George Washington Williams

American historian

• Born: October 16, 1849
• Birthplace: Bedford Springs, Pennsylvania
• Died: August 2, 1891
• Place of death: Blackpool, England

As the author of the first reliable history of African Americans and as a prominent political spokesman and observer, Williams contributed to the development of African American identity and racial pride.

Early Life

George Washington Williams was the son of a free black man named Thomas Williams, who is believed to have been the son of a white Virginia planter and a slave woman. Sometime during the 1840’s, the elder Williams moved to Bedford Springs, where he met and married Ellen Rouse, a light-skinned local black woman. George was the second of five children born to the couple. His childhood was a difficult one, plagued by frequent moves, family instability, a scant education, and Thomas Williams’s heavy drinking. Although the elder Williams eventually tempered his lifestyle enough to serve as the minister of a black church in Newcastle, Pennsylvania, George became incorrigible and was placed in a refuge house for delinquent juveniles. There, he discovered literature and religion, interests that were to permeate his adult life.

Drawn by a sense of adventure, Williams went off to fight in the Civil War at the age of fourteen. By falsifying his age and using an assumed name, he was able to enlist in a black Union army regiment in August, 1864. He saw action in the closing battles in Virginia, including the campaigns against Petersburg and Richmond. After the war, his unit was transferred to Texas, but he soon left it and joined the revolutionary forces that were fighting to overthrow Emperor Maximilian, an Austrian interloper on the Mexican throne. Shortly before Maximilian’s capture and execution in 1867, Williams returned to the United States and reenlisted. He served for more than a year as a cavalry sergeant at military posts in Kansas and Indian Territory (modern Oklahoma) until discharged in 1868.

Although untrained and barely literate, Williams was licensed as a Baptist preacher shortly after his military career ended. In September, 1870, he enrolled at the Newton Theological Institution, a Baptist school and seminary near Boston, Massachusetts. Williams completed both his general studies and his theological training in an astonishingly brief four years and was recognized as a good student. In June, 1874, he was graduated from Newton, was ordained in the Baptist clergy, and married Sarah A. Sterrett. A prominent member of Boston’s black community during his Newton years, Williams was named pastor of the city’s historic, black Twelfth Baptist Church in 1873. While in that position, he joined other black leaders in working for passage of a national civil rights bill, publicly voiced his concerns about the course of Reconstruction, and penned a history of the local congregation. When he resigned his pastorate in October, 1875, it was to pursue these two emerging interests—politics and history.

Life’s Work

One month before resigning his Boston pastorate, Williams went with his wife and infant son to Washington, D.C., which had become a gathering place for many of the nation’s black leaders. With their assistance, he soon inaugurated a new weekly newspaper called The Commoner , which he hoped would reach beyond the “chilling shadow of slavery” and become “a powerful agent for reorganizing the race.” Although he believed that it would attract a national audience, few subscribed and he was unable to sustain it beyond eight issues. The brevity of his encounter with the national political scene merely heightened Williams’s interest in politics.

In February, 1876, Williams was called to the pastorate of the Union Baptist Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. He quickly made his mark on the local black community as an energetic pastor, an articulate spokesperson and imaginative leader in racial affairs, and a regular contributor to the Commercial—a leading local newspaper—on a variety of local and national issues. He also became active in local Republican Party circles, rapidly gaining control of the party machinery in the city’s black precincts. Nominated as a candidate for the Ohio legislature in 1877, Williams proved a strong campaigner, but he was overwhelmingly defeated as many white voters openly refused to cast their ballot for a black man. After this taste of politics, he left the ministry and briefly published a newspaper called The Southwestern Review (1877-1878). When it folded, the peripatetic Williams embarked upon the study of law with Alphonso Taft, the father of President William Howard Taft and a politician of national prominence in his own right. He later attended lectures at the Cincinnati Law School.

Continuing to campaign extensively for Republican candidates, Williams proved to be particularly adept at “waving the bloody shirt”—linking the Democratic Party with the Confederacy, slavery, and responsibility for starting the Civil War. In 1879, he was again nominated as a candidate for the Ohio legislature. Despite widespread criticism, he campaigned hard, openly courted white support, and was narrowly elected. Williams distinguished himself as an active legislator, sponsoring several reform measures, including legislation to control the use of alcoholic beverages. On occasion he became the center of controversy, as when he called for a civil rights resolution after encountering racist treatment in Columbus restaurants, hotels, and newspapers. He also unsuccessfully sought the repeal of a state law prohibiting interracial marriages.

In 1881, Williams refused to seek a second term in the Ohio legislature. His announced reason was the desire to devote his time to historical research and writing. The centennial celebrations of American independence in 1876 had heightened his early interest in history. Moving to Columbus, he began work on a general history of African Americans. A diligent and thorough researcher, he succeeded in completing a massive, two-volume study of his race from its African origins through the end of Reconstruction. This work, entitled History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880 (1883), established Williams as a capable historian and was well received by leading eastern magazines and newspapers. The New YorkIndependent called it “an epoch-making book.”

Although sales of his first book were disappointing, Williams began work on a second, which was eventually published as History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861-1865 (1888). The work proved to be much broader than the title, examining the role of black soldiers in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Haitian Revolution, and other conflicts. This work was widely heralded, but the subsequent appearance of Joseph T. Wilson’s Black Phalanx (1888), another history of black participation in the Civil War, limited sales and publicity for the volume. Williams also researched a two-volume history of Reconstruction, but it was never published. He experimented with other literary forms, penning a play on the African slave trade and a novel on the subject of interracial marriage. Although the novel was rejected by numerous publishers, its first eight chapters were eventually published in the Indianapolis World (1888), a black newspaper.

