Читать книгу Reckoning with Race - Gene Dattel - Страница 10
ОглавлениеThe 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. . . .
—IDA HIGGINSON, WIFE OF UNION SOLDIER HENRY LEE HIGGINSON, BOSTON ABOLITIONISTS, DESCRIBING FREE BLACKS ON HER GEORGIA FARM, 1866
Cannot a nation that has absorbed ten million foreigners into its political life without catastrophe absorb ten million Negro Americans into that same political life at less cost than their unjust and illegal exclusion will involve?
—W. E. B. DU BOIS, 1900
Race measured by race, the Negro is inferior, and his past history in Africa and in America leads to the belief that he will remain inferior in race stamina and race achievement.
—ALBERT BUSHNELL HART, HARVARD PROFESSOR, TEACHER AND MENTOR OF W. E. B. DU BOIS, 1910
I know the negro fairly well. I have seen him at close quarters in the Yazoo Delta, where he formed ninety percent of the population, and where universal suffrage in his hand is the veriest criminal farce.
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT, 1906
Meet a Reconstruction stalwart, Ohio Radical Republican Benjamin Franklin Wade. Senator Wade, an abolitionist, supported black suffrage but personally loathed black people and favored colonization. In 1863 the Ohio senator asked, “If we are to have no more slave states, what the devil are we to do with the surplus niggers?” Wade’s political career ended partly because of his forthright advocacy of allowing black men to vote in Ohio. In a referendum held in Ohio’s 1867 general election, black suffrage was trounced, and Wade soon faded away. In 1851 he described Washington, DC, as a “god forsaken Nigger ridden place,” where the food was “all cooked by niggers until I can smell and taste the nigger.” In 1873 he sought to hire a white servant because he was “sick and tired of niggers.” He abused a black attorney by calling him a “damned Nigger lawyer.” In 1871 he traveled with Frederick Douglass to explore the annexation of Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) as a home for freed slaves. This juxtaposition of support for black voting rights for small numbers of Northern blacks and the desire to remove them from the neighborhood was common in the Northern states. And if blacks could not be coaxed into leaving the United States, at least they could be a Republican voting bloc, confined to the South.
W. E. B. Du Bois may have called Reconstruction, the period between 1865 and 1876, “a splendid failure,” but it was a failure nonetheless. This was the time allotted for the adjustment of the slaves to their new freedom. Why was Reconstruction a failure? The facile explanations—lack of political will in the North, President Andrew Johnson’s racial prejudice, and Southern resistance—gloss over the real determinant: Northern and Southern racial attitudes. Until this overriding fact is acknowledged, America will never confront its racial dilemma. Remember, no other group has been asked and encouraged to leave the country by establishment organizations and leaders in both the North and the South. These removal organizations—colonization societies—were founded to send the black population abroad.
Following the South’s capitulation, the race-based slavery system that most of the Founding Fathers had hoped would “wither away” was officially dead. Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist, rhetorically asked, “What shall we do with the Negro?” His famous and oft-quoted answer was “Do nothing. . . . Give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Leave him alone!” Douglass feared that state intervention might raise the specter of blacks as “wards of the state.” He thought that ensuring suffrage, civil rights, general property rights, and an end to discrimination were sufficient protection. Very few Radical Republicans, as we shall see, were committed to the extended use of force in reforming the South so as to protect the freedmen. But they did seek a deep government involvement, even land redistribution.
It was never possible that white Northerners would shed white Southern blood for black civil rights. While the story of white Southern resistance is firmly ensconced in history textbooks and heritage events, the critical force of white Northern racial attitudes is a deliberately neglected part of American history. The lame excuses for white Northern apathy during Reconstruction—lack of will and a preoccupation with material concerns—ignores the American consensus about the place of blacks in the society. All the issues of Reconstruction circle back inexorably to the attitude of the white North toward blacks.
Despite the North’s dominant position, at the close of the war no firm plan for Reconstruction existed. Political leaders acknowledged the need for a transitional phase for the freedmen, an apprenticeship period or a civilizing status between slavery and freedom. The British post-slavery apprenticeship for its slave colonies thousands of miles away, in the 1830s, was no guide. Moreover, the humanitarian aura of British emancipation was dealt a severe blow when in October 1865 British authorities brutally repressed the bloody Morant Bay, Jamaica, racial insurrection, in which two hundred blacks were murdered. Afterward the British colonial secretary suggested that Jamaicans were “idle, vicious and profligate”; and a British journal thought that the black Jamaican population was moving “back to its ancestral barbarism.” There was no model here for Reconstruction.
The standard story of the postwar years is as follows: The South convinced the North that the Reconstruction governments, in which blacks played a large role, were corrupt and needed to be forcibly removed. Similarly the South successfully created the myth of the “lost cause,” which fostered nostalgia and white reconciliation and minimized the role of slavery as the cause of the conflict. Was the North really this gullible? After all, the North had condescendingly viewed the white Southerner as honor-bound, emotional, indolent, and devoid of commercial skills. It is difficult to imagine that the stereotypical white Southerner could dupe the North. Yet historians claim that white Southerners, a discredited group recently trounced in war, could influence the minds of Northerners.
A more plausible explanation returns to the economic imperatives. For white Americans in the North, the Civil War was a necessary distraction to preserve the Union and abolish race-based slavery. After the war the nation was free to pursue its material goals and populate a continent, both of which had been defining American characteristics from the beginning. The inability of white America to focus on black civil rights cannot be blamed on a sudden attraction to wealth. White Northerners had made an extensive effort to build commercial relations with the South before the war. Northern rails and cities vied for Southern business. Northern economic dominance of the South, some argue, was akin to colonialism.
