Reckoning with Race. Gene Dattel
totaled seven thousand (0.3 percent of the population).
Meanwhile the white population of Minnesota was exploding, rising from 169,000 during the Civil War to more than two million in 1910. Neighboring Wisconsin had a similar growth trajectory with blacks intentionally almost invisible. Wisconsin’s black population in 1860 numbered 1,171 (0.1 percent) and was still denied suffrage by an overwhelming vote. The state had been admitted to the Union in 1848; by 1855 the Wisconsin State Colonization Society was established to send its thousand-plus blacks to Africa. Strapped for money, the Society managed only to pass an ineffectual resolution. The intent was nonetheless clear: Wisconsin wanted no blacks. Wisconsin Republican newspapers cited fears that emancipation would produce a “Negro infestation.” Wisconsin Democrats raised the specter of miscegenation. If blacks could vote, they asserted, black men would “marry our sisters and daughters and smutty wenches . . . [would marry] our brothers and sons.” Republican senator James R. Doolittle favored colonization in order to “keep our Anglo-Saxon institutions as well as our Anglo-Saxon blood pure and uncontaminated.” Doolittle wanted blacks colonized in Florida.
Ultimately the fallback position of Northerners was the containment of blacks in the South. In 1863 the Wisconsin Assembly determined that the most effective way to keep blacks out of the state was to ensure that they had “freedom, homes and employment” in the South. Northern blacks, it was thought, could be coaxed into the South. They could not compete in the North because the Northern boss was an “exacting taskmaster” while the Southern manager “has less repugnance to the black man’s shiftless ways. They understand each other better.”
Even as Wisconsin and other states in the North were excluding or discouraging black settlement, they were attempting to augment their sparse populations by actively promoting white European immigration. Wisconsin formalized its white immigration policy in an 1852 law that established an immigration commissioner to be located in New York City. (Iowa passed a similar law in 1860.) The commissioner’s office was a conduit for information about Wisconsin to white European immigrants and worked with a Dr. Hildebrandt, a Wisconsin native who represented America in Bremen, Germany. The office disseminated thirty thousand German-language brochures, half of them to Europe. Wisconsin continued to publish these brochures throughout the nineteenth century.
Thousands of immigrants sought information at Wisconsin’s New York office. The orchestrated effort involved contact with foreign consuls as well as railroad and steamship companies. Immigration to the state surged. In 1853 Wisconsin received the following white European immigrants: 16,000 to 18,000 Germans; 4,000 to 5,000 Irish; 3,000 to 4,000 Norwegians; and 2,000 to 3,000 others. The recruitment efforts succeeded; by 1900, 710,000 (34 percent) of Wisconsin’s two million people were of German lineage. There was never an attempt to entice blacks from the South.
Each of the states of the Old Northwest followed the same pattern of black exclusion, either by law or by custom. In 1860 Iowa had a truly inconsequential black population of 1,059 (0.2 percent) in a total of 673,844 residents, yet exclusion laws appeared as early as 1827. Iowa demanded from entering blacks a $500 bond and proof of freedom; intermarriage was made illegal; blacks could not serve in the militia; jury service was prohibited; nor could they vote. In 1857 Iowans voted 49,511 to 8,489 against black suffrage. The state’s colonization society encouraged formal recognition of Liberia so that Iowa’s black residents would be tempted to move there. “As long as blacks are here,” declared J. C. Hall at the Iowa colonization convention of 1857, “they must be treated as outcasts and inferiors.” As the threat of black migration eased, Iowa abandoned its exclusion laws in 1864.
Michigan’s anti-black, anti-slavery stance was similar to that of its neighbors. By 1860 the state had 6,799 black residents (0.9 percent of the total population). A $500 bond requirement for entering blacks was passed in 1827; black suffrage was prohibited in 1836 with the comment, “[T]he negro belonged to a degraded caste of mankind.” A law against miscegenation followed in 1846. The Radical Republican senator Jacob M. Howard was upset when confronted in 1862 with the possible relocation of 123,000 freed slaves to Michigan. After it became apparent that blacks would be contained in the South, Senator Howard voiced his opinion that freed slaves “ought to be created as equals before the law.” He promoted black equality only when they were “at a distance.” The city of Detroit suffered its first race riot in 1863.
Lincoln and the Aftermath of War
The abolition of race-based slavery, the close of the Civil War, and the tragic death of Abraham Lincoln concluded an era. The posthumous Lincoln has been given supernatural powers by historians. Despite their efforts to divine what Lincoln’s Reconstruction policy might have been, they shed little light on postwar events.
Lincoln did, however, espouse the very American view that “every man should have the means and opportunity of benefiting his condition.” To deprive anyone of the “fruits of their labor,” he declared, was tyranny. The black man therefore had a “right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, [in that regard] he is my equal . . . and the equal of every living man.” Lincoln was adamant about the need for work; his philosophy of “root, hog, or die” applied to blacks as well as whites. But he was noticeably silent on specifics. He expressed no views on land redistribution and the famous concept of “forty acres and a mule” for the freedmen.
Frederick Douglass and other blacks, in anticipation of Booker T. Washington, echoed the self-help and economic independence philosophy of Abraham Lincoln. “Learn trades or starve,” advised Douglass in 1853, “and learn not only to black boots but to make them.” In 1831 black state and national conventions recommended “their people to shift from menial jobs to mechanical and agricultural pursuits, to form joint-stock companies, and mutual-savings banks . . . to pool capital for the purchase of real estate, and to patronize Negro-owned businesses.” More adamantly, the “Negro Convention” of 1848 antedated Booker T. Washington’s views on the critical nature of economic self-sufficiency: “To be dependent is to be degraded. . . . Men may indeed pity us, but they cannot respect us.” Black attitudes, according to the historian Leon Litwack, held that “it was nonsensical for Negroes to prate about political and social equality” without economic independence. Avoiding the dependency trap meant understanding the values of business and proper training.
Historians have pushed the idea of the “evolving” Lincoln beyond the boundaries of nineteenth-century America’s racial realities. Lincoln’s last public address, on April 11, 1865, is said to foreshadow his intent to deliver full citizenship with political and economic equality to the freed slaves. Lincoln said he would “prefer that [suffrage] were now conferred on the very intelligent and those who serve our cause as soldiers.” This was not a dictum or ultimatum, it was a recommendation to the state of Louisiana. This limited endorsement of suffrage for freedmen has been given broad and speculative meaning that has had a soothing effect on the conscience of later generations of white Americans.
Lincoln’s nod to the “very intelligent” black is a recurring theme in American history, where one can find a pattern of recognition by white America of a black elite. The few blacks accorded this status were useful to white America as role models for progress as well as persons of influence within the black community. In the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville, that most famous of all foreign observers of America, remarked on the separation of the races and on the possibility of an individual attaining equality. He was convinced that “the white and black races will [never] . . . be upon an equal footing.” Tocqueville does allow that an “isolated [black] individual may surmount the prejudices . . . of his race . . . but a whole people cannot rise above itself.” And the exceptional individual would have little impact on the whole of society. Lincoln’s invitation to the powerful black abolitionist, orator, and writer Frederick Douglass to visit the White House for a meeting in 1862 acknowledges white America’s recognition of a black elite. This instance, and later when Theodore Roosevelt hosted Booker T. Washington for dinner at the White House, were gestures to the black community of the esteem for a few exceptional individuals.
On February 26, 1865, the New York Times candidly predicted and endorsed black separatism in the South and the possibility of the occasional