Fight Like a Tiger by Harrison Victoria L.;

Author:Harrison, Victoria L.; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press

The Civil War and its aftermath transformed Little Rock, a southern capital now inhabited not only by black state legislators but also by a number of black city officials. The 1871 city directory, the first ever issued, showed that several blacks held positions of authority in the municipality, a phenomenon inconceivable only a few years earlier. “Colored” men, duly noted as such in the directory, were policemen, aldermen, and jail guards. Thomas Johnson, of the city’s Third Ward, was a justice of the peace with $2,500 in real and personal property. City Marshal William A. Rector, possibly related to or owned by a former governor, had $4,000 in real and $1,200 in personal property. The extent of progress, however, should not be overstated. Of 341 black male heads of household in the directory, 215 (63 percent) were occupied as laborers, teamsters, porters, and draymen. Some, like teamster Osborn Hill, accumulated substantial assets. Hill, a forty-two-year-old Georgia native, had real and personal property worth $2,400. Most of these workers, however, owned nothing.36

Black and mulatto women were typically seamstresses or washerwomen who also had no property. A couple of black women were associated with hotel- or saloon-keeping families, but the economic prospects for free black women in postbellum Little Rock were similar to those found in antebellum Louisville and Cleveland or pre- and postwar Alton. An 1870 census entry for a “bawdy house” of white women and the number of poor white laborers in the city directory suggests that times were difficult for many.

Some months before the city directory was published, Barbour went to Little Rock to become a member of the Arkansas General Assembly. Just as Clayton saw defense of the New Era as an extension of the Civil War, Barbour fought the war in his own way in Little Rock by defending the governor. Many years earlier, another governor, Illinois’ Richard Yates, declined Barbour’s offer to provide leadership in the national crisis. Now, fresh from his electoral victory, Barbour had the chance to defend the meaning of the Civil War as embodied by Clayton and to demonstrate his own political skills by proving, belatedly, that Yates was wrong. Barbour approached the task with energy.

During the eighteenth session of the Arkansas legislature, commencing 2 January 1871, Clayton’s opponents tried to neutralize him as a force in Little Rock. They first elected him to the U.S. Senate so that Lieutenant Governor Johnson, a native Arkansan and Liberal Republican, would ascend to the governorship and the statehouse. When Clayton refused to relinquish his office to this political enemy, the Arkansas House next impeached him for political and financial malfeasance. The impeachment effort failed, but the indictment and related political warfare dominated the entire session. The tone was set on the first day when an armed force verified the legislators’ credentials.37

Barbour was one of ten African Americans negotiating their way through the confusion and rancor. Arkansas’s 1871 black legislative contingent, like the Republican Party as whole, split into two factions, Clayton men and anti-Clayton men.

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