The Testimony of Henry Adams, Freedman: Hope, Terror, and Exodus in the Post-Civil War South

A FORGOTTEN EPISODE FROM THE ERA OF RECONSTRUCTION: An extraordinary American hero travels to the nation’s capital to tell an unforgettable story of violence, resistance, and social action in the post-Civil War South.

For Black History Month, the never-before-published testimony with an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Steven Hahn.

In March 1880 a committee of the U.S. Senate investigating the ongoing ＂Negro Exodus＂ from the South heard two days of testimony from an extraordinary American. A freedman, former soldier, laborer, faith healer, political activist, and sometime undercover government operative, Henry Adams was one of the leaders of the exodus movement in Louisiana. In his exchanges with the senators and his written testimony, Adams chronicles:

• the nightmarish violence and insidious economic exploitation inflicted upon the freedpeople by ＂the very men who held us slaves＂
• the defiant Black resistance of voters determined to go to the polls in the face of systemic terrorism
• his work with ＂the committee,＂ a secret group of workingmen who sought to learn ＂the true condition of our race＂ throughout the South.

The Testimony of Henry Adams, Freedman presents the entirety of Adams’s questioning by the committee and the five documents he submitted for the record, including the enumeration of hundreds of cases of atrocities perpetrated in the cause of white supremacy.

This fascinating, never-before-available text provides an illuminating perspective on Reconstruction as it was experienced ＂from below,＂ far removed from Washington and the major cities of the South. Adams’s remarkable testimony is a tribute to Black determination and self-reliance that looks forward to the Great Migration of the twentieth century. It is also a terrifying and timely reminder of the fragility of democracy in the face of unrestrained lawlessness.

HENRY ADAMS was born into slavery in Georgia in 1843 and brought to Louisiana at age seven. Emancipated in June 1865, he learned to read and write while serving in the army. In 1869 Adams settled in Caddo Parish and worked as a wood cutter, mill operator, and sometime plantation manager. He also became active in ＂the committee,＂ a secretive group of Black workingmen dedicated to learning ＂the true condition of our race.＂ There is no record of him after 1884.

STEVEN HAHN is professor of history at New York University and the author of A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 (2016) and Illiberal America: A History (2024). A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003) was awarded the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes.