Читать книгу Reckoning with Race - Gene Dattel - Страница 9
ОглавлениеRacial Attitudes in the North, 1800–1865
White abolitionists “best love the colored man at a distance.”
—SAMUEL R. WARD, BLACK ABOLITIONIST, 1840S
The great fact is now fully realized that the African race here is a foreign and feeble element . . . incapable of assimilation . . . a pitiful exotic unnecessarily transplanted into our fields, and which it is unprofitable to cultivate at the cost of the desolation of the native vineyard.
—WILLIAM H. SEWARD, ANTI-SLAVERY ADVOCATE, NEW YORK GOVERNOR AND SENATOR, SECRETARY OF STATE, LINCOLN’S “RIGHT HAND,” 1860
[Free blacks] have no economy; and waste, of course, much of what they earn. They have little knowledge either of morals or religion. They are left, therefore, as miserable victims to sloth, prodigality, poverty, ignorance, and vice.
—TIMOTHY DWIGHT, PRESIDENT OF YALE UNIVERSITY, 1810
African Colonization is predicated on the principle that there is an utter aversion in the public mind, to an amalgamation and equalization of the two races; and that any attempt to press equalization is not only fruitless but injurious.
—WILBUR FISK, PRESIDENT OF WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY, 1835
[Blacks must] learn trades or starve . . . and learn not only to black boot but to make them as well.
—FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1853
White foreigners who are, or may hereafter become residents of [Oregon] . . . shall enjoy the same rights in respect to the possession, enjoyment, and descent of property as native-born citizens.
No Negro, Chinaman, or Mulatto shall have the right of suffrage.
No free Negro, or Mulatto, not residing in this state at the time of the adoption of this constitution, shall come, reside, or be within this state, or hold any real estate, or make any contracts, or maintain any suit therein; an [sic] the Legislative Assembly shall provide by penal laws, for the removal, by public officers, of all such Negroes, and Mulattoes, and for their effectual exclusion from the state, and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state, or employ, or harbor them.
—OREGON STATE CONSTITUTION, 1857 (THE BLACK EXCLUSION LAW WAS REPEALED IN 1926.)
The end of slavery in the United States did not change white attitudes toward blacks. From the early nineteenth century, when gradual emancipation began in earnest, the presence of free blacks had presented a problem for the antebellum North. From New England to California and Oregon, whites asked themselves, what shall we do with them? The overwhelming response was that blacks belonged nowhere but in the South.
Race-based slavery was a moral and economic anachronism. For the South, where slavery was implanted in large-scale staple agriculture, morality was an issue, but the advent of the tornado that was cotton gave slavery a vital economic role. In one decade, the 1830s, the South completely revised its rationalization of slavery to account for its economic benefits.
With the growth of slavery due solely to the expansion of profitable cotton agriculture came a gradual shift in the rhetoric of slavery. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the cotton and land boom of the pivotal 1830s. Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in 1831 and the growing anti-slavery movement in the North exacerbated Southern racial fears. In 1831 the Mississippi lawyer and politician Seargent S. Prentiss expressed a commonly held belief: “That slavery is a great evil, there can be no doubt—and it is an unfortunate circumstance that it was ever introduced into this or any other country. At present, however, it is a necessary evil, and I do not think admits of a remedy.” Just five years later the quotable Prentiss offered a diametrically opposed view in his recommendation to the Mississippi state legislature:
Resolved, that the people of the state of Mississippi look upon the institution of domestic slavery . . . not as a curse, but as a blessing, as the legitimate condition of the African race, as authorized both by the laws of God and the dictates of reason and humanity. . . . We will allow no present change, or hope of future alteration in this manner.
From a “great” and “necessary” evil to a “blessing” in five years to justify an economic force.
The white North, without the ability to cultivate cotton, had no such economic imperative for slavery, but it nonetheless had to grapple with the existence of a small free-black population in its midst. While Americans have often conflated anti-slavery attitudes with pro-black sentiments, in fact, white Northerners were anti-slavery and also predominantly anti-black. In every Northern state the pattern of responses to free blacks was similar. There was no thought of creating a biracial society based on freedom and equality. White Northerners wanted blacks shipped overseas to Africa, the Caribbean, or Central America via colonization societies or sent to segregated regions within America or placed in designated all-black states or forced into physically separate communities, the forerunners of the modern urban racial ghettos. Above all, after emancipation they wanted blacks contained in the South.
