As I’ve been thinking about and working on my upcoming Osher Class on the last three decades of the 19th century, one of my underlying assumptions was that I knew more about the history of race in this time period than I did about some of the other issues I planned to address. Boy, was I wrong.
I knew the broad outlines – The Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the various Reconstruction Acts in 1867, the three Constitutional amendments between 1868 and 1870, several Civil Rights acts, the abandonment of Reconstruction with the Presidential Election of 1876, and the emergence of Jim Crow by the 1890s – cemented by the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. I have found that there’s a whole lot of stuff that other people understand much better than I do, and my head is swimming in my effort to figure out how to tell this part of the story.
I’ve come to realize that the basic problem was that the Civil War managed to bring about the end of slavery, but it did not change the federal system that had allowed the institution to rise in the first place – the system that gave the states control over significant elements of the lives of individuals. I understand why this system came to exist in the first place, but I hadn’t thought about how the post-Civil War decision to retain its basic elements virtually assured that slavery would be recreated after the war was over.
Before I go on any further, I want to acknowledge the absolute tragedy that ensued because the United States chose not to address the real economic, social, and political issues created by Emancipation. A combination of the recalcitrant South and the increasingly indifferent North in the decade after the end of the war allowed the very significant gains made during Reconstruction to fade and ultimately be demolished. It’s easy for modern Americans to accept a cartoon version of the differences between the North and South before, during, and after the Civil War, but the reality was that most people in the North were not abolitionists and had little regard for the lives of black folks. Residents of many states that were not part of the slaveholding South had no interest in providing a good life for the African Americans who might think they could find safe haven in their states.
What did Reconstruction accomplish? During the years when freedmen were allowed to vote and former white Confederates were denied suffrage, southern states elected 2,000 freedmen to office (including 20 members of the House of Representatives and 2 United States Senators) and wrote state constitutions that protected the rights of the freed slaves. In addition, this “New Birth of Freedom” allowed for the creation of black churches, black schools, and black colleges, along with the reinstitution of stable marriage-based families, that would allow African Americans to push back against the repression that was to follow.
Another data point is important if you want to understand what went on after the Civil War. Emancipation had come with a tremendous cost to the Southern economy; by some estimates, in the cotton states in the deep South nearly half of all investment was in human beings. By a stroke of the pen, emancipation meant that the tiny slaveholding elite in the South had lost nearly everything. The newly established Freedman’s Bureau coupled this reality with the initial promise of land to the freedmen – the fabled “40 acres and mule” – providng the recipe for the disaster that ensued. I never though about where this land might come from – and I’ve come to understand that it was land confiscated from the plantation elites across the South. The interests of these formerly wealthy former elites was coupled with the fears of poor whites, who saw freedmen as competitors for the remnants of the economy of the South. This was a new alliance – Andrew Johnson, who became President after Lincoln, was against the Confederacy because he hated the plantation elites, not because he opposed slavery. He was more than willing to use the powers of the Presidency to take down the landowners. But it was a powerful alliance, as we were to learn in the succeeding decades.
It’s also important to recognize that Radical Reconstruction — including the military occupation of the South — required the support of the North in order to provide the soldiers necessary for this policy. Northerners, who had already lost millions of men during the war, were not interested in continued military service to maintain peace in the South.
After the Civil War, three questions needed to be answered:
How would we restore the Confederate States to the Union
What would be the status of former slaves?
More broadly, what did citizenship mean? If it did not include the right to vote, what did it mean? If it did require the right to vote, what did this mean for groups that did not have the right to vote? Primarily, this meant women – but in the last decades of the 19th century, it also meant Native Americans and Chinese immigrants.
One fundamental misunderstanding underpinned this problem: the North and the South saw Appomattox differently. Grant assumed that, because he had won, his principles had won. Lee admitted none of that; rather, he acknowledged simply that his side had lost on the battlefield, not that the Southern way of life had to change.
