Debating exodus in the Reconstruction South: changing attitudes among the Republican grassroots

The sharp descent from the slaves’ ‘jubilee’ at the new dawn of emancipation to catastrophic despair just over a decade later constitutes a reversal without parallel in US history, and even on a global scale it is difficult to find instances where the arc of history bent so abruptly from buoyant hope at slavery’s demise to dejection and even panic at the resurrection of white supremacy after 1876.

This articles explores the implications of this sharp reversal for ‘black politics’ between 1865 and 1880—and in particular the dramatic shift in attitudes toward emigration among the four million former slaves emancipated at the conclusion of the Civil War. Focusing on the lives of two prominent grassroots organizers during Reconstruction—the Rev. Elias Hill of York County, South Carolina, and Henry Adams of Shreveport, Louisiana—here I aim to demonstrate the mutable, changing quality of freedpeople’s attitudes toward emigration. Thomas Holt makes the critical observation that ‘emigration and migration ebbed and flowed inversely with access to mainstream politics’—a point that is powerfully illustrated in the activist trajectories of these two men and the large, overwhelmingly working-class constituencies they represented.