White America’s hypocrisy and its true racial attitudes were fully on display in the North. There, racial animosity was rife, and an all-consuming fear of black migration was well entrenched. Northern bigotry played a vital role in curtailing the physical and economic mobility of blacks. Trapped in the South, they were needed as cotton-field laborers, first as slaves, then as free blacks, for with emancipation the economic imperatives of cotton did not go away. The consequence was a separate community of free blacks, first induced by white Northerners, then adopted by the white South after Emancipation, then reinforced by blacks during the long period of compulsory exclusion. Historians generally ignore the North’s racial containment policy designed to keep blacks in the South. The policy worked, for on the eve of World War I 90 percent of all blacks in America lived in the South. Only another economic force—a labor shortage in the North—toppled the containment policy.
Black American identity was put to the test early in the North, where slavery was being eliminated by gradual emancipation. The living and social conditions of the small number of free blacks in the antebellum North is well worth reviewing, beginning in the New England and Middle Atlantic states.
Separatism asserted itself early on. As a twenty-six-year-old, Richard Allen, a former slave turned gifted Methodist orator, preached to a small number of blacks in 1786 at St. George’s Church in Philadelphia. The young leader was allowed to perform his service at 5 a.m., before the white service. At a later date, either 1787 or 1792, Allen and his fellow black worshipers were told to vacate the white section of St. George’s Church. Allen’s black colleague, the Reverend Absalom Jones, in a prayer position on his knees, was pulled up by a white trustee. “You must get up; you must not kneel here,” the trustee said. The black congregants had been assigned instead to a newly built, racially segregated balcony. Thus provoked, blacks left the church, never to return. “An increase in the black communicants,” as W. E. B. Du Bois later wrote, had alarmed the white church and prompted racial segregation. Allen and others would found a racially separate religious entity, the African American Church (Bethel), and a mutual aid society, the Free African Society of Philadelphia. The white North would not be a promised land for free blacks.
In a pattern that would be repeated throughout American history, an increase, or anticipated increase, in the number of blacks in a particular community invariably provoked a policy of forced separation. Historians rationalize the establishment of separate black institutions by Allen and others as evidence of black resilience and ingenuity, but in doing so they ignore the devastating long-term consequences of racial segregation.
Philadelphia, like other Northern cities before the Civil War, offers a glimpse of the “squalid” conditions of most free blacks in the North. In 1862 the English visitor Edward Dicey provided this account of the city:
Everywhere and at all seasons the colored people form a separate community. . . . As a rule, the blacks you meet in the Free States are shabbily, if not squalidly, dressed; and as far as I could learn, the instances of black men having made money by trade in the North are few in number. . . . In every Northern city, the poorest, the most thriftless, and perhaps the most troublesome part of the population are free negroes.
“There is . . . [no] city,” wrote Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist and orator, “in which prejudice against color is more rampant than in Philadelphia.” Such was the reality in the “City of Brotherly Love.”
By the time Philadelphia’s most famous citizen, Benjamin Franklin, was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he had become an abolitionist. Earlier he had owned slaves for thirty years; in 1770 he had lobbied the English government for approval of the state of Georgia’s slave codes; in 1779 he had contacted the French police to help recapture Abbe, a female slave owned by John Jay, another of his compatriots living in France. (Jay was a founding member of New York’s abolition society when he still owned slaves.) The French police found Abbe and imprisoned her until she “repented her ingratitude.” Franklin had also asked the French government to allow his relative, John Williams Jr., to keep a slave in France after the French had abolished slavery.
More important for our purposes, Franklin’s ideas for the “improvement” of free blacks were harsh. In the fall of 1789 he issued a formal plan for a committee of Abolition Society members to oversee emancipated blacks. Because he feared a mass of free slaves unleashed on American society, he also recommended that a branch of our “national police . . . supervise emancipated slaves.” A “committee of inspection” would “superintend the morals, general conduct, and ordinary situation of Free Negroes.” A “committee of education” was formed to “superintend the children of Free Blacks,” who would be taught “moral and religious principles.” A “committee of employ” would find “constant employment for those Free Negroes who are able to work, as the want of this would occasion poverty, idleness, and many vicious habits.” The jobs contemplated would “require little skill.” Apprehensive white abolitionists like Franklin wanted comprehensive white regulation of the lives of blacks after emancipation.
