Testimony before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction on Atrocities in the South against Blacks

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The seven black men who testified before the Joint Committee came from diverse backgrounds. Their ages ranged from twenty-six to fifty. Some were freeborn, and others had been enslaved until the Emancipation Proclamation set them free. Two came from the North but had ties to Virginia. Despite these differences, however, all the men held positions of respect and authority in their local communities and acted as representatives both at the hearings of the Joint Committee and at a freedmen’s convention that took place concurrently with the hearings in Washington, D.C.

Daniel Norton, twenty-six and the youngest among the black Virginians, was a physician from New York State who had come south either during or immediately after the war to aid the freed population. Although he was born in Williamsburg, it is not known whether Norton had been a slave or free or at what age he went to New York. Unlike Norton, the Reverend William Thornton, forty-two, had been a slave until 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. Madison Newby, thirty-three and from Surrey County, had been free before the war and owned his own house and land. Richard Hill, thirty-four, was a former slave from Hampton. Alexander Dunlop, forty-eight, was also a free black before the war, worked as a blacksmith, and was a trustee of the First Baptist Church in Williamsburg. Thomas Bain, forty, was a freedman who had escaped Virginia on the Underground Railroad and was living in Massachusetts at the time of emancipation in 1863, when he returned to Virginia as a missionary. Edmund Parsons, who at fifty was the oldest of the men, had been a house slave in Williamsburg. These men’s testimony reveals the attitudes of whites toward their former slaves and their efforts to reassert their domination and supremacy in all areas of life. The testimony provides an important view into life in the immediate postwar South and the struggles between freedpeople and southern whites to define freedom there. It also gives insight into the problems of establishing a system of wage labor after slavery and freedpeople’s efforts to gain economic as well as political independence.