“I hope that isn’t the cognac talking.”
“It isn’t. You’ll make points with your teacher. Promise.”
Drake did want to make Valinda happy.
Hugh asked, “Where are you off to now?”
“To the Quarter to make Archer feed me.”
“I have some hens we can cook.” He held up the bottle of cognac. “And we have this fancy French liquor that needs finishing.”
Drake grinned. “Let’s eat.”
After eating his fill, Drake left Hugh and rode to Raimond’s house to attend the Council meeting. Made up of veterans, freedmen, and a few trusted Black Republican party members, the group formed after the surrender to intervene in work contract negotiations, educate people on their rights, and do their best to influence state and local politicians. People in the city knew about their public face, but the more secretive parts of their operation were conducted in shadow.
Drake entered the barn where they were meeting and nodded at the twelve men already inside, four of whom were his brothers. The agenda opened with reports sent in by similar groups across the South on subjects pertaining to land ownership, Black codes, and the overall state of freedmen rights.
Rai began with the good news of the increasing number of schools and colleges being established across the region, most notably Howard College in Washington, named for General Howard, and two in North Carolina: St. Augustine Normal School and Collegiate Institute and the Freedmen’s College of North Carolina.
Drake saw people nodding approvingly.
Rai then turned to more serious matters. “General Sheridan has designated May first as the day Louisiana and other states will begin registering voters both Black and White under the recently passed Reconstruction Acts. The elections will be held to pick delegates to form new Constitutional conventions. Violence is anticipated. Sheridan’s promised to keep the process as safe as possible, but we all know there aren’t enough troops to meet that promise. I’ve sent word asking veterans to volunteer as peacekeepers, and that they pass the word to all veterans they may know.”
Beau added, “And that they be armed.”
Since May first was only two weeks away, Drake asked, “Have you talked to Hugh and his Heroes to request their assistance?”
“No, but if you could, I’d have one less thing to do.”
“I’ll speak with him.”
“Thank you.”
They spent a few more minutes discussing the logistics of where the registration sites would be. As Rai pointed out, violence was probably guaranteed because Confederates would be forbidden from adding their names to the ballots as delegates.
Mason Diggs, one of the veterans, asked, “So, does this Reconstruction Act give members of the race the right to vote everywhere?”
“No. Just in the states that rebelled.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
Rai said, “Tell that to the fools in Congress.”
They all knew Black voters would hold a numerical advantage in the five states of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. If the elected delegates could indeed rewrite their state constitutions, conditions in the South would change for the better. Being a political pessimist, Drake doubted the Confederates would allow them to hold on to power for long, due to the infighting going on within the Republican party, and the ease with which the supremacists were being allowed back into the political arena via President Johnson’s toothless Loyalty Oath.
Rebels who re-pledged their loyalty to the Union were being given back their land and their power. That they’d committed treason and cost the country thousands of lives seemingly meant nothing. Regaining their status meant more Black Codes were being put in place to disenfranchise the newly freed, and splintering the state’s Republican Party into three warring factions. There was the powerful Custom House Ring, the Radicals flocking to the leadership of young Henry Clay Warmoth, and in Drake’s opinion, the most important block of Republicans—the newly freed—because without the support of the third leg, the Republicans’ stool could not stand.
But the opposing forces, made up of the Redeemers and other Lost Cause supporters, were fractioned as well. Louisiana’s Bourbon Democrats vehemently opposed anything benefiting the formerly enslaved—from owning property to establishing schools. The more practical-minded, conservative Democrats, aka Reformers, supported limited rights, but joined the Bourbons in saying no to social equality—even as they held the Bourbon’s hard-line approach responsible for the federal government’s intervention in the state’s politics.
As a result, the state was a powder keg. The Lost Cause Democrats, in cahoots with some Southern Republicans, were determined to restore the old order by any means. Last year’s riot at the state convention, in which the city’s police force and firearms descended on the convention hall and murdered thirty-four Blacks and three White Radicals, stood as a sobering example of how far they were willing to go to achieve their goals.
Raimond continued the meeting by asking, “Does anyone know a man named William Nichols?”
No one did.
Rai explained, “Neither do I, but he’s one of the leaders of the groups confronting the streetcar companies and their star cars.”
As more and more Blacks and allied Whites pushed back against the discriminatory policies, the situation with the streetcars was reaching a boiling point. Many people were attempting to ride the regular cars in spite of the law. In response, White drivers and passengers were routinely dragging the protestors off the cars and assaulting them afterwards. A Black veteran in uniform boarded a Whites-only car with his mother, only to have her “brutally ejected,” according to a newspaper account. In response soldiers had attempted to derail a Whites-only car.