In the midst of the Civil War, Louis Hughes told his wife, Matilda, “in low tones” about his intention “to try to get to Memphis.” The Hugheses were being held as slaves by Edmund McGee in Panola County, Mississippi. They knew that “others, here and there, all through the neighborhood, were going,” fleeing to the city that was now under Union Army control. Louis later wrote of how Matilda was overcome with fear at hearing his news. They both understood that “there was a law or regulation of the rebel government . . . authorizing the hanging of any slave...

On June 1, 1866, a former slave named Frances Thompson sat in a room in Memphis’s Gayoso House hotel facing three U.S. congressmen and a stenographer. The congressmen formed a congressional investigating committee before whom Thompson had come to testify, and the stenographer was there to write down her words. Among the testimony he recorded was Thompson’s recounting of how several weeks earlier, some time after 1:00 in the morning, seven white men broke into the house that she shared with another African American woman, Lucy Smith, and demanded “some woman to sleep with.” “I said that we were not...

By nine o’clock in the morning of April 2, 1867, large numbers of African Americans were already moving through the streets of Little Rock. An air of anticipation was noted by a reporter for theArkansas Gazette: “The crowds which thronged the streets of our city . . . gave indications that more than usual daily events were about to transpire.”¹ People were heading toward the state’s capitol building, the State House, intending to listen to the proceedings of a political convention meeting to shape a “Union” platform for the reorganization of Arkansas’s state government. But the convention was not...

The delegates to Arkansas’s constitutional convention who met in Little Rock in January 1868 were charged with a momentous task. They were to design a new state constitution establishing for the first time in Arkansas a democracy without regard to race and thereby incorporate former slaves into the political community as equal citizens. This would be Arkansas’s first postemancipation constitution, and it had to meet the requirements of the federal Reconstruction Acts. Above all, it had to establish universal male suffrage (excluding former government officials who gave aid to the Confederacy as specified under the Fourteenth Amendment) and thus extend...

Late in May 1871, eleven disguised men rode up to a cabin on a plantation in Gwinnett County, Georgia. After tying up their horses about 100 yards away, they approached the house yelling, “Open the door.” A former slave named Hampton Mitchell was inside with his wife, his son-in-law, and his wife’s father. Before anyone inside the house was able to get to the door, the men outside had forced it open. Mitchell recognized three of the intruders, despite their masks, as white men from the area. After grabbing Mitchell’s gun, these men ordered him to kneel beside the cabin’s...

In the summer of 1867, an unusual confrontation in a Freedmen’s Bureau office in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, was brought on by the courage of a freedwoman. This woman and her young daughter left the plantation of Vincent Mullins, where both the woman and her husband, Moses King, were employed, to denounce Mullins before Freedmen’s Bureau agent J. K. Nelson.¹ Mrs. King charged that Mullins had become abusive toward her and her children after the freedmen on his plantation voted for William Brownlow, the Republican candidate for governor in Tennessee. Just as Mrs. King was recounting this abuse to Nelson, Vincent Mullins...