In the wake of the conflict, King Cotton was a bit shaken but remained on the economic throne. America needed cotton’s export power and fuel for the burgeoning textile industry in the North and subsequently in the South. American cotton would soon provide three-quarters of the world export market for the “indispensable product.” How could America not determine that the future of free blacks was in the cotton fields of the South? The financial system and credit requirements of cotton production did change—to sharecropping, instead of bank borrowing by the landowner. In theory, sharecropping was an arrangement for equity participation by the black farmer; in practice, the black farmer could be easily defrauded because he had no legal recourse. The arrangement was purely arbitrary. Slavery was only the first chapter of the link between African Americans and cotton. Beginning in 1800, slaves cultivated cotton for sixty years, but free blacks were cotton laborers for nearly a hundred years after Emancipation.
The inability to understand the failure of Reconstruction survives. A New York Times editorial of March 2016 distilled the doom of Reconstruction to two events: “Washington’s decision to no longer enforce the rights of African Americans” and “the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.” But racial attitudes in the white North prevented any sustained federal action to protect free blacks. Even the passage of civil rights legislation and constitutional amendments grew out of the need to keep blacks in the South. Eric Foner’s description of blacks in the North is hardly a paean to racial enlightenment. Northern blacks, according to Foner, were “trapped in urban poverty and confined to inferior housing and menial and unskilled jobs (even here their foothold, challenged by the continuing influx of European immigrants and discrimination by employers and unions alike, became increasingly precarious).” Under such circumstances, blacks had no “viable strategy” for economic progress.
In addition to white Northerners’ dread of a black migration, they feared that former slaves would refuse to work in the cotton fields. Edward Tobey, an influential 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 were eager to punish Davis, who had hired an able defense lawyer, Charles O’Conor. The war’s military tribunals had been discontinued, so Davis would have to be tried in a civilian court system. The attorney general James Speed “had grave doubts” about winning the case. He warned that the federal government might “end up having fought a successful war, only to have it declared unlawful by a Virginia jury.” Legal questions centered on the states’ right to secede.
President Johnson then suggested a pardon for Jefferson Davis, who proudly refused to accept it. A pardon, he said, “would be a confession of guilt.” Davis relished the idea of pleading the justice of his cause in a courtroom, with the nation as an audience. He was finally indicted in May 1866. The prosecutors who joined the case, William H. Evarts and Richard Dana, replaced the original indictment for complicity in the assassination of the president with a new one accusing Davis of treason. Even with the new charge, Evarts and Dana had serious doubts about obtaining a conviction. The government did not want the embarrassment of a defeat in court. When the case came to trial in May 1867, a postponement ensued.
The judge, John Underwood of the US District Court of Virginia, allowed the defendant to be released on bail of $100,000. The sum was guaranteed by an unlikely group of abolitionists—Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune; Gerrit Smith; and Cornelius Vanderbilt. Each guaranteed $25,000, and ten others contributed $2,500 each. The day after Davis’s release, a banquet was held in Richmond. At the festive affair, journalists from New York, Boston, London, and Richmond toasted both Confederate and Union generals. Greeley, who had attempted to shorten the Civil War by compromise, wanted a peaceful reunion. He attended the trial in person and afterward spoke to a group of blacks and whites at the African Methodist Church in Richmond. The editor asked the assembly to forget:
I entreat you to forget the years of slavery, and secession, and civil war now happily past. . . . forget that some of you have been masters, others slaves, some for disunion, others against it, and remember that you are Virginians, and all now freemen.
Gerrit Smith, the abolitionist supporter of John Brown and sponsor of the ill-fated black colony of Timbuctoo in New York, now placed equal blame for slavery on both North and South. “A sufficient reason we should not punish the conquered South is that the North was quite as responsible as the South for [slavery], the chief cause of the war . . . the mercenary North.”
Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase devised a legal strategy for avoiding the prosecution of Davis, one derived from the Fourteenth Amendment. Because Davis had already been punished by prohibiting him from holding public office, a new trial would amount to double jeopardy. Fearing Davis’s ability to perform before the Supreme Court, prosecutor Evarts offered to drop the case if Davis would not ask the Supreme Court to review. On February 26, 1869, Evarts informed Davis that all indictments would be dropped. Davis was a free man. In other words, the federal government could not prosecute the man who had led the rebellion for fear of losing the case.
Honor-bound, Davis had outwitted the federal government. In 2016 public opinion has belatedly passed judgment by provoking the removal of statues of Jefferson Davis from various sites. In 1869 the leaders of the Union preferred union over revenge.
Only one high-ranking Confederate official was in danger. That was Judah P. Benjamin, who at various times held significant positions in the Confederacy—secretary of war, attorney general, and secretary of state. The multilingual Benjamin, a brilliant lawyer who had argued before the Supreme Court on numerous occasions, was forced to leave the country because his Jewish ancestry made him vulnerable to American anti-Semitism. He fled to England where he pursued his legal career.
Another beneficiary of post-conflict cordiality was Raphael Semmes, the colorful captain of the famous Confederate raider Alabama, who was not prosecuted. Like its sister ships, the Shenandoah and the Florida, the Alabama had preyed on American merchant ships and virtually decimated the fleet. All the Confederacy’s war vessels had been purchased on cotton credit; all were built in England with full knowledge of the British government, by British employees of British companies, with British materials, and were manned by British seamen, much to the consternation of the American government.
Semmes, an American who was essentially a pirate, was arrested for treason on December 15, 1865, but was released without a trial. Afterward he taught literature and philosophy at what is now Louisiana State University before returning to his native Mobile, Alabama, to practice maritime law.
If America had any hope of enforcing black rights, a significant military presence in the South would have been necessary after the war. In the spring and summer of 1866 serious race-related riots broke out in Norfolk, Vicksburg, Nashville, Charleston, Memphis, and New Orleans. Because the federal government viewed these disturbances as a possible incipient insurrection, it imposed a form of martial law that entailed dividing the South into military districts overseen by the United States Army.
