A Year in the South (35 page)

This is not to say that the mood of the city was sour. There was much optimism that fall among Cincinnati's newcomers and old residents alike, a sense that the triumph of the Union had ensured a bright future for themselves and for the nation. Lou could not help being struck by this mood. In Memphis there had been lots of talk about a bright future, but the public optimism was tempered by the former Confederates' sense of defeat and the former slaves' uneasiness about reconstruction policies. Cincinnati, by contrast, glowed with a feeling of victory and the certainty of God's continued favor.
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The city's celebratory mood reached a climax about a month after Lou's arrival, when General Ulysses S. Grant paid a visit. The great hero of the Union was on a tour of the North, and Cincinnati prepared a grand reception for him. On the morning of September 23, the mayor and several dozen other dignitaries boarded the
C. T. Dumont
and steamed downriver about fifteen miles to North Bend. They met Grant at the train station there and then ushered him aboard the boat. Everyone in the welcoming party was impressed by the modesty of the hero, who wore a plain wool hat and brown duster and carried his own valise. At the wharf in Cincinnati, carriages were waiting. The 7th National Guard Regiment and the city police force were also on hand, and they escorted the general and the city delegation to Pike's Opera House, where a large audience was assembled. Grant stepped up to the stage and gave a brief speech, thanking the people of the city and commending their “loyalty … to the cause we have been fighting for the past four years.” Then it was back to the carriages and a parade through the city, led by a marching band. All who were there that day agreed that Cincinnati had never been more festive. Signs of welcome hung everywhere, and buildings sported red, white, and blue bunting. Thousands upon thousands of citizens jammed the sidewalks or leaned out of upper-story windows, straining their necks and cheering excitedly as the general came into view.
14

Even as the people of Cincinnati toasted their victory in war and hailed their great hero, they turned to confront the future and the new problems it presented. Two of these were particularly controversial in the city that fall: labor and race.

Cincinnati had a tradition of labor activism. During the war, when many men exchanged their work clothes for blue uniforms, the city's labor unions had been relatively quiet. In the summer and fall of 1865, when the soldiers mustered out and returned to the city to resume their trades, they found that wartime inflation had far outpaced wages. The result was a resurgence of union activity. In the weeks following Lou's arrival in the city, evening meetings were held by the Journeymen Tailors' Association, the Bricklayers' Union, the Carpenters' Union, the Journeymen Plasterers' Association, the Gas-Fitters' Union, and many others. At these gatherings, workers talked late into the night about their current plight and how to remedy it.
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The labor militancy that rocked Cincinnati that fall was something altogether unfamiliar to Lou. Southern cities, including Memphis, had their workingmen's associations, but they were mostly relics of an earlier era, when manufacturing was done in small artisan shops, and masters, journeymen, and apprentices lived as well as worked together. There were still such shops and craftsmen in Cincinnati, but manufacturing in the city was increasingly dominated by highly regimented factories with fifty or a hundred or more workers, most of them unskilled machine-tenders and all of them overseen by impersonal supervisors. It had long been an article of faith among Northern laborers that if a man worked hard, he could acquire a skill and property and eventually be his own boss. But the coming of the factories called that assumption into question: such a system of labor seemed to many workers nothing better than “industrial slavery.”
16

When Cincinnati workingmen went on strike that fall—as the journeymen stonemasons and boot makers did in September, demanding a raise—they were seeking not only to put more meat on their tables, but also to secure their vision of the future. Higher wages alone were not enough. Many in the city were also calling for a truly radical reform: an eight-hour workday. This represented not simply a desire to work less, proponents insisted, but to become better citizens, for the extra leisure time would be devoted to self-improvement. “Eight Hours For Work, Eight Hours For Sleep, and Eight Hours For Mental and Moral Improvement,” was their battle cry.
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The moving force behind the eight-hour campaign was an organization called the Trades and Labor Assembly, whose mission was to bring all of Cincinnati's workers together in one giant city-wide union. This was a herculean task, given the antipathies that had long divided the city's labor force. Skilled workers looked down on the unskilled; the Germans and the Irish disliked each other; male laborers refused to associate with the women and children who were employed in many of the factories; and the whites wanted nothing to do with the blacks.
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White-black antagonism was not confined to the labor movement. Cincinnati had a long history of racial friction. The city had witnessed at least four antiblack riots, most recently in July 1862, when Irish dockworkers reacted to competition from black laborers by going on a two-day rampage, screaming, “Let's clear out the niggers!” No one would be surprised to see more such trouble, for the influx of freedmen only aggravated the racial tension. The city's Democratic newspaper, the
Daily Enquirer,
did its best to provoke white resentment, using editorials to remind workers that “[t]he negroes are coming” to take away their jobs. Emancipating the slaves, the editor told his readers, was “the most foolish and unsound measure that has happened in this country.” And every day on the city's streets there were arguments and scuffles between black and white men, any one of which could, under the right circumstances, explode into a riot.
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Cincinnati's blacks were not without friends. White Republicans, who outnumbered Democrats by almost four to one in the city, were for the most part moderate on racial issues. Many had been active in the antislavery movement before the war and, although few would concede that blacks were inherently equal to whites, all endorsed emancipation wholeheartedly and deplored the race-baiting of the Democrats. Some now even advocated allowing Ohio's black men to vote. There were, moreover, whites in the city who were willing to give tangible aid to the black race. The Ladies' Freedmen's Aid Society of Cincinnati, formed in January 1865, solicited donations of secondhand shoes, clothing, and eyeglasses. Some of these items were sent to a contraband camp in Tennessee, and others were directed to a home for sick and orphaned freedmen that the society maintained in Cincinnati.
20