Restoring the Union meant, first and foremost, revitalizing the Southern economy, which had lost not only its labor force but the majority of its investment capital. The cotton-based economy of the South was not only profitable for the Southern states; it fueled America’s foreign trade and made possible the industrialization that was happening in the North. This became bound up with the question of the status of former slaves, whose labor was still seen as essential to rebuilding the Union.
The period of Reconstruction (lasting until 1877) was followed by a period that the South called Redemption – that is, a concerted effort to “redeem” the South from its negative postwar image and create what came to be called “the Lost Cause” mythology. During Redemption, southerners were generally restored to full civic participation as their voting rights were restored. They began to elect Democrats to office once again; the Republican elected officials, including the freedmen who had won office in the first wave of reconstructionist enthusiasm, soon began to lose elections.
One thing that made this more likely was the 14th amendment itself; by creating birthright citizenship, the amendment required the enumeration of freedmen as a whole person (rather than 3/5 of a person as the original constitution had required). This increased the number of representatives elected from the South (and increased the number of Electoral Votes controlled by Southern states), and allowed Democrats to resume control of state legislatures and the state’s Congressional delegation. By the 1890s, these redemptionist governments were reversing the gains achieved during Reconstruction by passing new laws and writing new state Constitutions, all with the purpose of relegating African Americans to a subordinate position.
With the waning of Northern commitment to reconstituting southern governments (rather than simply re-establishing the status quo ante bellum), white Southerners found ways to affirm the racial hierarchy that they had come to believe in during the 200 years of depending on an enslaved workforce.
In his first year in office, President Johnson ordered that the land confiscated by the Freedman’s Bureau be returned to the original owners. Then, the system of sharecropping required freedmen to enter into contracts with the very men who had formerly enslaved them. These contracts were more restrictive than the similar contracts offered to industrial labor in the North – the freedmen were not allowed to move during their contract year, they were not paid until after the harvest, and all of the data about the crop – the weight and value of the product – were determined by the landowner. Not surprisingly, the sharecroppers didn’t fare well under this system. They were kept in debt, routinely being shortchanged by the landowner and forbidden to leave the land until their debts were paid.
As Redemption governments were elected across the South, this contract labor system evolved to the point where freedmen who could not show that they had signed a labor contract could be accused of vagrancy and incarcerated at the whim of any white person who wanted to make the accusation. A white person could quit his job, move to another town (or state), and find work when they got there. A freedman was required to sign a contract for a year, and couldn’t move until he procured work elsewhere. Violating this meant he could be locked up.
This soon evolved into a convict labor system. Once locked up, convicts were subjected to the pernicious system of this system, by which incarcerated individuals could be rented out (at a profit) to businessmen or landowners and even resold if the opportunity arose. Under slavery, a slaveholder had an incentive to treat his property well enough that they didn’t die on him (thus robbing him of his investment); under the system of convict labor, a landowner or mine owner had no incentive to provide the bare minimum of care – if the convict died, the owner could simply go back to the prison and procure another worker.
Convict labor was cheap – costing 60-80% less than free workers. This served to depress wages to both blacks and whites across the South. Up to 90% of convict laborers were black men. The creative Redemption-era legislatures in the South dreamed up new crimes by which freedmen could be incarcerated and then rented out – often increasing arrests on bogus charges to fill the seasonal agricultural needs of the region. Convict workers died at the rate of 30-40% a year. Because the vast majority of convict workers were freedmen, the perception grew that criminality was something inherent in being Black. This would underpin opposition to racial equality until the present day.
Why didn’t I know about this?
It's important to recognize that although segregation was mandated only throughout most of the South, it was upheld by the Federal Government in a series of Supreme Court cases that restricted the applicability of the words of the post-Civil War amendments that were intended to provide for due process and equality. Those words ceased to have any meaningful impact by the time the 1890s rolled around.