This show of force sounds impressive, but reality reveals otherwise. It involved little commitment to protect the freedmen. During this period of military occupation, the army was reduced to a mere shadow of the fighting machine that had won the Civil War. Clearly the Republicans, the white Northern population, and President Grant were aware of the widespread racial violence in the South. They knew that troops had to manage a vast area in the enforcement of newly enacted laws. Yet Republicans presided over the dismantling of the Union Army in the South, which was reduced from 1 million men on May 1, 1865, to 152,000 by the end of the year. By the time of the 1868 elections it numbered 20,000; by 1871, 8,000; and at the close of 1876, 6,000. Other than a few aggregations in cities, the troops were dispersed in small units. In 1869 there were only 716 Union soldiers in Mississippi; Texas had 4,600, of which 3,000 were occupied with American Indian problems.
What attempts were made to guarantee legal protection for blacks? The Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, did not gain the requisite majority in the House of Representatives in April 1864. It finally passed by three votes on January 31, 1865, with copious doses of bribes and the pardons of Confederates. Thaddeus Stevens quipped that “the greatest measure of the nineteenth century was passed by corruption.” Even at that late date there was difficulty in providing a constitutional guarantee of freedom.
The Radical Republicans rode to victory in the elections of 1866 on the backs of Southern violence, the restrictive Black Codes enacted in the South, and the unpopularity of Andrew Johnson, the stubborn, irritable, anti-slavery, Southern-leaning Democratic president. Johnson was ultimately impeached by Congress, though he was found not guilty by one vote in the Senate. Nonetheless he lost his authority. He was succeeded as president by Ulysses S. Grant, who held office from 1869 to 1877. There remained plenty of time to execute an effective Reconstruction; Johnson was hardly to blame for Reconstruction’s failure.
After 1866, legislation provided a form of citizenship to the black population—but reality made a mockery of legislative language. Three compelling reasons propelled the enactment of black rights: (1) Protection would induce blacks to remain in the South. (2) Black suffrage would provide Republicans with an unassailable voter base in the South. (3) Black suffrage would not affect the North because of the small black population.
But the Reconstruction interlude was rife with hypocrisy. Republican (and sometime) Democratic congressman Samuel W. Moulton of Illinois supported civil rights legislation in order to contain freedmen in the South. “Whenever the colored man is completely and fully protected in the southern states,” Moulton reasoned, “he will never visit Illinois, and . . . every northern state will be depopulated of colored people as will Canada.”
In 1866 Roscoe Conkling, a New York senator and author of civil rights legislation, clearly pointed to the need to keep blacks in the South:
Four years ago, mobs were raised, passions were roused, votes were given, upon the idea that emancipated negroes were to burst upon the North. We then said, give them liberty and rights at the South, and they will stay there and never come into a cold climate to die.
The expedient support of white Northerners for black equality could hardly be expected to withstand sustained Southern resistance.
After Grant’s election to the presidency in 1868, a new leader became the target of Southern antagonism. The former commanding general of the victorious army was a former slaveholder and a recent convert to black rights. Unafraid of risking the lives of his troops in the cause of preserving the Union, he had presided over an army that had lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers to combat and disease. How many lives would he now risk to preserve black rights? The answer is none.
A variety of legislative efforts sought to outline the civil and political rights of freedmen during the Radical Republican ascendancy. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868), through its famous due process clause, broadly ensured that rights could not be taken away; the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) guaranteed the right to vote; the Civil Rights Act of 1875 provided for equal treatment in public accommodations and prevented the exclusion of citizens from jury duty “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Grant’s rhetorical and legislative advocacy of black issues was solid. He applied pressure to secure passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and was ebullient in his message that announced ratification:
A measure which makes . . . 4,000,000 people who were heretofore declared by the highest tribunal in the land not citizens . . . is indeed a measure of grander importance than any of the kind from the foundation of our free Government to the present day.
Later, as with other events, Grant would express second thoughts about the Fifteenth Amendment. At the close of his frustrating second term, he announced to his Cabinet that the Fifteenth Amendment “had done the Negro no good, and had been a hindrance to the South, and by no means a political advantage to the North.”
During Grant’s presidency the federal government confronted repeated acts of violence and intimidation against freedmen in the South. Congressional hearings on the activities of the Ku Klux Klan and other white-supremacy organizations led to the Enforcement Acts, which gave the president power to intervene militarily on behalf of the freedmen. Grant occasionally authorized military force to curtail “lawlessness, turbulence, and bloodshed,” but he failed to intervene in the pivotal 1875 Mississippi election that effectively ended Reconstruction in the state. In the end, Grant gave the freedmen no foundation for future security. Most federal expenditures under the Enforcement Acts were spent in the North, not the South. In effect, the Republican Party used federal money to gain political advantage in the Democratic cities of the North.
In order to combat the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina, Grant warned the South that he would “not hesitate to exhaust the [presidential] powers . . . whenever it should be necessary to protect the rights of citizens.” In 1871 he suspended habeas corpus in nine counties in South Carolina, sent troops, and made hundreds of arrests. In North Carolina and Mississippi there were also hundreds of arrests but no convictions. In 1872 Grant ordered troops into New Orleans to protect the Republican regime; in 1873 he ordered troops to Louisiana in response to the massacre of blacks in Colfax.
But suppressing resistance in the South was ultimately ineffective. Troop reductions, as noted earlier, had left the army understaffed. Southerners persisted in vigorously challenging federal authority and reestablishing white rule. The white South was not deterred. In a nod to priorities, the federal government actually expended vastly more time, money, and men in subduing and placing Indians on reservations in the West than it did in enforcing laws to protect freedmen in the South.
The actions of white America, rather than the words of a very few Republicans, demonstrated that black equality was not a priority in a country obsessed with land expansion and railroads, rife with racial animosity, and devastated in 1873 by financial panic and depression. The political and economic opportunists who ventured south were resented by the defeated region. In Mississippi, a state where blacks constituted a significant and in some places a majority of the population, the restoration of white rule was tantamount to a “racial-political” war.
A close look at the Mississippi election of 1875 reveals the predictable lack of white Northern commitment. In that state contest, white Mississippians violently intervened to prevent blacks from voting. In addition, the Mississippi Democratic congressman L. Q. C. Lamar worked assiduously to rid the state of Republican political control. Henceforth white Mississippians would control the state government without black participation.
Grant refused a request by the Republican governor, Adelbert Ames, for federal troops to supervise elections in Vicksburg. The president famously responded through his attorney general, Edwards Pierrepont: “The whole public are tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South and the majority are ready to condemn any interference on the part of the [federal] government.” Translation: White Northerners did not care about black rights in Mississippi.
Governor Ames provides a useful example of the lack of dedication by Northern Republican officials. He was forced to curtail his summer holiday in cool New England to tend to the volatile situation in 1875. A Maine native, Ames was a political opportunist whose main objective in Mississippi was to gain a seat in the US Senate. He supported the civil rights of his constituency, the black population, but he had no long-term commitment to remain in Mississippi to fight for the rights of freedmen. While Lamar was energetically campaigning for the Democrats during the summer and fall of 1875, Ames was ensconced in the governor’s mansion in Jackson. There he whiled away his time reading Anthony Trollope’s novel The Way We Live Now (about a ruthless, corrupt financier who promotes a fraudulent railroad investment in the United States). In August a frustrated Ames confided to his wife that he had given up: “I am fully determined not to accept the Senatorship if I can get it. I do not like anything in the life I lead here.”
Reconstruction was thus effectively overthrown in Mississippi. Governor Ames retreated to the private sector in Minnesota and New England, where there were few blacks. Grant’s defeat in the 1875 battles of Vicksburg, Yazoo City, and other Mississippi venues was arguably as significant as his victory in the Battle of Vicksburg during the Civil War.
According to John R. Lynch, the able black congressman from Mississippi, Grant admitted that political expediency had impelled his inaction. Congressman Lynch, during an audience with Grant in November 1875, asked the president why he had not intervened in the Mississippi election, “a sanguinary struggle” that was practically an insurrection against the state government. Lynch suggested that prominent Ohio Republicans had warned Grant about sending troops to Mississippi because such an action would jeopardize their own prospects in October elections. Grant confessed that he had taken the expedient path. The bold general, in this instance, had become a political hack.
The most significant of the initial Southern acts of reconciliation between the North and the South featured Congressman L. Q. C. Lamar’s eulogy for the abolitionist Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, author of the Civil Rights Act. Lamar had written the secessionist document for the state of Mississippi. Yet after Sumner died on March 11, 1874, the Massachusetts congressional delegation asked Lamar to “deliver a memorial address” to Congress. Lamar’s oration resonated within the Senate and across the North. He had genuine respect for Sumner and used the opportunity to promote reconciliation. He praised Sumner, a man universally disliked in the South. As he finished, his tribute gave way to a deafening silence and then to thunderous ovation. “Democrats and Republicans alike, melted in tears,” one observer noted. “Those who listened sometimes forgot to respect Sumner in respecting Lamar.” The secessionist supporter of slavery had become the reconciliatory and rhetorical supporter of black suffrage. The Northern press was rapturous.
Congressman Lynch, who had significant interaction with his fellow Mississippian Lamar, figured prominently in the Reconstruction period. Lynch was the son of a white planter and a slave mother, and grew up in Natchez. In 1869 the ambitious, self-taught Lynch was elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives at the age of twenty-two. Like his black colleagues, he emphasized public education, black suffrage, black civil rights, and economics based on self-help. He tried unsuccessfully to put a compromise school integration clause in the state constitution, by recommending that school districts whose small population could support only one school should be integrated. A similar plan was approved in some Northern locales where there were few blacks, but it was unattractive in the South with its large black populations.
An aggressive young politician and master parliamentarian, Lynch managed to be selected speaker of the Mississippi House over the opposition of white Radical Republicans. He delivered on his promise to be fair to all men “who are alike entitled to equal rights and privileges.” He was noticed by a New York Times reporter, who admiringly wrote of the “astonishing . . . coolness and sagacity with which he disposed of all points.” A white Mississippi newspaper went so far as to declare its support of white candidates only if they were equal to Lynch in “intelligence, moral worth and integrity, which virtues we give [him] credit.” Elected to Congress in 1872, Lynch was defeated in 1876.
Lynch retreated to Natchez to establish a law practice, purchase farm land, and pursue an influential role in Republican politics. He would ally with Lamar’s supporters as some black Republicans and some Democrats formed a so-called fusion political movement. This fragile alliance was based on political jockeying by whites and blacks, and the implicit recognition by blacks of their increasingly weak position. It was hardly biracial cooperation, but it did allow Lynch to be reelected to Congress. Defeated after one term, he would never run for public office again.
The Reconstruction world of Mississippi threw together black senator Blanche K. Bruce, black congressman John R. Lynch, and white congressman and senator L. Q. C. Lamar. They often disagreed but enjoyed an amicable relationship and sometimes worked together. In 1885 Lynch visited Lamar, who was secretary of the interior in Grover Cleveland’s Cabinet. Lynch had come to “pay him my respects and tender him my congratulations upon his appointment.” Lamar greeted Lynch and introduced him to his other visitor, Mayor William Russell Grace of New York.
After the mayor left, an extraordinary conversation ensued between the two Mississippians. As disclosed in Lynch’s memoirs, it provides a rare glimpse of behind-the-scenes racial politics. Lamar’s position allowed him to dispense patronage jobs. The Democrat Lamar offered to the Republican Lynch a job that paid a generous annual salary of $2,250. Lynch had not solicited any form of employment for himself. He declined the offer but added his respect for the secretary of the interior.
Lynch had come to submit a list of “colored” department of interior employees whom he hoped Lamar would retain. Lamar agreed upon seeing the names. As the dialogue continued, Lynch mentioned two sensitive cases, “[one] a colored man, a physician; the other a white man, a lawyer.” The “colored man” was married to a white woman, the “white man” was married to a black woman. Lamar rejected the white man married to the black woman because the case had drawn public attention and was highly charged; the black physician’s case was not well known, and Lamar accepted it. He was not concerned about intermarriage but did not wish to “antagonize public opinion.”
Lynch then asserted that “opposition to [racial] amalgamation is both hypocritical and insincere.” Lamar agreed but offered a candid qualification:
My sympathies are with your friend and it is my desire to retain him. . . . But when you ask me to openly defy the well-known sentiment of the white people of my State on the question of amalgamation, I fear you make a request of me which I cannot safely grant, however anxious I may be to serve you . . . although in the main, I recognize the force and admit the truth of what you have said on that subject.
Lamar regretted that he could not act on the proposition that Lynch had “so forcibly and eloquently suggested.” The “white man” with the black wife was not retained: the “colored physician” continued in his position. Such was the convoluted world of racial norms practiced in the South and in the North.
Reconstruction officially ended with the compromise that followed the disputed presidential election of 1876, in which the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, agreed to withdraw remaining federal troops from Southern states. The Democratic and anti-black candidate, Samuel J. Tilden from New York, had won the popular vote, but the electoral votes of Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana remained in doubt. Hayes’s bargain allegedly called for removal of troops from the South and government support for a transcontinental railroad through the region in return for the contested electoral votes. Often not mentioned is the fact that had Tilden been elected, the situation of blacks would have worsened.
The racial attitudes of Rutherford B. Hayes, the anti-slavery Ohio congressman, governor, Union Army general, and US president from 1876 to 1880, vividly illustrate the transition from Reconstruction to reconciliation. After the Civil War, Hayes supported black suffrage with platitudes: “Our government has been called the white man’s government. Not so. It is not the government of any class, sect, or nationality or race.” Education, Hayes thought, was the only long-term solution to the acceptance of blacks in American society. After his presidency, as chairman of the Slater Fund, he underwrote programs “to assist the education of young able blacks.” Hayes’s agenda incorporated a heavy dose of white control and paternalism; in essence he and like-minded Americans sought to “civilize” the freedmen.
Expediency was an integral part of Hayes’s politics. He understood that a black vote was a Republican vote, hence his support of the Fourteenth Amendment was based not on equal protection but on the clause that denied representation where black voting was restricted. When Cincinnati blacks voted for the first time, Hayes gleefully announced, “They vote Republican solid.” But his actions contradicted his rhetoric.
Despite the bargain that secured his presidency in 1876, Hayes had made his decision about troop withdrawal from the South and reconciliation well before the election. By 1876 he had moved away from Radical Reconstruction. In 1875 he had replied to a Kenyon College classmate, “As to Southern affairs, the let-alone policy seems to be the true course. . . . The future depends on [the] moderation and good sense of [white] Southern men.” Hayes was aware that a removal of the remnant of federal troops would leave freedmen at the mercy of white Southerners. Nevertheless, after he received the Republican nomination for president, he confided to his friend Guy Bryan, a Texan, “You will be almost if not quite satisfied with my letter of acceptance—especially on the Southern question.” On the use of federal troops in the South, the candidate wrote to Republican senator Carl Schurz, “There is to be an end of all that.” In February 1877 he was ready to do away with the North’s “injudicious meddling.” In September that year, as president, Hayes spoke to a Georgia group that included blacks. “[N]ow my colored friends, . . . After thinking it over, I believe your rights and interests would be safer if this great mass of intelligent white men were left alone by the general government.”
In 1880 Hayes anticipated Booker T. Washington’s famous social metaphor at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895. The occasion was the twelfth anniversary of the all-black Hampton Institute. Hayes, now the former president, spoke:
We would not undertake to violate the laws of nature. . . . We are willing to have these elements of our population separate as the fingers are, but we require to see them united for every good work, for national defense, one as the hand.
To his nineteenth-century audience, the meaning was unmistakable: social separation and inequality. In 1878 he had recorded in his diary that “the blacks, poor, ignorant and timid, can’t stand alone against the whites.” Hayes knew that the black man would lose any struggle in a white America that adhered firmly to racial separation and racial hatred.
Where was Frederick Douglass during the postwar period? Douglass was indisputably the most prominent black leader of the antebellum and Civil War periods. His abolitionist writings and lectures were widely known, powerfully expressed, and highly effective. He edited and published the influential North Star (1847–1851), which later became Frederick Douglass’ Paper. In a precedent-setting event, Abraham Lincoln hosted Douglass in the White House in 1862. Despite Lincoln’s attention, Douglass knew that Lincoln was “the white man’s president”; blacks “were only his stepchildren.”
The drama and violence of Douglass’s early life—escape to freedom, the abolitionist movement, the Civil War—had given way to Emancipation; continuing violence and a slide into racial second-class citizenship dominated the second phase of his life. The fiery orator and writer died in 1895, thirty years after the end of the war. His oratory and writing skills had not diminished, but his effectiveness had waned. With the end of slavery, Douglass found his rhetoric helpless in the face of white America, not just the South. His penetrating eyes and determination leap from the photographs and paintings of the younger man; a resignation born of frustration and disappointment seem to characterize the older giant of black history.
Frederick Douglass was clear about treatment of the freedmen. He thought that ensuring suffrage, civil rights, general property rights, and the end of discrimination would be sufficient protection. Douglass never espoused land reform. He advocated self-reliance and hard work, which together would bring land ownership. He emphatically viewed the South as the freedmen’s home. He knew all too well the Northern fear of “vagrancy, and criminality from the freedmen.”
