Goldsboro Headlight, 6 November 1889.

This brief, disparaging piece appeared in the Goldsboro Headlight in 1889, but very well could have described attitudes in Wilson County. Silas Herring was an African-American Wayne County native, but Alabama-born, former Confederate Robert A. “Peg-Leg” Williams criss-crossed the Upper South as a labor agent, partnering with local Black men to entice African-Americans to migrate to the Deep South.

On 27 November 1889, the Wilson Mirror reprinted a Goldsboro Argus piece that described Williams and Herring as “railroad hirelings and speculators.” “However much the desire should be divided among our people — and by this we mean the white people — for the negro to exodus this country or remain, the solid, stubborn truth shall not be kept from the poor, deluded, half-informed negro, that this is his home, the climate of his nature; that our people are the most tolerant and generous in the world; and his best friends, and that, therefore, he should stay right here where his associations date back through the centuries; where his faults, and there are many (but who of us is without faults?) are borne with from custom; where his privileges as a free citizen are unquestioned and untrammeled, and where his destinies are linked by law with the whites, who, under a Democratic administration, have for twenty years paid 90 per cent. of his government and education, while he has furnished 90 per cent. of the crime and ignorance of the State.” Best friends, indeed.

The 20 December 1889 issue of the Wilmington Messenger chimed in with mockery, noting that “Peg leg Williams and Silas Herring have not dissolved copartnership. Peg leg is now in [Goldsboro], and he and Silas are as active as bees in inducing the ‘coons’ of this section to leave their homes of peace and plenty here, to go the far off miasmatic lands of the West, there to die like cattle with the black tongue.”

“Peg-Leg” Williams is memorialized in 100 Americans Making Constitutional History: A Biographical History, edited by Melvin I. Urofsky. Described as the most famous and successful of Southern “emigrant agents, Mississippi-born Williams, a Civil War veteran, assisted 16,000 African-Americans in leaving North Carolina in the wake of discriminatory labor laws passed in 1889.”

Working as an agent for plantation owners and railroad companies from the lower Mississippi Valley states and Texas, Williams recruited laborers to work their immense cotton plantations or, in the case of the railroads, buy up their vast acreages of former federal land. Williams generally paid transportation costs for migrating families, who would have been required to enter into onerous agreements to repay the money the planters had fronted to Williams.

Daily Journal (New Bern, N.C.), 28 May 1890.

Mecklenburg Times (Charlotte, N.C.), 25 December 1891.

After two years of perceived depredations, in 1891 the North Carolina legislature joined other states in enacting a law aimed directly at men like Williams, imposing one thousand dollar fees on labor recruiters, who overwhelmingly targeted African-Americans. The law stayed on the books for seven years.

The Wilmington Messenger, 5 November 1901.

By 1913, Peg-Leg Williams was the stuff of nostalgia….

The News-Herald (Morganton, N.C.), 3 July 1913.

… and as late as 1947, his name and work could still inspire journalists. If you skim the condescension off the top, this lengthy piece is noteworthy for details about Exoduster life provided by men and women who made the journey (or knew someone who had.)

News and Record (Greensboro, N.C.), 26 October 1947.