Reckoning with Race. Gene Dattel
“Northern capital should flow into these rich cotton-lands on the borders of the Atlantic and Gulf. . . . The negro race . . . would exist side by side with the white for centuries being constantly elevated by it, individuals of it rising to an equality with the superior race. . . . [Cotton production requires] the white brain employing the black labor. . . .”
The tendency to select gifted individuals from the black masses continues in the twenty-first century. The white psyche has always had room for a black elite. During the 2008 presidential race, the Senate Democratic Majority Leader, Harry Reid, referred to the candidate Barack Obama as notably “light-skinned” and having no black dialect “unless he wanted one.” In the same year, then Democratic senator Joe Biden extraordinarily remarked, “I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. . . . I mean that’s storybook, man.”
Some in the black community have recognized the limits of Lincoln’s racial enlightenment. The black journalist Lerone Bennett Jr.’s book Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (1999) describes the reactionary nature of Lincoln’s actions. The book, published by the black media giant Johnson Publishing Company, also the publisher of Ebony magazine, has been widely criticized by white historians. In his 1965 book, Robert Penn Warren asked some black “big brass” what they thought about Lincoln. “I think that Lincoln is vastly overrated,” said Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell. “I think that he did nothing at all except that which he had to do, and he did it in terms of winning a war.” Roy Wilkins, the venerable executive director of the NAACP, was more nuanced: “I have mixed feelings about Lincoln. . . . I think that you’d have to judge Lincoln in the context of his climate, and in that context I still would give him . . . credit.” Malcolm X thought Lincoln “did more to trick Negroes than any other man in history.” Malcolm put Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, and Eleanor Roosevelt in the same category as Lincoln. Interestingly, in 1964 the White Citizens’ Councils exalted Lincoln as the “patron saint” of racial segregation. “Negro colonization,” wrote historian John Hope Franklin, “seemed almost as important to Lincoln as emancipation.” Lincoln, according to Franklin, hoped for colonization until the end of the war.
Lincoln’s greatness needs no exaggeration. Without Lincoln, America would have splintered. He saved the Union and hastened the end of America’s most enduring tragedy, race-based slavery. White historians wince when blacks challenge Lincoln’s racial credentials. But Lincoln, despite the efforts of historians, did not conform to the racial standards of the twenty-first century.
The closing scene of the Civil War and the practical end of race-based slavery occurred at Appomattox, Virginia, on April 9, 1865. The Emancipation Proclamation could now take full effect. The surrender ceremony had none of the drama of the bloody war or the struggle for human dignity and human rights in the land of the free and the home of the brave. There was no conversation; the signing of documents took twenty-three minutes. The cordial and respectful interaction between the victor, General Ulysses S. Grant, and the vanquished, General Robert E. Lee, was symbolic of the reunion of white America. Black America would remain excluded from the American mainstream.
What transpired at the small courthouse would be quite instructive for the black experience after Emancipation. The meeting of the opposing generals is particularly noteworthy because of the current demonizing of Confederate symbols, including statues of Lee. Both Lee and Grant were antagonists in a war that felled hundreds of thousands of soldiers, but the scene at Appomattox was anything but vengeful. Both generals had been graduates of the US Military Academy. Grant would become president of the United States for eight years of the postwar Reconstruction period; Lee would live a quiet life as president of what is now Washington and Lee University.
Lee was immediately paroled. Despite the fact that Grant viewed the Confederate cause as immoral, his respect for the Confederate general was genuine. Grant recorded that his “own feelings were sad and depressed.”
I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and so valiantly. . . . [Lee and I] soon fell into a pleasant conversation about old army times. . . . [O]ur conversation grew so pleasant that I almost forgot the object of our meeting.
In the annals of military history, the discussion between and the disposition of the two warring combatants at this surrender was arguably unique. On June 13, 1865, a mere two months after Lee surrendered, Grant ordered a pardon application for Lee with his personal “earnest recommendation.” Within five years the leader of the secessionist army would be hosted in the White House by President Grant. Again, the friendly invitation by the victorious head of state to his defeated foe is unusual, to say the least.
As the historian C. Vann Woodward wrote, “. . . when the chips were down, the overwhelming preponderance of views of the North on [black equality] were no different from those of the South—and never had been.” But the key difference between North and South was that four million black people lived in the South before the Civil War, compared with only 250,000 in the North; and unlike the North, the South depended on black labor for cotton production.
Black America would remain excluded from the American mainstream. A combination of white Southern racial intransigence and white Northern racial antipathy would effectively chain blacks to the cotton fields until World War I. Though unstated, a racial containment policy was in effect, sanctioned by white America. The issues of equality, black political and social rights, separation, exclusion, and economic independence had uncomfortably surfaced in the white antebellum North. Only the question of race-based slavery had been put to rest. America would struggle to resolve its myriad remaining racial problems.
1 There is a current ring to the diffusion policy. The founding father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, an ethnic Chinese, in 2013 recommended to the United States a policy of diffusion. Singapore, a multiracial entity—Chinese, Tamil, and Malay—did not employ diffusion because of its small area, but it had adopted English as the national language in order to promote social cohesion and discourage ethnic competition. Lee thought that large numbers of Hispanics, if they settled in one area such as California, would threaten the successful Anglo-Saxon culture there. He was not speaking about race or the complete negation of Hispanic heritage. “If they come in dribs and drabs and you scatter them across America, then you will change their culture,” Lee continued, “but if they come in large numbers . . . and stay together in California, then their culture will continue, and they may well affect the Anglo-Saxon culture around them.” Lee, an admirer of American society and values, had a keen sense of the proper place of culture within ethnic groups. His aim was the social cohesion necessary for a nation to function effectively.
The diffusion idea was also raised during the 1960s civil rights era by Georgia senator Richard Russell, who suggested that blacks be distributed to the states in proportion to their population.
The Containment of Blacks in the South
If the freedman does not work in the cotton field, “let him starve and exterminate himself if he will, and so remove the negro question,—still we must have cotton.”
—EDWARD ATKINSON, BOSTON ABOLITIONIST AND SUPPLIER OF ARMS TO JOHN BROWN, 1861
. . . these imperturbable darks. . . . The more I see of them, the more inscrutable do they become, and the less that I like them. . . . It is discouraging to see how utterly wanting in character and conscience these people [the freedmen] seem to be, and how much more hopeful they appear at a distance than near to.