Tunis Gulic Campbell 1812-1891
Tunis Gulic Campbell was one of the most important, fearless, politically astute Black men in the history of the United States. His skill for leading, community organizing and political acumen are the reason why he will be the next Black individual elevated to "Black God" status by The West Oakland Opportunity Zone.
Tunis Campbell was one of ten children born to Two free Blacks, John Campbell, a blacksmith, and his wife in Middlebrook, New Jersey. In 1817, when Campbell was five, a white friend worked to place the unusually self-aware Campbell in an all-white Episcopal school on Long Island. At this school, Tunis was trained for work as a missionary in Liberia by the American Colonization Society. Soon though, Tunis began to see that he disagreed that Blacks, who had been in the United States prior to virtually all other peoples of the world, should be repatriated as a solution to the race question.
At age eighteen he followed his conscience and began to lecture and preach against slavery, colonization, alcohol, and prostitution. To support himself, Tunis made a living as a hotel steward and head waiter in new York and Boston. He was so effective at this profession that he wrote the first book on hotel management to be published in the United States.
Campbell's greatest legacy is as a political leader in Georgia, where he lead one of the most remarkable experiments in democracy in the history of the United States, by organizing a large community of freedmen into a model community of self-sufficiency and self-governance. This all came about In 1865 when Campbell was appointed Freedmen Bureau Superintendent of the major islands off the coast of Georgia. On January 12, 1865, General William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, met with Tunis Campbell and 20 of Savannah's black clergy to discuss how to help blacks make the transition from slavery to freedom. The meeting in itself had no precedent. White leaders, meeting with Black leaders, to discuss and organize the transition from slavery to freedom. Tunis and others argued for self-sufficiency and that Blacks be given a chance to govern themselves and not be governed or managed. All they asked for was freedom, protection, land and the opportunity to take part in the great experiment of democracy that whites had enjoyed for the previous 200 years.
Based upon what was shared, discussed, General Sherman issued the most important Order in the History of Blacks in America, Special Field Orders No. 15., promising all blacks 40 acres of Low Country property and a military mule. It was General Rufus Saxton, director of the South Carolina Freedmen's Bureau implemented the program, and over the next several months, over 40,000 blacks were settled on 40-acre tracts along the North and South Carolina Coast.
The experiment flourished, the crops were planted, homes built, government officials elected and churches ministered over their recently freed parishioners. In an amazingly short time, and under the leadership of Campbell, the communities bonded; however, due to the forgiveness of President Johnson of former Confederate soldiers, plantation owners and former slave owners, many of these lands were returned to their previous White owners. The great Black democratic experiment in freedom and self-sufficiency was over, and eventually, Campbell was summarily exiled from the Sea Islands.
Once the Black were turned out of their newly given lands, A program was implemented to force the freemen into labor contracts with white investors. The land was either returned to its Confederate owners or leased to Northern entrepreneurs. Freedmen who protested against outrageously unfair contract stipulations and inflated prices at the White-run company stores, or who resisted signing the contracts, were arrested, punished and many were worked to death after they were leased to public works projects, road gangs, levee construction and railroads.
Campbell managed to regroup on the mainland at an abandoned plantation he purchased and was joined by a hundred people on the land to form the Belleville Farmers Association. For several years, this project was troubled by bad weather and poor harvests and inadequate support by private agencies.
Some positive changed did take place and it seemed for a while that Blacks would experience a reprieve. In 1867 Radical Republicans gained control of Congress and overpowered the conservative president Johnson and a number of Reconstruction acts were passed over veto.
Among these acts, the former Confederate states had to
--register all qualified voters, under federal supervision;
--elect delegates to rewrite the state constitution into compliance with the united States Constitution;
--elect new state legislatures;
--ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, which established full African-American citizenship.
Under these federal guidelines McIntosh County fall of 1867 elected Tunis Campbell, and along with 37 blacks among 170 delegates to the state constitutional convention. Campbell developed a voting bloc to propose and enact legislation favorable to freedmen, such as passing a bill eliminating imprisonment for debt.. With the new constitution Campbell and two other blacks were elected to the Georgia State Senate.
Although success was sweet, it was short lasting, for on 12 September 1868, Campbell and other blacks were expelled when racist argued that "the right to vote did not imply the right to hold office".
In December 1869, in response to the steady rise of Ku Klux Klan terrorism, the United States Congress restored military rule in Georgia. The expelled legislators were reinstated, and for what remained of his term Campbell served on committees on education, the penal system, and the military. he introduced fifteen bills furthering black rights, most of which were unsuccessful. His great concerns were access to voting and education.
Campbell lost his Senate seat in 1872 in an election mired in fraud. He continued to serve as a justice of the peace; in that capacity he was most prominent defending the rights of black sailors on the ships docking in Darien, an active port. His vigilance on their behalf, and his willingness to fine and imprison the white ships' captains who abused them, incurred the wrath of local whites.
Campbell had been a major irritant to the white power structure for years. they recognized his influence over McIntosh County African Americans, and they despised him for it. Planters claimed That Campbell's opposition to contract labor and his constant advice to the freedmen cost the planters hundreds of thousands of dollars. By the mid-1870s the momentum of national politics was conservative again, and white "Redeemer" forces, dedicated to restoring the "'old order," were seizing power throughout the South.
The former Confederates engaged in a plot with racist Judge Henry Tompkins, a Confederate veteran sworn to destroy him. He indicted Campbell for falsely imprisoning white men (the abusive ship captains in Darien) and set the bail so high that blacks were not able to redeem Campbell, who was thus forced to serve one year of hard labor in Georgia's penal system.
Conditions in these camps were appalling, and the treatment accorded the men were brutal. In the late 1870s, convicts leased to one railroad company in South Carolina suffered a 45% annual death rate; the death rate across the South averaged between 16 and 25%.
There were some attempts at exposure and reform: in one such brave effort, a United States district judge examined the court records of one Georgia county for one month and disclosed that 149 people--almost all of them black--had been sentenced to an average of 19 years each at leased labor for crimes no more serious than walking on the grass and spitting on dirt streets. The maverick Southern reformer George Washington Cable published and lectured against convict leasing. But the system was too profitable for both the state and the contractor for reform to have a chance. In the mid-1889s Georgia's United States Senator, Joseph E. Brown, held a twenty-year lease on three hundred, "healthy" convicts, for which he paid the state the sum of seven cents per man per working day.
Tunis Campbell entered that world in January of 1876 Tunis Campbell entered the dark world of convict leasing when a plantation owner bought his labor contract from the state of Georgia for $8.75.
A petition for pardon was offered to the Governor of Georgia, James M. Smith, for Rev. Tunis G. Campbell. The facts of the case seemed to warrant an effort to obtain clemency but it was denied.
After little more than a year, Campbell was released in January 1877 and moved to Washington, D.C. where he lobbied for federal protection of African American rights. He returned to Georgia briefly in 1882 for a Republican convention in Atlanta and visited McIntosh County and was received by the local colored population with "support and affection." Campbell never returned to Georgia and died in Boston 4 December 1891.
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