Like many revolutionaries, Douglass lost his radical force after the revolution. Nowhere is this more explicit than in his role in the Freedmen’s Bank, an entity created within the Freedmen’s Bureau to help encourage thrift among the emancipated slaves. On March 3, 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau, or as it was formally named, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, was chartered by the federal government to act as a guardian for the freedmen in matters of education and relief, and protection in earning a living. The goals were to further an orderly transition to a free society and reestablish cotton production. Thus it was essential to safeguard the freedmen “from abuse . . . foil the selfish designs of northern speculators, and . . . transform the South from a plantation economy to an economy of small, family-owned farms.” The Freedmen’s Bureau was expressly designed to be temporary; it ceased to exist in 1869 except for responsibilities in education and payments to blacks who were Union Army veterans. Even these duties ended within a few years. President Lincoln had not given “much attention to the Freedmen’s Bureau.” Its basic purpose for “white America,” according to the historian William McFeeley, was to prevent the kind of black violence that had occurred with the end of slavery in the Caribbean.
The newly appointed commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau upon its creation was General Oliver Otis Howard, a fervently religious thirty-five-year-old from Maine who had lost an arm in combat and had never been an abolitionist. Howard, the battle-tested veteran, told a black audience in New Orleans, “You must begin at the bottom of the ladder and climb up.” He wanted blacks to “return to plantation labor . . . and work their way out of the wage earning class” to become landowners. In this approach he was merely echoing fears that freed slaves would be idle. He did not consider a black person equal “and never advocated equality,” McFeeley writes, “except by law and justice.” During the war, Union soldiers under the command of Generals Sherman and Howard had showed “contempt” for freedmen in South Carolina. After his bureau experience, the pious general was next assigned the task of chasing the Nez Perce Indians away from their homeland in the Wallowa Valley in Oregon. Howard, the well-intentioned Sunday school teacher, took his black servant, Washington Kemp, to Maine to become a landowning farmer. Instead Kemp became a “subsistence farmer,” known for his minstrel appearances throughout the state. Nonetheless Oliver Otis Howard’s name lives on in Howard University, the premier historically black college in America.
The auxiliary of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Freedmen’s Bank, was chartered in 1865 with a main office in Washington, thirty-five branches, and an asset base of $3 million. The bank was established to foster savings habits among the freedmen. The founder, John W. Alvord, a Congregationalist minister and abolitionist, had no banking experience. The institution became riddled with mismanagement, fraud, and poor loans, all overseen by its white directors.
Frederick Douglass was appointed president of the failing bank in March 1874, in the financial institution’s dying days. Douglass had no chance of rescuing the bank, but he enjoyed the prestige of being called the “president of the Freedmen’s Bank.” The towering figure yielded to symbolism rather than substance. The former slave, in awe of the physical structure, was fooled.
[The building was] one of the most costly and splendid buildings of the time, finished on the inside with black walnut and furnished with marble counters. . . . I often peeped into its spacious windows, and looked down the row of its gentlemanly and elegantly dressed colored clerks with . . . their buttonhole bouquets in their coat-fronts. . . . I was amazed with the facility with which they counted money. . . . The whole thing was beautiful.
An icon of American history, Douglass marveled at his rise from impoverished slave to “President of a bank counting its assets by the millions.”
But he had not the slightest notion of the bank’s business and condition, and rather than trying to learn, he spent his time promoting civil rights legislation. The perils of having a political activist manage a business were thus on display. What was actually transpiring in these luxurious accommodations? A black cashier, “Daddy” Wilson, was the “figurehead used by the white financial committee to endorse” fraudulent business activity. The depression of 1873 aided the bank’s demise. It folded in July 1874, a few months after Douglass had been named president. Thousands of freedmen lost their savings when the bank met an ignominious death in bankruptcy.
No movie about Reconstruction will feature the debacle of the Freedmen’s Bank, but the impact was psychologically severe. W. E. B. Du Bois in 1901 highlighted the significance of the failure. “Not even ten years of slavery could have done as much to throttle the thrift of the freedmen,” wrote Du Bois, “as the mismanagement and bankruptcy” of the Freedmen’s Bank. Others have cited the formation of black banks as evidence of Du Bois’s exaggeration. Du Bois may have been hyperbolic, but there is a major lesson to be learned. Of 134 black banks formed between 1888 and 1934, seventy failed in the Depression of the 1930s, and only four were in existence in 1996, according to Juliet E. K. Walker’s The History of Black Business in America. A thriving, self-sufficient black business community could not survive outside the economic mainstream. Separatism, whether voluntary or involuntary, will not bring material success to a broad group.
Douglass advocated black advancement through farming. Fundamental and prescient was his understanding of white Northern antipathy toward blacks. He predicted the growth of black urban ghettos occasioned by a black migration to the North. The result, he wrote, would leave blacks “crowded into lanes and alleys, cellars and garrets, poorly provided with the necessities of life.”
As for the South, Douglass believed that there the black person held a monopoly on the labor supply. “He is there, as he is nowhere else, an absolute necessity,” Douglass wrote. The economics of the cotton field were never far from Douglass’s thoughts. “Neither the Chinaman, German, Norwegian, Swede,” he observed, “can drive [the African American] from the sugar and cotton fields. . . . The climate of the South makes such labor uninviting and harshly repulsive to the white man.”
Although Douglass emphasized suffrage, he knew, as did Booker T. Washington, that economic power was vital for black progress. The freedman’s labor in the cotton field was worth more than “sword, ballot-boxes or bayonets. It touches the heart of the South through its pockets.” But because the freedman was a captive, with no option to move north, blacks had no bargaining power. Had the white North been receptive to black migration, blacks might have had economic leverage; white Southerners would have had no choice but to acquiesce to black civil and economic rights. Such was not the case.
