The Testimony of Henry Adams, Freedman: Hope, Terror, and Exodus in the Post-Civil War South Introduction by Steven Hahn

Henry Adams was a former slave who became a free Black laborer after Emancipation. He lived in Louisiana for most of his life where the  Knights of the White Camelia  and the White League were actively using terrorism to stamp down African American political action and end Black voting. Adams works with a large number of other Blacks to record instances of violence and threats of violence by these paramilitary groups against the formerly enslaved African Americans.

Adams was born into slavery in Jasper County, Georgia, in 1843. When he was seven years old his enslaver moved Adams’s family to DeSoto Parish, Louisiana. The Adams family was finally emancipated at the end of the Civil War. When he was free from slavery, Adams was not free from harm. For example, in December of 1865 he was confronted by a gang of white men who challenged him for trying to leave the parish where he lived. In 1866, he testified, that “I was met up by about five men, and they asked me who I belonged to. I told them I belonged to nobody. ‘You don’t belong to nobody?’ I said ‘No.’ ‘Well, by God,’ they says, ‘negroes can’t travel through here that don’t belong to somebody, and we will fix you up right here.’ I was on a good horse—a pretty good horse—and I made a break and ran. They tried to kill me but I got off; they shot four or five times at me, but never hit me. I ran and got away.”

Adams saw violent retaliation for emancipation right after the Civil War. He reported that “In the year 1866,” in the parish of Caddo, State of Louisiana, “I seen hanging to a limb of an oak tree, about six miles south from Shreveport, the body of a colored man. He was dead when I seen him. About six miles north from Keachie I saw a wagon belonging to a colored man burning, with all his things; even his mules were burned to death. While on my way to Sunny Grove I seen the head of a colored man lying on the side of the road.”

In September, 1866 Adams enlisted in the United States Colored Troops (USCT). As a soldier, he learned to read and write and he came into contact with other African Americans who came from the wider world. Before he was discharged in 1869, Adams and other soldiers formed a secret committee to report on the conditions of  freed people in the South. Its purpose was twofold. First, of course, these USCT veterans wanted to record human rights abuses. Second, they wanted to identify places where freedpeople could move and be treated with respect. They did not find that place in the South.

In 1877, President Ulysses S. Grant sent documents to Congress detailing interference with the election in Louisiana that contained a report from Adams.  The veteran wrote that the report was truthful and that it reporting it placed his life in danger.

In 1880, Adams received a subpoena to testify before a Senate Select Committee on the violence faced by Blacks in the South, how Adams had gathered accounts of it, and what the plans were among Blacks to flee the South. This book is the testimony by Henry Adams in response to questions from the senators. Adams gave two days of testimony.

I had seen parts of the testimony of Henry Adams before, but this was the first time I had read the whole of his questioning. Just a warning-This is the whole transcript of his questioning and his answers. I am a lawyer, so I see these transcripts on a regular basis, but for non-lawyers this format may take a while to get used to. The senators sometimes ask question and Henry Adams can’t understand what they are asking about and he and the questioner may go on for several sentences trying to ascertain what the question is. Adams only learned to read as an adult when he was in the army and his responses sometime use African American Vernacular English from the late 1800s. This can be confusing, although the Library of America edition puts in notes explaining the definitions of words. Then there is the equal weight given to testimony on matters of life and death and on peripheral information like what precise time an incident happened or who were the witnesses who saw it. As a lawyer, I understand the importance of using these question to establish the credibility of the witness, but it may be tiresome for the lay reader.

Adams told how he and other members of the United States Colored Troops met in the 1860s to form a secret committee to monitor human rights violation in the South and to assess which parts of the South Blacks could live without harassment. The leaders of this committee, of whom Adams was one, compiled the reports coming in from wherever these African American soldiers were stationed. The information was shared with journalists, sympathetic elected representatives, and with law enforcement. Adams reads from some of the reports and he submitted written copies of reports from the 1860s and 1870s. The book includes those reports submitted by Adams to the Senate Committee.

The reports from different parts of the South were alarming. Adams said that the observers “cited several things that they saw in their travels; it was very bad.” In spite of slavery having been ended a decade earlier, the reports said “the people was still being whipped, some of them, by the old owners, the men that had owned them as slaves…” When African Americans tried to stand up for themselves, the white Redeemer “will haul out a revolver and strike him on the head, and knock blood out of him, or something of that sort, and maybe, perhaps, shoot him.”

When Blacks tried to exercise the franchise, “where they voted they would be shot.” In Louisiana the movement for Redemption [restoring white supremacy] was the White League, led by old Confederate officers. Adams told the Congress that after “the white league sprung up, they organized and said this is a white man’s government, and the colored men should not hold any offices; they were no good but to work in the fields…” This sharp turn towards Jim Crow led the committee to make an appeal to the Grant administration; “We first organized and adopted a plan to appeal to the President of the United States and to Congress to help us out of our distress, or protect us in our rights and privileges,” said Adams. Grant never gave a response to the committee. 

By the time Henry Adams gave his testimony, Grant had left office and the Republicans under President Rutherford B. Hayes had largely retreated from enforcing the law in most parts of the South. It would take another seventy years before the courts ordered the Federal Government to make sure the 14th and 15th Amendments were respected, and twenty more years to complete this task. Of course, now some of these gains may be in jeopardy.

Steven Hahn edited this book and he includes a very useful introduction. The fifteen page introduction gives a brief biography of Adams as well as putting his life into the context of Reconstruction and Redemption. After the testimony, Hahn added “Documents compiled and submitted by Henry Adams for the record.” These report are almost as long at the testimony. Several reports give details about “outrages” committed against Black citizens by armed white groups. There is also a section of Affidavits from Black witnesses to the violence against African Americans.  Henry Adams also submitted an essay on the White League, who its leaders were, and crimes committed by its members. There is also a useful chronology at the end of the book.