vessel, the Star of the West, attempting to resupply Fort Sumter. It was about a month after South Carolina had seceded. In three months more, the Confederates would open fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor and the Civil War was fully on.


The document is addressed to the Governor of South Carolina, and begins thus:

Memorial of Free Negroes — January 10th 1861

His Excellency, Governor, Francis W. Pickens

"We whose names are underwritten Free Men of the City of Charleston, South Carolina, having the interest of the State in view do tender our services to the Governor of the State in order to be placed or occupy any position the Executive may deem proper and do hold ourselves ready whenever called upon to assist in preparing the State for a defence against any action which may be brought against her."

The signatories include Robert Howard, Joseph and Richard Dereef, and Anthony Weston—in short, the creme de la creme of Charleston's FPOC elite.

There were at least two other, similar petitions from other groups of Charleston's Free Persons of Color (FPOC) using even more dramatic language. This petition was addressed to Charleston's Mayor J.H. Boatright:

"We are by birth Citizens of South Carolina, in our veins is the blood of the white race in some half in others much more, our attachments are with you. Our hopes of safety and protection is [sic] in South Carolina, our allegiance is due alone to her, in her defence we are willing to offer up our lives and all that is dear to us. We therefore take this liberty of asking the privilege of volunteering our Services to the State at this time, She needs the services of all her true and devoted Citizens. We are willing to be assigned to any service where we can be made useful. And in tendering our services to the Governor through you, we only ask that we be disposed of under your approval and if ordered off that our wives & children be taken care of & provided for..."

Some context helps to understand why these Free Men of Color might have volunteered to defend South Carolina: one of the most deep-seated fears of White southerners was that the slaves would rise up in open rebellion against their owners. White Charlestonians had reacted to the uncovering of the Denmark Vesey plot in 1822 by hanging thirty-five of the alleged conspirators ("alleged" because no arms caches were ever found), burning down the Bethel AME Church on Calhoun Street, where the plotters were suspected of having met, and by forbidding black men to meet in private groups.

In the wake of the Vesey affair, the only way that FPOC societies such as Brown Fellowship could continue meeting was by presenting their scrupulously kept minutes to the white city fathers to show that no political topics were ever discussed at these meetings and that Brown Fellowship members were therefore not a threat.

Of course, John Brown's 1859 raid on the armory and arsenal at Harper's Ferry was considered by many Southerners to be proof positive that the North intended to agitate rebellion and support open warfare against them. Correspondingly, the situation of FPOC became even more precarious because after all they were "still" persons of color and therefore presumed by whites to be untrustworthy by nature.

Bernard Powers in Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822-1885 sums up the increasing dangers to the FPOC community this way:

"In the heat of the South's reaction to John Brown's raid, some whites were not satisfied with the mere enforcement of the laws [regulating the movement and labor of free blacks]. For such persons, only the complete removal or enslavement of the free black population could eliminate its threat. in 1859-60 at least four different bills for this purpose were introduced into the [SC] state legislature...." (p. 64)

The very existence of the FPOC community in Charleston was coming under direct threat, as their livelihoods and their very freedom itself was under open attack. Powers notes that the FPOC community still had good ties with some influential whites, and it was those influential whites who succeeded in derailing the proposed legislation.

Powers says that it was at this juncture that the above-cited documents came into being, as the FPOC community sought to, as Powers describes it, "....disarm their detractors and bolster their eroded social niche..."

Did it work? The outbreak of the Civil War makes the question largely moot. Powers does comment that, during the war, FPOC and slave alike involved in helping to build and maintain the City of Charleston's fortifications. The Brown Fellowship Society even donated $50 to the Ladies Relief Association for the care of injured and sick Confederate soldiers. Nevertheless, the fact that slaves who were working "for" the Confederacy repeatedly escaped (sometimes spectacularly) makes clear where their true sympathies lay.

Although Charleston was heavily shelled from the sea starting in August of 1863, she was not occupied by Union troops until February 18, 1865. And even then, no pitched battle was required, as the Confederate troops had abandoned the city. As the Confederates left, they burned much of what had survived the shelling. The first Union troops to march into Charleston were the 21st Infantry Regiment, United States Colored Troops, composed of African-American soldiers from South Carolina and Florida. The famous 55th Massachusetts brought up the rear and there was great rejoicing in the streets of Charleston. Slavery was finished.

This Charleston Public Library website has links to two newspaper accounts of the celebrations in Charleston at the end of the Civil War.


Source: Bernard E. Powers, Jr., Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822-1885 (U of Arkansas Press: 1994)