Examples of white Northern racial animosity abound, often with a modern resonance. In the 1790s, residents of New Haven, Connecticut, and Salem, Massachusetts, argued that the movement of blacks to white neighborhoods precipitated a 20 to 50 percent decline in property values. Citizens of South Boston bragged in 1847 that “not a single colored family” resided in the neighborhood. Abolitionist Boston had its segregated “Nigger Hill” when only 1.3 percent of the population was black. Groping for a positive interpretation of this situation, black historians cite examples of Boston blacks and whites living “adjacent to one another.” But, in fact, Boston greeted blacks with residential segregation; separate and inferior schools; separate churches, lecture halls, and places of entertainment; and, according to the historian James Horton, “condescension in polite circles.” Blacks “held the worst jobs at the lowest pay.” Even the Irish, according to Frederick Douglass, were able to push blacks out of their normal occupations. The two decades before the Civil War were a time of economic crisis for Boston’s blacks. As the white population doubled from 84,400 to 177,800, the black population held stagnant at 2,261 (1.3 percent).
Historians heap praise on the Massachusetts legislature for banning racial segregation in schools in 1855. The act affected all of fifty children. (When time came for real integration via busing in the 1960s, Boston’s resistance, led by Louise Day Hicks, was legendary.) In 1860 only thirty thousand black children out of an American black school population of eighty-six thousand in the free North attended any form of school. A small number attended integrated schools. In contrast, 6.3 million (two-thirds) of white children were enrolled in school.
The absolute numbers of black people residing in a Northern city or state in the antebellum years are critical to understanding racial separation and animosity. They reinforce the distinction made by the white North in opposing slavery but despising the presence of blacks. Blacks constituted a mere 2 percent of the North’s antebellum population, and 94 percent of them were not allowed to vote, even with such minuscule numbers. That proportion was preferred even in Boston, the hotbed of abolition and twentieth-century liberal politics. In 1930 the black population in the entire state of Massachusetts was 1.3 percent out of a total of four million. By contrast, as David Cohn has noted, the cotton-dominated Bolivar County, in the Mississippi Delta, alone had the same number of blacks—fifty-two thousand. A hospitable North would have drained the South’s labor force after the Civil War.
Connecticut provides a vivid portrait of Northern disdain for free blacks. Slavery was hardly an economic bonanza in Connecticut and was simply not profitable enough to expand. In 1784 the state ended race-based slavery via legislation for gradual emancipation, by which all slaves born after 1784 would be freed at age twenty-five; females were to be freed at age twenty-one. In 1775 the state had had more than 5,100 black slaves, about 3 percent of the population. In 1800, in a population of 451,520, only 8,627 (1.9 percent) were black.
Supposedly, slavery in New England was benign. Still, an article in the Connecticut Journal in 1774 exhibited widespread notions of black inferiority. The writer categorized “the Negroes of Africa” as animals to be ruled by white descendants of the biblical Adam.
God formed [blacks] . . . in common with horses, oxen, dogs, &c. for the white people alone to be used by them either for pleasure or to labour with other beasts in the culture of tobacco, indigo, rice, and sugar. [This was before the advent of cotton production.]
Connecticut has left an extraordinary record of white attitudes toward free blacks in the antebellum North. In 1800 the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences conducted a survey of more than one hundred Connecticut towns. The major sponsors were Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale College, and Noah Webster. The survey consisted of thirty-two “articles,” of which Number 26 dealt with race. Specifically, it wanted to know if a black person born enslaved was different than one born free:
Free blacks; their number, vices and modes of life, their industry and success in acquiring property; whether those born free are more ingenious and virtuous, than those who were emancipated after arriving to adult years.
The inquiry embodied the optimistic viewpoint that blacks had been degraded by slavery and, once freed, would undergo a transition to “proper” morality and productive citizenship. In Connecticut a brief period between gradual emancipation and the first decades of the nineteenth century evidenced white idealism and a hope that the effects of slavery could be whitewashed from black character. A thorough apprenticeship, similar to Benjamin Franklin’s proposal for “improvement,” with white tutelage and charity, was envisioned. The goal was the acceptance of white Christian norms. If this transition could not work in Connecticut, what would be the fate of blacks in the rest of America?