Douglass was drawn into two episodes of the black separatist quandary. First, in a variation of the colonization scheme, he was appointed in 1871 to visit Santo Domingo to explore annexation. In a broad sense, President Grant was not at all sure what to do about the freedmen. He thought that annexation of Santo Domingo would provide a safe haven for blacks who wished to leave the country. In effect, Grant recognized the nation’s inability to assimilate blacks. The Santo Domingo plan might have forced white Southerners to be more accommodating because of a labor shortage, but Grant was admitting that America could not absorb four million freedmen. He wanted to “secure a retreat for the portion of the laboring class of our former slave states, who find themselves under unbelievable pressure.” He continued:
The present difficulty in bringing all parts of the United States into a happy unity and love of country grows out of the prejudice to color. . . . The colored man . . . with a refuge like Santo Domingo his worth here would be soon discovered and he would soon receive such recognition as to induce him to stay: or if Providence designed that the two races should not live together, he would find a home in . . . [Santo Domingo].
Douglass favored the idea of annexation as a safety valve for black Americans. In his final message to Congress on December 5, 1876, Grant maintained his support of Santo Domingo as a home for blacks. According to the president, it would be a “congenial home” for the freedmen, “where their civil rights would not be disputed and their labor much sought after.” As early as 1871, racial separation was Grant’s stated preference; Santo Domingo was yet another variation of schemes to remove or resettle black people. Implicit was the understanding that they would not move to Northern states. The black alternative was Santo Domingo, not New York, Massachusetts, or Ohio. Grant’s scheme led a tortured existence before it died at the hands of the Senate.
During his entire postwar life, Frederick Douglass clung to his hope that white and black Americans could live together peacefully. His keynote speech at the dedication of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington’s Lincoln Park in 1876 was the highlight of a life whose crowning moment was the abolition of slavery. The statue shows a slave in chains on his knees in front of Lincoln—hardly an introduction to freedom. At the celebration, Douglass referred to Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, as the “white man’s president.”
The champion of emancipation did have a role model: the Jews. He advised blacks to imitate the Jews, who were “worst situated than you are” but “have fought their way up.” He rejected the exodus metaphor by citing Jewish example:
A Hebrew may even now be rudely repulsed from the door of a hotel, but he will not on account get up another exodus as he did three thousand years ago, but will quietly “put money in his purse” and bide his time, knowing that the rising tide of civilization will eventually float him.
A bronze statue of Frederick Douglass stands on the steps at the side entrance of the New York Historical Society; Abraham Lincoln is around the corner, adorning the front entrance of the museum. A block away, Theodore Roosevelt sits astride a horse with an American Indian below him on the steps of the American Museum of Natural History. Roosevelt wrote that universal suffrage was a farce; if enacted, the South would resemble the dysfunctional Haiti. Douglass would not have been pleased.
The only major attempt at mass black migration to the North after the Civil War was the “Exoduster” movement of the late 1870s, in which Southern blacks were enticed to go to the promised land of Kansas. Most conventional discussions of the Exodusters focus on the oppression and destitution of Southern blacks, in the midst of a depressed cotton market, as impetus for the first black-initiated domestic migration of freedmen. In 1854 “Bleeding Kansas” had suffered a conflict to determine whether it would be admitted as a free or a slave state. By 1870 the Kansas population had grown to more than a million and continued to grow, but at no time did blacks account for more than 5 percent of the population. By the spring of 1879, thousands of Southern blacks were pouring into Kansas.
Kansas prided itself on being anti-slavery before the war, and for John Brown’s stand there against slavery. But the state’s anti-black sentiment was as strong as its anti-slavery feeling. The door was shut very quickly on the poor black migrants. The Lawrence city council raised money to “send these undesirables to some other city.” Humanitarian efforts stalled. A few of the Exodusters eventually enjoyed better lives than they had had in the South, but Kansas was no promised land and certainly no haven for large numbers of blacks.
In May 1879 Frederick Douglass famously recommended to a black group that freedmen stay in the South. He viewed Kansas as yet another false Canaan, along with Haiti and Liberia. The “dumping” of thousands of impoverished blacks, he cautioned, would reinforce the image of “that detestable class from whom we are not so free—tramps.”
The overworked and misleading allusion to the biblical exodus would ring hollow except in song. When the Israelites left Egypt for the promised land, they created their own country where assimilation issues were irrelevant. The Exodusters, however, remained in an America where they were not wanted. Even the South did not want them, but no alternative cotton workers could be found. Mississippi cotton farmers tried diligently but unsuccessfully to recruit Europeans, particularly Italians, and Chinese to labor in the cotton fields.
Kansas, like many Northern states, experienced a huge demand for white immigrants. From 1861 to 1890, 11.3 million white immigrants—primarily from the United Kingdom, Germany, and Scandinavia—arrived in America. Most of them were destined for the North and the West, precisely those areas where few blacks lived. Between 1879 and 1881, while a few thousand blacks made their way to Kansas, more than a half-million Germans immigrated to the Midwest. From 1800 to 1920, 18.2 million people arrived mainly from Southern and Eastern Europe. When white immigrants were available, states could find no refuge for blacks.
The Kansas slave-versus-free dichotomy is best illustrated by its anti-slavery Republican senator, John J. Ingalls. On May 28, 1893, Senator Ingalls was quoted in the Chicago Tribune as advocating physical separation and repatriation to Africa to solve the race dilemma. (Sixty-one years later the Supreme Court upended legal segregation in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. For Kansas it was closure of a kind.)
The impressive extent of civil rights legislation passed during Reconstruction was no match for reality. The legislation was ignored, circumvented, and violated in the South and the North, and sometimes did not survive the tests of the judicial process. Former slaves soon found themselves devoid of rights and at the mercy of the states. White Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices decimated national legislation and constitutional amendments that had been passed during Reconstruction.
Grant’s appointments to the Supreme Court played a key role in the nullification of Reconstruction legislation. After the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) restricted the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, United States v. Cruikshank (1876) demolished the Enforcement Acts. Grant’s appointee, Chief Justice Morrison Waite, issued the Cruikshank opinion. Waite, a strong defender of states’ rights and a former Ohio corporate lawyer, consistently voted against black rights in his fourteen years on the bench.
In 1883 the Supreme Court dealt a fatal blow to the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which stated that “all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations” in “restaurants, theaters, hotels, and railroads.” Lawsuits alleging that black citizens were denied “equal enjoyment” arose in Kansas (1875), California (1876), Missouri (1877), and Tennessee (1879). These cases, joined as the Civil Rights Cases, reached the Supreme Court in 1883. In the San Francisco case, a black man named George M. Tyler was denied entry to Maguire’s Theatre after he had purchased a ticket because he was “of the African or negro race, being what is commonly called a colored man, and not a white man.”
Justice Joseph Bradley, a Grant appointee, wrote the opinion in the civil rights cases. Bradley was a railroad lawyer who had arrived on the bench with a record of hostility toward equal rights for blacks. In his opinion he reasoned that depriving “white people of the right of choosing their own company would introduce another form of slavery.” The court, eight to one, ruled that the black plaintiffs in these situations were not protected under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. Justice Bradley’s opinion amounted to a lecture to blacks, whom he said were no longer “to be a special favorite of the law.” The Radical Republican senator George Hoar of Massachusetts, in his memoir, described Justice Bradley as a “most admirable appointment.” But John R. Lynch attributed the failure of Reconstruction to President Grant’s Court appointments of Joseph Bradley and Morrison Waite, whose votes condemned civil rights legislation.
The Supreme Court’s decision in the civil rights cases was applauded by the establishment Northern press. Harper’s Weekly called it “an illustration of the singular wisdom of our constitutional system.” The New York Times observed that “The Court has been serving a useful purpose in thus undoing the work of Congress.” According to the Times, blacks “should be treated on their merits as individuals precisely as other citizens are treated in like circumstances.” In the 1890s the Times elaborated, declaring that civil rights legislation had been responsible for sustaining “a prejudice against negroes . . . which without it would have gradually died out.” The newspaper proposed “self-help and reliance.” It suggested that blacks follow the leadership of “eminent leaders of the white race in the South.”
Other racial landmark cases continued to flow from appointments to the Supreme Court by the anti-slavery Republican Party. In 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson formally enshrined racial segregation in public accommodations, provided that the facilities were separate but equal. The decision was quickly interpreted as applying to all aspects of American life, including schools.
A man defined as black, Homer Plessy, had been arrested for violating a state law by sitting in the “white section” of a New Orleans train. According to Louisiana’s definition of “black,” Plessy qualified. He was an octoroon—a person whose parentage was one-eighth black. (The court agreed that a state could determine who was black.) Plessy died in obscurity in 1925, but his name resonates in American history.
The Plessy opinion was written by Judge Henry B. Brown, an appointee of Republican president Benjamin Harrison. Brown wrote that “separation of the two races,” in and of itself, did not convey a “badge of inferiority” upon blacks.
If the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of . . . a mutual appreciation of each other’s merits and voluntary consent. . . . If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution . . . cannot put them on the same plane.
Therefore the states were free to legislate separation. In the seven-to-one decision, Justice John Marshall Harlan, a former slaveholder from Kentucky, is given credit for his dissent, in which he said the “Constitution is color-blind.” No attention is given to Justice Harlan’s authorship of the opinion in Cumming v. School Board of Richmond, County, Georgia (1899), which allowed unequal funding for black schools. Plessy was finally overturned by Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which held that segregation is inherently unequal. (By 2016, however, de facto and self-segregation were present in every aspect of American life.)
The final nail in the coffin of black suffrage, it could be argued, was the 1898 Supreme Court decision in Williams v. Mississippi, which upheld Mississippi’s 1890 constitution that had effectively disfranchised blacks. The consequences of that constitution were striking. In 1880, 110,113 whites and 130,606 blacks were registered to vote in Mississippi. In 1896, 108,998 whites and 16,234 blacks could vote in the state. In its consideration of the constitutionality of Mississippi’s law, the court’s opinion was written by Justice Joseph McKenna, an appointee of Republican President William McKinley.
Was political or economic power more important for the freedmen? The question resonates in the twenty-first century, when blacks have political power but still lack broad representation in the private sector of the economy. Could a separate black economy prosper in American society where racial separation, both North and South, was deeply embedded? The controversy between two major black leaders, Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), centers on the correct approach to black success in America and remains enormously relevant. Both Washington and Du Bois recognized that blacks were confined to the South; neither forecast the Great Migration north that began during World War I.
Booker T. Washington, born into slavery and educated at the vocational Hampton Institute in Virginia, had experienced physical labor. He was an apostle of self-help, racial pride, racial self-sufficiency, vocational training, and the prioritizing of economic over political goals. In 1881 Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a vocational institution that derived its plan from the Hampton Institute. He was the most visible and important black leader of his time, a recognition crowned by the famous invitation from President Theodore Roosevelt to dine at the White House.
Washington rose to national prominence when he spoke at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta on September 18, 1895. There he paraphrased Rutherford Hayes, who had dismissed social equality with whites as a goal for blacks. “In all things that are purely social,” Washington declared, “we can be separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
“[N]o race can prosper,” said Washington, “until it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.” He recommended preparation in agriculture, mechanics, commerce, domestic service, and in the professions—a recognition of the obvious geographic and vocational restrictions placed on blacks. Respect, Washington believed, would come only with economic success: “No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized.”