Shortly after the publication of his History, Williams returned to Massachusetts to live. Although he practiced law and stumped the state for Republican candidates, he derived most of his income from lecturing on black history, Africa, and general literature. Delivering hundreds of lectures throughout the Northeast, he soon gained a reputation as an eloquent speaker, and the handsome, mustached Williams must have cut a striking figure for his audiences.

Williams maintained his interest in politics. On March 2, 1885, two days before leaving office, President Chester A. Arthur, a Republican, nominated him to serve as minister resident and consul general to Haiti. Although the Senate immediately confirmed him, and he was sworn in, the incoming Democratic administration of President Grover Cleveland refused him the post. He challenged the action in federal court but was denied redress. He abandoned the effort in 1889 after the newly inaugurated Republican president, Benjamin Harrison, appointed black leader Frederick Douglass to the post.

Depressed by his inability to obtain a diplomatic position, Williams turned his attention to Africa. In 1884, he had written articles on African geography, and, in testimony before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, he had urged American recognition of the Congo Free State. In the years that followed, he visited Europe several times to attend conferences on the African slave trade and African missions. In 1889, he interviewed King Leopold IIII28IIII II of Belgium about his efforts to bring commerce and Christianity to Africa’s Congo basin. When S. S. McClure of the Associated Literary Press commissioned him to write a series of articles on the Congo, and railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington asked him to report on the progress of the Congo railway being built by the Belgians, he visited the African continent.

Although King Leopold attempted to discourage him, Williams sailed for Africa in January, 1890. He spent four months exploring the Congo from the mouth of the Congo River to its headwaters at Stanley Falls. The trip revealed the Belgians’ inhuman exploitation of black Africans. Williams responded by publishing An Open Letter to His Serene Majesty, Leopold II, King of the Belgians (1890), which extensively criticized Belgian colonial policy in the Congo. After visiting Portuguese and British possessions in East Africa, Williams went to Egypt, where he contracted tuberculosis. By the spring of 1891, he had improved enough to return to England, where he intended to write a full report of the European colonial impact on Africa. Concerned for his health, he hurried to the coastal city of Blackpool, where he hoped that the Irish Sea air and the curative powers of a local spa would restore his health. They did not. Williams died of tuberculosis and pleurisy on August 2, 1891.

Significance

George Washington Williams contributed many “firsts” to the African American experience. He was one of only a few African Americans outside the South to serve in a state legislature during the nineteenth century. Representing Hamilton County, Ohio, he distinguished himself during a single term in the Ohio legislature.

Williams is best remembered for his contributions to the writing of African American history. His books were the first reliable studies of the black role in America’s past. On the cutting edge of historical research, Williams gathered information from thousands of volumes, but also employed church minutes, school statistics, newspapers, and oral interviews in compiling his works. This took him on an extensive tour of Western military posts, where he interviewed numerous black veterans of the Civil War.

Williams explored beyond the stereotypes and prejudices in his research on the war and thus reclaimed a place for black Americans in the history of the American Revolution, the antislavery movement, and the Civil War. He also delved into African history and was among the first historians to provide a realistic portrayal of the African kingdoms of Benin, Dahomey, Yoruba, and Ashanti. The epic quality of his work brought it attention in major magazines and newspapers, which was highly unusual for black research at that time. In researching his history of black soldiers in the Civil War, Williams became one of the first students of that conflict to use the official records of the Union and Confederate armies. Although he eventually moved away from historical studies, he left his mark on future investigations of the African American experience. Twentieth century black leader W. E. B. Du Bois called Williams “the greatest historian of the race.”

Williams was the first African American to investigate extensively European colonialism in Africa. His criticism at first stirred controversy in the United States and abroad, but later colonial observers substantiated his claims. As a result, the Congo Reform Association was founded in 1904 to crusade against conditions in the Congo Free State. In 1890, these accomplishments prompted readers of the Indianapolis Freeman to vote Williams one of the ten greatest African Americans in history.

Bibliography

Franklin, John Hope. George Washington Williams: A Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. The only reliable biography of Williams, this well-documented and balanced study is based on years of extensive research in a wide variety of obscure sources.

Gerber, David A. Black Ohio and the Color Line: 1860-1915. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976. This valuable, well-documented work provides a context for understanding Williams’s Ohio years. It includes a lengthy discussion of black institutions, politics, and race relations in Ohio during the 1870’s and 1880’s.

Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Hochschild’s chronicle of Belgium’s tyrannical rule of the Congo includes information about Williams’s interview with King Leopold II, his visit to the colony, and his indictment of Leopold’s regime.

Sanoff, A. P. “Tracking a Pioneer: Forgotten Case.” U.S. News & World Report 109, no. 11 (September 17, 1990): 53. Briefly describes how historian John Hope Franklin spent almost forty years conducting research and preparing his biography of Williams.

Slade, Ruth. King Leopold’s Congo: Aspects of the Development of Race Relations in the Congo Independent State. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Examines King Leopold II’s policies in the Congo Free State. It credits Williams as one of the first critics of colonialism to demonstrate that Belgian officials in the Congo violated international trading practices established by European diplomats.

Thorpe, Earl E. Black Historians: A Critique. New York: William Morrow, 1971. A general overview of African American historians from 1836 to the present. It critically analyzes Williams’s historical writings and compares him with Joseph T. Wilson and other black historians of his time.

Williams, George Washington. History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. 2 vols. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883. Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1968. The best way to understand Williams’s historical contribution is to pursue this massive, two-volume study of African Americans from colonial days through Reconstruction. It has been conveniently reprinted in a single volume by Arno Press and The New York Times.