The Connecticut town responses were devastating, with a damaging assessment of blacks as lazy and immoral. No distinction was drawn between the character of emancipated blacks and that of freeborn blacks. In all, blacks were recognized in early-nineteenth-century Connecticut as an intractable problem.
Timothy Dwight, the well-educated Congregationalist minister, wrote the report from New Haven in 1811. In one of his own sermons in 1810, Dwight was highly critical of New Haven blacks:
[T]hese people . . . are, generally, neither able, nor inclined to make their freedom a blessing unto themselves. When they first became free, they are turned out into the world, in circumstances, fitted to make them nuisances to society. They have not property; nor any skill to acquire it. Nor have they . . . generally any industry. . . . They have no economy; and waste, of course, much of what they earn. They have little knowledge either of morals or religion. They are therefore victims to sloth, prodigality, poverty, ignorance, and vice.
In the report of the Connecticut towns survey, Dwight expanded on the destructive behavioral characteristics of blacks.
Their vices . . . are usually intended by the phrase “low vice.” Uneducated to principals of morality, or to habits of industry . . . they labor only to gratify gross and vulgar appetites. Accordingly, many of them are thieves, liars, profane drunkards, Sabbath-breakers, quarrelsome idle. . . . Their ruling passion seems very generally to be . . . fashionable.
The conservative scholar Thomas Sowell has blamed white Southerners for such destructive traits in blacks. The characteristics—“aversion to work,” “neglect of education,” “drunkenness,” “improvidence,” “proneness to violence,” love “of fine clothes and good living . . . more than . . . a bank account,” and “low standards of ability, ambition, and morals”—sound very much like those of early-nineteenth-century Connecticut; yet the erudite Sowell finds that Southern blacks, whom he calls “black rednecks,” inherited these habits from white Southern rednecks. There were no white Southern rednecks in Connecticut in 1800 to influence blacks.
In his report, Dwight then describes the white tutelage that will be necessary to bring blacks properly into white society. Two racially separate schools were set up for black children, one of which was funded by charity. For Dwight, education was the only “rational hope of a reformation” for blacks.
But the idea of a black transition to freedom was essentially abandoned by Connecticut. By 1818 the state constitution had disfranchised its tiny black population. By 1820 Connecticut joined the American Colonization Society (ACS), which sought to encourage blacks to leave America for Africa. Short of deportation, this was the ultimate form of exclusion. Few recall that Harriet Beecher Stowe gave a nod to colonization when she sent the heroes and heroines of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as missionaries to Liberia. The powerful New Haven Congregationalist minister Leonard Bacon in 1823 referred to free blacks as “aliens and outcasts” who should “seek a home on the . . . shores of Africa.” White tutelage had vanished; assimilation was impossible. “You cannot bleach him,” wrote Bacon using the color metaphor, “into the enjoyment of freedom.”
Connecticut never evolved toward racial tolerance. With a tiny black population, in 1857 the state reaffirmed its disfranchisement of blacks when 76 percent of whites voted against allowing the vote to its 1.9 percent black population. Again, after the Civil War Connecticut voted against ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to enfranchise blacks.
At the root of this support for colonization and disfranchisement, as elsewhere in the North, was a fear of black migration from the South and an endorsement of separatism. Further evidence may be seen in the Reverend Simeon S. Jocelyn’s 1831 proposal that “a Collegiate school [for teaching] a manual labor system” for blacks be established in New Haven. In the years before the Civil War most Northern blacks lived in poverty, typically working as domestic servants or manual laborers. Successful black barbers were an exception.
Jocelyn’s school was designed to help blacks “cultivate habits of industry.” The clergyman had impeccable credentials as a friend of blacks: he had helped found the anti-slavery society in New Haven, was pastor of New Haven’s Temple Church, which had a black congregation, and was actively involved in charities for blacks. Nevertheless, his was a voice in the wilderness. Despite the town’s anti-slavery trappings, its citizens had voted heavily against black suffrage in 1857. In a hastily convened town council meeting, the “air ran hot and foul” as New Haven condemned Reverend Jocelyn’s proposed school on racial grounds. A resolution passed by the mayor, aldermen, and the Common Council was clear:
Yale College, the institutions for the education of females, and the other schools [in New Haven] . . . are important . . . and the establishment of a College in the same place to educate the Colored population is incompatible with their prosperity, if not the existence of the present institutions of learning, and will be destructive of the best interests of the city. . . . We will resist the establishment of the proposed College in this place by every lawful means.