Whites and blacks came together one evening in early autumn in Greenwood Hall, one of the city's auditoriums. The occasion was an address by Henry Highland Garnet of Washington, D.C., a minister and former slave who had earned a reputation as a spokesman for his race. In a measured yet passionate tone, the Reverend Garnet told his audience of his vision of the future of America's blacks. They would not seek vengeance for the wrongs done to them in the past, he predicted. Nor would they stridently demand legal equality; but they deserved it and, in the fullness of time, they would surely receive it. He reminded his listeners that when the war began, whites who rallied around the Union banner had at first rejected the idea of enlisting black soldiers in their cause. But before long they had found it necessary to call on those great reserves of black strength, and the tens of thousands of black men of the North and South who responded to that call had helped achieve the glorious triumph of the Union. Now, Garnet reasoned, those who cherished the great ideals of the American republic—liberty and equality—would before long find it necessary to grant full citizenship and the ballot to the nation's blacks, so that they could be enlisted in the continuing struggle to bring those ideals to full fruition. “The colored race ha[s] been recognized as soldiers,” he declared; “they must now be recognized as men.” He praised Abraham Lincoln as “the best friend of freedom,” a leader who had moved the nation in the right direction. Lincoln's successor was proving to be stubborn and contrary, Garnet said, but he had no fear that President Johnson would obstruct America's progress, for “[h]e who should stand in the way of God's providence would be crushed to pieces, and the Lord would raise up some one who would carry out [H]is purposes.”
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The Cincinnati that welcomed the Reverend Garnet and General Grant was a city of charity and optimism, but even so it was not the city Lou Hughes had hoped for. After several weeks he still had no steady work, and he and his family were living in nearly intolerable accommodations. And he had seen enough of Cincinnati to convince him that neither problem was going to be solved if he stayed in the city.
22

By midautumn he and the four women of the family decided to move on. Somewhere they heard that there were opportunities in the town of Hamilton, Ohio, twenty miles north. So one day in the latter part of October they packed up their belongings and made their way to the newly constructed depot of the Cincinnati, Hamilton, & Dayton Railroad, an imposing, four-hundred-foot-long building that stretched between Fifth and Sixth streets on the west side of town. There they boarded a train for the short trip to Hamilton.
23

It was an unpretentious town on the banks of the Miami River, home to nine or ten thousand people, the governmental seat and economic center of Butler County, a farming district. The first thing many visitors noticed about it at this time of year, when the weather grew cool, was the coal soot that drifted down from the chimney tops and covered everything outdoors—a “miniature snow storm in black,” one observer complained.
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The new arrivals found a place to live and moved in. Lou searched for steady work but finally had to settle for odd jobs, mostly whitewashing fences and buildings. Matilda and her mother and sisters spread the word around town that they were available to do laundry, and they soon had a good deal of business.
25

There were some troubling things about Hamilton that undoubtedly became apparent to Lou as the weeks passed, besides the depressing dinginess of the place. For one thing, the town seemed to be in the grip of a crime wave. It was nowhere near as dangerous as Bucktown, to be sure, but there were enough burglaries and muggings to alarm the law-abiding citizens. At a public meeting in November, some of those citizens demanded that the town council create a night police force and put lawbreakers to work on a chain gang. The editor of Hamilton's newspaper, the
True Telegraph,
pointed out that towns all across the northern United States were experiencing a similar surge of villainy and showing other signs of moral decay. It was a consequence of the war, he said. While the soldiers had struggled on the battlefield, those at home had relaxed civic discipline, allowed churches to decline, and indulged in a “reckless spirit of extravagance and luxury.”
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Another disturbing thing about Hamilton was the racial atmosphere. The residential segregation that Lou had seen in Cincinnati was reproduced here in miniature. All but a handful of the 200 or so black inhabitants were clustered in one ward of the town. Hamilton was, moreover, predominantly Democratic, and there was much hostility toward blacks. The newspaper was vehemently racist. One had to read no further than the motto that adorned the paper's masthead to learn the editor's guiding principles: “White Supremacy—State Sovereignty—Federal Union—DEMOCRACY.” In his columns he told crude racial jokes, railed against Republican proposals to provide better schools and the ballot for Ohio's blacks, warned that “negro equality” meant “white degradation,” and bemoaned the continuing influx of freedmen. Ohio, he said, was becoming “a vast almshouse for the negro paupers of the South.”
27

Before long Lou grew restless again. As the days passed and the soot-covered leaves of Hamilton's trees drifted to the ground, his thoughts turned more and more to another place: Canada. Before the war, a good number of slaves had fled there with the help of Northern abolitionists. Lou had eavesdropped on occasion when Boss read aloud newspaper accounts of the Underground Railroad. Everybody in those days knew that Canada was the only real haven for black runaways, the one place in North America beyond the reach of the Fugitive Slave Law. One of Boss's slaves, Tom, who had been a close friend of Lou's, had actually escaped to Canada in the 1850s. Having secretly learned to write, Tom had forged a pass, gone down to the Memphis wharf, and gotten a job on a steamboat. Eventually he made it to New Orleans and from there sailed to Boston. After reaching Canada, he had had the temerity to send Boss a letter notifying him of his new address.
28

Now that slavery was abolished, many of the Canadian fugitives were returning to the United States. But Lou was not convinced that any former slave was truly safe in America. “We did not know what might come again for our injury,” he wrote, and to him Canada was still the only refuge. He talked the matter over with Matilda and her mother and sisters, and all agreed that they should go to Canada.
29

By the time they had made up their minds to leave Hamilton, December had arrived and with it came Lou's first Yankee winter. The trees were starkly bare, and there was a frigid crispness in the air unlike anything he had ever felt in Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, or Virginia. And there were sights he had perhaps never before seen: ice skaters gliding over the frozen river basin, and store windows radiant with Christmas displays of toys, candy, and fireworks.
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