Lesson 162:
Callie Guy House
An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted on 10/26/2024
"If the government had the right to free us she had a right to make some provision for us and since she did not make it soon after Emancipation she ought to make it now."
One of the earliest leaders in the cause of post-enslavement reparations, Callie Guy House was herself born enslaved in (it is assumed) 1861, in Tennessee, even as the Civil War was underway. After emancipation her mother moved the family to Nashville, where she lived until the age of 22. While Callie did receive some primary school education there is no indication of her ever having graduated from any high school or higher institution. She married a William House and and they raised five children.
From there the story might otherwise have ended unremarkably, but for Callie happening upon a pamphlet that had been circulating amongst Black communities in central Tennessee in 1891; Freedmen's Pension Bill: A Plea for American Freedmen by Walter Vaughan. Modeled on the military service pensions of the Civil War, Vaughan's pamphlet was an appeal for the fair treatment of formerly enslaved people, and a proposal to grant pensions to people of color who had been emancipated. While the first such bill had already been introduced in Congress the previous year, it had gotten little traction. But the premise appealed to House and she set forth on a newfound personal mission.
By 1898 House had chartered the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association and was serving as its secretary --eventually to be its president. She travelled throughout the post-Reconstruction South, and spread the idea of former slave reparations to massed audiences. By 1900 the organization's membership stood at 300,000, and House had brought her eloquent arguments all the way to the floor of Congress.
In an era of rapidly expanding Jim Crow laws, House's efforts quite naturally entailed a lot of risk, and the ex-slave pension movement fell afoul of both the press and the government, which resorted to using (of all tactics) the Post Office Department's antifraud powers to concoct charges against House. In 1916, in the midst of a prolonged attempt to file a class action lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury department (see Johnson v. McAdoo, 1915), Callie and other leaders of the association were formally indicted by U.S. postmaster general on charges of mail fraud (on the argument that the printed circulars were promising "imminent" reparation payments). House was convicted and sentenced to nearly a year in prison in Jefferson City, Missouri. House did not return to her activist life after prison; she died in 1928 at the age of 67.
Read (and cite) Vaughan's original draft Freedman's Pension Bill, with annotations.
(It really is astonishing just how relevant the arguments remain, even today.)
Next page - Lesson 163: Melanie Campbell
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