The proposal died, and thousands of free blacks over the years lost an educational opportunity. Yale certainly had a hand in this. New Haven, like every Northern city, sought to prevent blacks from moving there.
The fear of black migration also derailed a black school founded in Canterbury, Connecticut. The well-documented efforts of Prudence Crandall to educate young black girls in 1831 met with staunch resistance by Canterbury citizens. Connecticut had instituted “black laws” in 1833 to prevent out-of-state blacks from coming into the state for an education. Crandall was accused of violating these laws and was acquitted on a technicality. Afterward her school was the target of vandalism and attempted arson when the citizens of Canterbury descended on the school and destroyed all its windows. The entire episode was brought about because twenty young African American girls were attending Crandall’s school. Eventually she abandoned Connecticut for Illinois, an even worse environment of racial intolerance.
Connecticut claims as a daughter Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, whose emotional appeal was a catalyst for the anti-slavery movement and the Civil War. Hartford boasts the Harriet Beecher Stowe house, a museum that was once the home of the famous author. Stowe captured the horrors of slavery in her monumental novel that appeared in 1852. Despite her difficulty in finding a publisher, copies of the book literally flew off the press: ten thousand copies in the first week, three hundred thousand in the first year. The book spawned theater productions and other slave stories as its monetary success became widely known.
Stowe’s enlightenment had limits. We know what she thought about slavery, but what was her attitude toward free blacks? The reader of Uncle Tom’s Cabin may easily overlook the book’s denouement, the fate of its heroes and heroines—Stowe sent them to Liberia. She deliberately followed the colonization scheme and fictionally deported them to Africa as missionaries. She speaks through George Harris, the former slave. After gaining his freedom, he articulates his future plans:
I might mingle in the circle of whites, in [America], my shade of color is so slight, and that of my wife and family scarce perceptible. . . . But to tell you the truth, I have no wish to. . . . I have no wish to pass for an American, or to identify myself with them. . . .
We have more than the rights of common men;—we have claim of an injured race for reparation. But, then, I do not want it; I want a country, a nation, of my own.
As a Christian patriot, as a teacher of Christianity, I go to my country,—glorious Africa. I go to Liberia, not as to an Elysium of romance, but as a field of work.
This is a staggering and prescient statement by the author of the most powerful anti-slavery tract ever written in America. Harriet Beecher Stowe sent her characters George, Eliza, and their family and Topsy to Liberia as missionaries to “civilize and proselytize.” Here, consciously or subconsciously, was an argument that blacks needed to be separate. It is also the first mention of reparations for the injustice and harm done by slavery, a demand that continues even today. Notably, the white Stowe rejected reparations, as has white America.
In response to Stowe’s colonization solution, the black leader Frederick Douglass was indignant. “The truth is, dear Madam, we are here, & we are likely to remain.” The colonization attempts championed by Abraham Lincoln, by many abolitionists, and by white Southerners are often dismissed as impractical. Indeed, African Americans, despite the harsh reality of the lives of free blacks, thought of themselves as Americans: “Why should we leave this land?” the Reverend Jehiel C. Beman asked in 1835. “Truly this is our home, here let us live and here let us die.” When encouraged by an abolitionist in 1853 to consider leaving America through the colonization effort, an Ohio black was adamant: “I would die first, before I would leave the land of my birth.”
In 1853 Harriet Beecher Stowe, with her newly minted wealth, rejected Frederick Douglass’s proposal for a vocational school for blacks in New Haven, Connecticut. Douglass expressed his “great disappointment” at her response, which had put him in “an awkward position before the colored people.” Stowe explained her refusal in a letter to the abolitionist Wendell Phillips:
Of all the vague unbased fabrics of a vision this floating idea of a colored industrial school is the most illusive. If [black people] want one why don’t they have one—many men among the colored people are richer than I am & better able to help such an object.—Will they ever learn to walk?
Stowe thought that blacks should be responsible for their own progress.