By the 1890s, convict labor had been supplemented by a system of debt servitude – peonage. Outlawed in 1867 because it was a form of labor enforced against poor Mexicans or Native Americans in the West that seemed to violate the 13th amendment – which, you recall, was considered important during the heyday of Reconstruction in the decade after the Civil War. As the Redemption years evolved, it was reimposed. If a freedman was found to have violated the many new laws that were being written in Southern states, he could be fined and then jailed if he was unable to pay his fine. Once he was jailed, he could be held there and made available as a convict laborer until he paid his fines. This practice continued well into the 20th century, with the apparent approval of President Theodore Roosevelt, who pardoned Southerners convicted of peonage.
There’s a lot more to say about this topic, but this gives you something to chew on. It is important to recognize that African Americans disagreed over the proper course of action. Booker T. Washington (born into slavery in Virginia) and W.E.B. DuBois (born in Massachusetts after the Civil War) staked out the poles of this debate; Washington believed that if blacks pursued economic independence, they would, over time, earn social and economic independence. DuBois was not so patient, demanding that what he identified as “the talented tenth” of African Americans be afforded political opportunities so that they could legislate the kind of economic development that Washington wanted.
These two proponents of civil rights were received quite differently by white America. Washinton was invited to the White House; DuBois, founder of the NAACP, remained an activist and associated with Marcus Garvey and the Back-to-Africa movement of the 1920s. DuBois self-identified as a Socialist in the 1930s, was a pacifist in the 1940s, and relocated to Ghana at the age of 93 in 1961. After the US refused to renew his passport, he became a citizen of Ghana, although he never renounced his US citizenship. He died on August 27, 1963 – one day before the famous March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream.
It's not surprising that, whereas dozens of public schools are named after Booker T. Washington, only five schools bear the name of DuBois.
In 1965, poet Dudley Randall wrote a poem portraying the essential argument between these two proponents of civil rights for Black Americans.
I used to give this poem to my students, line them up on opposite sides of the classroom, and have them do a dramatic reading. This often involved students climbing up on the furniture and shouting the lines at each other. Fun times. No, really, this was fun. My students remember the history because of this activity.
Booker T. and W.E.B
“It seems to me,” said Booker T.,
“It shows a mighty lot of cheek
To study chemistry and Greek
When Mister Charlie needs a hand
To hoe the cotton on his land,
And when Miss Ann looks for a cook,
Why stick your nose inside a book?”“I don’t agree,” said W. E. B.,
“If I should have the drive to seek
Knowledge of chemistry or Greek,
I’ll do it. Charles and Miss can look
Another place for hand or cook.
Some men rejoice in skill of hand,
And some in cultivating land,
But there are others who maintain
The right to cultivate the brain.”“It seems to me,” said Booker T.,
“That all you folks have missed the boat
Who shout about the right to vote,
And spend vain days and sleepless nights
In uproar over civil rights.
Just keep your mouths shut, do not grouse,
But work, and save, and buy a house.”“I don’t agree,” said W. E. B.,
“For what can property avail
If dignity and justice fail?
Unless you help to make the laws,
They’ll steal your house with trumped-up clause.
A rope’s as tight, a fire as hot,
No matter how much cash you’ve got.
Speak soft, and try your little plan,
But as for me, I’ll be a man.”“It seems to me,” said Booker T.—
“I don’t agree,”
Said W. E. B.
Nineteen years ago I was working for a government contractor that did training for the Army. For some reason we had a day off and I spent the day with another contractor friend of mine, a retired Black Army Lieutenant Colonel. My friend's his father had enlisted in the Army during WWII and stayed in the Army until he retired, my friend had come into the Army through ROTC, his son was a West Point graduate. The day started out with us eating breakfast together at a McDonalds and ended up with going to Forest Gump that night. The rest of the day we hung out together. During that day one of the things we talked about was our childhoods. I can guarantee you that the America that I grew up in the 50s and 60s as white kid in Cedar Rapids, Iowa a was a much different America than the one he grew up in as a black kid in the South.
Wow! So much to learn about this part of our history. Wish I could be there to take the class. Sounds like you are having a blast!