Reckoning with Race. Gene Dattel
Bostonian, warned that “If . . . [the freedmen] refuse to work, neither shall they eat.” The abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher declared that “The black man is just like the white . . .—he should be left, & obliged to take care of himself & suffer & enjoy, according as he creates the means of either.” Boston anti-slavery advocate Edward Atkinson supplied the militant Kansas abolitionist John Brown with rifles. And he organized the Shaw Monument Fund, which raised money for the Saint-Gaudens statue that honored Robert Gould Shaw, the Boston officer who commanded the black Fifty-Fourth Regiment. But Atkinson agreed that the free black must remain in the South to produce cotton. If not, “Let him starve and exterminate himself if he will, and so remove the negro question . . .” In 1889 Atkinson was given an honorary degree by the University of South Carolina for his service to the South.
One needs only to read the pages of the New York Times during the late nineteenth century to see why Reconstruction was doomed from the outset. In 1863, in the midst of the war, the Times noted the “vast and most difficult subject of making [freedmen] work” after emancipation. In 1865 the Times wrote that free blacks should be cotton laborers under the supervision of “[w]hite ingenuity.” Further, the Times noted the need to civilize the freedmen over centuries, with some black individuals rising to equality with the white man. In 1883 the Times supported the dismantling of civil rights legislation. And it opposed special rights for blacks who “should be treated on their merits as individuals precisely as other citizens.” In 1874 the Times favored the racial integration of schools in sparsely settled areas of the country where there were few blacks. But in 1890, when a significant number of blacks were involved in a desegregation suit, the newspaper called blacks “foolish” for insisting that their children attend a white school. “Whoever insists upon forcing himself where he is not wanted,” thundered the Times, “is a nuisance, and his offensiveness is not in the least mitigated by the circumstance that he is black.”
Since the Union had not been sundered by the Civil War, and the country saved from the brink of self-destruction, it must have been asked, Who would assist the freedmen? Would their committed, long-term ally be Congress, the president, the Supreme Court, the Republican Party, the white soldiers of the Union Army, white Northern philanthropists, or Northern state governments?
Attitudes produced consequences. White Southern resistance to black equality immediately sought a racial caste system; white Northerners maintained their belief in black inferiority and second-class or, at best, probationary citizenship. Whites North and South in effect helped create a subordinate role for black Americans.
The former slave was trapped in the cotton South, unable to move in great numbers to the industrial North until the economic demands of World War I. In 1914, 90 percent of all African Americans lived in the South; 50 percent were involved with cotton production. If conditions in the South were so deplorable, why was there so little movement north? Now that they were free, why didn’t blacks flee the lands to which they had been chained for generations? Why didn’t they flock to Detroit, New York, and Chicago?
W. E. B. Du Bois, the black activist and giant of African American history, regarded the North as racially inhospitable. From 1865 until World War I, the white North imposed a containment policy that maintained the black population in Northern states at less than 2 percent. “Cannot a nation that has absorbed ten million foreigners into its political life without catastrophe,” wrote the prolific Du Bois, “absorb ten million Negro Americans into that same political life at less cost than their unjust and illegal exclusion will involve?” The white North dictum of keeping blacks “at a distance” persisted. Despite Emancipation and a brief phase of political enfranchisement, America’s pattern of racial animosity remained the same.
A consistent theme among the abolitionist Republicans who favored containment was expediency. The influential Massachusetts Republican congressman George S. Boutwell wrote, “Next to the restoration of the Union, and the abolition of slavery, the recognition of universal suffrage is the most important result of the war.” What did he really mean? In 1866 he warned that if black people were not given rights they would move north with disastrous consequences for white workers.
I bid the people, the working peoples of the North, the men who are struggling for subsistence, to beware of the day when the southern freedmen shall swarm over the borders in quest of those rights which should be secured to them in their native states. A just policy leaves the black man in the South. . . . An unjust policy on our part forces him from home [to the North], to the injury of the black man and the white man both of the North and the South. Justice and expediency are united in indissoluble bonds. . . .
Translation: If the freedmen are given rights, they will not move north. Boutwell even labeled the policy expedient! He further acknowledged that America’s racial dilemma was intractable, recommending that Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida be given exclusively to the freedmen. Boutwell was saying, in effect, that blacks could not be assimilated.
Reconstruction witnessed the passage of an impressive amount of legislation that supported the rights of freedmen. With these laws, the federal government (still dominated by white Northerners) attempted to impose rules and values that its own constituencies—even with their tiny black communities—had not accepted. The legislation had to be tested locally in states with large black populations, not in the North. It had to be interpreted through the judicial process; the new laws would require enforcement.
Abstract concepts of freedom and citizenship, embedded in Reconstruction legislation, were crushed when applied to the real world of nineteenth-century America. Reconstruction’s accomplishments—the fostering of public education for blacks and whites in the South, and the introduction of blacks to political and civil life—were overshadowed by subsequent events. The political rights of freedmen were taken away; their economic livelihood was chained to cotton production and an arbitrary legal system; and their physical and economic mobility within America was denied.
The result was an extension of the separation policy dictated by white America—from colonization abroad to segregated communities within towns, to containment in the South. The future would bring another form of separation—the urban ghetto in both North and South.
As the decades passed, what changed? How do the stories of some of the major actors in this ongoing drama illustrate themes—civil rights, economic progress, education, priorities, racial attitudes, relations between North and South? What, if anything, was reconstructed? Where did black America fit?
In April 1865 the South was devastated; the terms of Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House were unconditional. In theory, the white North could dictate terms and conditions to the utterly defeated South, which it had occupied. In just four years of fighting, 265,000 men of productive age in the white South were dead or incapacitated. In Mississippi alone, of the seventy-eight thousand soldiers and officers that the state provided to the Confederacy, 35 percent perished. Transportation and infrastructure throughout the South were disrupted as the war destroyed towns and cities, roads, railroads, and bridges. Farms were in disrepair. Large numbers of freedmen were destitute. One tiny but poignant statistic of devastation may be found in the Mississippi budget: in 1866, 20 percent of all state revenues were spent on artificial limbs for Confederate veterans.
The capture of the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, on May 10, 1865, presented an intriguing issue for the United States government. For two years Davis was incarcerated at Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia. Initially Northerners branded him a traitor and demanded his trial as a war criminal. The cabinet wanted to indict him as a conspirator in the assassination of President Lincoln, but no connecting evidence ever materialized. Abram Dittenhoefer, the self-proclaimed confidant of Lincoln, wrote that the president had intended to “let him die in peace on his Southern plantation.” Lincoln “would not permit any punishment to be inflicted on Jefferson Davis unless it were absolutely demanded by the American people.”
But President Andrew Johnson and his cabinet