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The Return of the Eighth of August

by Jack Neely

This Sunday is the Eighth of August. If that date means something to you, there’s a good chance you’re over 50 and black. Aug. 8 was, for half a century, the one day of the year that black people were allowed into Chilhowee Park. It was known here and in a few pockets around the country, as Emancipation Day, or Freedom Day.

According to tradition, it was the day that Andrew Johnson, then military governor of the Union-occupied parts of Tennessee, freed his own personal slaves.

Johnson is a weird creature in American history, a political duckbilled platypus, the ungainly result of tortured evolutionary mutations in the fetid moral swamp that was 1860s Tennessee. A loyal U.S. senator in Washington representing a state that no longer liked to think of itself as part of the United States, Johnson found himself, after a few Union victories, the U.S. military governor of the conquered parts of Tennessee.

In the wartime election of 1864, when one of Lincoln’s own generals was running against him in an apparently close race, the Republican convention chose as his running mate a politician from another party, from a state with few eligible voters and, thanks to its secessionist tendencies, no electoral votes.

Johnson, a Democrat on a Republican ticket, might have seemed more agreeable to Republican voters in the summer of ‘64 than he would have seemed a year or two earlier, when he still owned slaves.

When President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation to free slaves in the rebellious states, Johnson persuaded the president that, as secessionist states go, Tennessee wasn’t really all that rebellious—that Tennessee was, in fact, full of innocent Unionists who owned slaves and would be inconvenienced by losing them. So when the proclamation went into effect, on Jan. 1, 1863, Johnson’s slaves were still slaves. He waited until a little over seven months later to free them; according to the story, on Aug. 8.

There weren’t many of them—maybe six in all—in Greeneville. Johnson gave a couple of pro-emancipation speeches that month but didn’t mention his own gesture. Historians say there is, in fact, no record of the actual emancipation, but a strong oral tradition: “One day Mrs. Johnson called us all in and said we were free now,” one remembered years later. “She said we were free to go, or we could stay if we wanted to. We all stayed.”

It may have been the wise choice. Black or white, the fall of 1863 was a dangerous time to be footloose in East Tennessee. It was hardly more stable 14 months later, when the whole state was more securely in Union hands, and Gov. Johnson issued the order granting all Tennessee slaves their freedom. The slaveowner-turned-abolitionist later insisted that freedom wasn’t something that anyone could grant; it was an “inherent principle” in everyone. All a man could do, Johnson said, was “proclaim” freedom.

Most of his former slaves were still with the Johnson family in the spring of ‘65, when they moved to Washington—and, too soon, into the White House. Johnson’s former slaves lived there with him.

One of his youngest slaves was named William Andrew Johnson: Bill, or Uncle Bill, as he was known as an older man. He’d been allowed unusual liberties in Greeneville, even taking odd jobs. It was understood among the boy’s relatives that he was Andrew Johnson’s own son.

Emancipation came in so many fits and starts, as different pockets in the South got to know freedom, that black communities celebrated various days. The day Johnson freed his slaves was a day of celebration in Greeneville by 1871, when local blacks celebrated their freedom with a brass-band parade and picnics, and speeches, one of them given by former President Johnson himself. In 1888, a large delegation of blacks from Knoxville took the train to Greeneville to join in.

By the early 20th century, it was a big deal in Knoxville proper, especially at Chilhowee Park. In the 1930s, the “bronze mayor” J.H. Presnell, a popular figurehead who represented black Knoxville on ceremonial occasions, declared Aug. 8 to be “Emancipation Day.” He urged employers across the city to give black employees that day off. Many did. The anticipation of the day that blacks took over the park, from the picnic tables to the Ferris wheel, made Aug. 8 seem, to some children, better than Christmas.

Some suggest the Eighth of August in Knoxville was an ironic casualty of desegregation. Beginning in 1953, the city began liberalizing access to the park; Emancipation Day began to seem a thing of the past.

In later life, a couple of the freed Johnson slaves, including Bill Johnson, moved to Knoxville, and lived in the Mechanicsville area. Developers eager to give some stamp of authenticity to the new Andrew Johnson Hotel on Gay Street hired Johnson’s last surviving slave to be the doorman—so hotel patrons of the automobile era could be waited on by the same man who once waited on Andrew Johnson. What wasn’t spread around as much was the idea that he was the namesake’s son. “Bill” kept the job until his old feet gave out, and he returned to his first love, baking. He became the pastry chef at a popular restaurant, Weavers’ Grill, on Union Avenue.

The chef realized a dream when, responding to an Ernie Pyle column about Uncle Bill, Franklin Roosevelt invited Bill Johnson to be his guest at the White House. Johnson enjoyed his visit with the president in the big house where he had lived 70 years before. William Johnson died here in 1943.

Meanwhile, the pocket holiday celebrating the date that Bill and his family earned their personal freedom spread into Kentucky and beyond. It’s reportedly still a big deal in Paducah, an annual black homecoming day. A novel by Dawn Turner Trice, An Eighth of August, published in 2000, describes an Illinois family’s personal celebration of the day. Attorney Bill Murrah, who has taken a special interest in the holiday, found it’s celebrated as far away as Flint, Mich. The day was so popular that some believed it to be the date of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. But that was Jan. 1. Nor was it the day that the Constitution banned slavery everywhere; that was Dec. 6. But no one ever doubted that Aug. 8 was a better day for a picnic.

Some area communities, like Newport, have celebrated it all along. It’s been fairly quiet in Knoxville for the last half-century or so. This Sunday, a group of interested folks will attempt to revive the worthy holiday, with memories, and at least one elderly descendent of that small family of Johnson slaves. The event will take place Sunday at 4 p.m. at the First United Presbyterian Church Cemetery on College Street in the Mechanicsville neighborhood, where a couple of Andrew Johnson’s emancipated slaves are buried.

There have been other attempts to revive Knoxville’s Eighth of August celebration; maybe it’ll take this time.

August 5, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 32 © 2004 Metro Pulse