After the Civil War, Stowe provided $10,000 for her son Frederick and two of his Connecticut army friends to rent a cotton plantation in Florida, near the St. John’s River. She stayed with him in 1866 and described the work ethic of emancipated blacks in her book Palmetto Leaves: “As a class they are more obedient, better natured, more joyous, and easily satisfied [than whites].” At the time, conventional white (and some black) American opinion held that blacks were better suited than whites to manual labor in hot climates. Stowe agreed. Blacks seemed at home in the cotton fields:
The thermometer, for these three days past, has risen over ninety every day. No white man that we know of dares stay in the fields later than ten o’clock. . . . Yet, the black laborers whom we leave in the field pursue their toil, if anything more actively, more cheerfully, than during the cooler months. The sun awakes all their vigor and all their boundless jolly. . . . A gang of negroes, great brawny, muscular fellows, seemed to make a perfect frolic of this job which, under such a sun, would have threatened sunstroke to any white man.
For Stowe, education during the transition from slavery to freedom resembled the much-criticized practical philosophy later espoused by Booker T. Washington. Here is the education she envisioned for black children:
The teaching in the common schools ought to be largely industrial, and do what it can to prepare the children to get a living by doing something well. Practical sewing, cutting and fitting, for girls, and the general principles of agriculture for boys, might be taught with advantage.
Unfortunately for Stowe, cotton was easier for her to write about than to grow. The army worm, an insect capable of devastating a cotton field, intervened. Her brave Union captains who had won many military battles were “defeated and routed” over a period of just two days. Only two bales of cotton were harvested from her farm, and she lost her entire $10,000 investment. She returned chastened to the North. Her commitment to black uplift in the South dissipated once there was no easy “golden fortune” in the cotton fields.
Northerners had no use for fiction that portrayed the true lives of blacks in the North. The first novel written in English by an African American was Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859). The author, a black woman named Harriet Wilson, of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, related the brutality and poverty of daily existence for Frado, the black heroine, at the hands of her white custodians. Wilson shows that “slavery’s shadows fall” even in Massachusetts. At the beginning of her story, she apologizes for embarrassing her “anti-slavery friends” by revealing the brute racial hatred of free blacks in the North. The six-year-old Frado is abandoned by her mother on the doorsteps of a white family, the Belmonts. During her period of indenture she is beaten repeatedly: at one point Mrs. Belmont “inflicted a blow which lay the tottering . . . [Frado] prostrate on the floor . . . [and then] snatching a towel, stuffed the mouth of the sufferer, and beat her cruelly.” Daily routines included Mrs. Belmont’s “spicing the toil with words that burn and frequent blows on [Frado’s] head.” After running away, Frado is “maltreated by professed abolitionists, who didn’t want slaves at the South, nor niggers in their own houses, . . . to lodge one; to eat with one; to admit one through the front door; to sit next to one; awful!”
Harriet Wilson’s novel lay in obscurity until 1983, a testament to the lack of interest in descriptions of the lives of free blacks in the North. Slavery would sell books, but the sordid condition of free blacks was largely ignored.
To further illustrate the North’s distinction between slaves and blacks, consider the case of William Henry Seward, the scruffy but sociable senator and former governor of New York. On May 18, 1860, Seward received 172 votes on the first ballot of the Republican National Convention in Chicago; Abraham Lincoln, the eventual nominee, received only 102 votes. Seward had been the favored candidate from the most populous state in the Union. The awkward Illinois lawyer would go on to win the Republican nomination and then the presidential election with only 40 percent of the popular vote. In Lincoln’s administration these two ambitious competitors who earlier had barely known each other would develop a close working relationship. Seward, the most powerful New York politician of the nineteenth century, became Lincoln’s secretary of state, his “Right Hand,” his “Indispensable Man.”
Seward and Lincoln had distinctly different backgrounds. Seward grew up in an affluent family in the small southern New York town of Florida. His father, Henry Seward, was an enormously prosperous farmer, land speculator, and well-connected politician who left an estate worth millions in today’s dollars. Henry’s access to power allowed him a three-hour visit in 1831 with former president John Quincy Adams. The precocious son, William Henry, was a superb student, and after graduation from Union College and the study of law he traveled to Europe with his father, attending debates in the House of Commons, walking in the Swiss Alps, and speaking with the aging Lafayette in Paris. By then the son’s vision for America was fully formed: “[T]he fearful responsibility of the American people to the people of the nations of the earth, [is] to carry successfully through the experiment which . . . is to prove that men are capable of self-government.”
Formally educated, cosmopolitan, and well-connected, Seward contrasted sharply with the homespun, self-taught, crafty, pragmatic, opportunistic lawyer from Illinois. The man who wrote and delivered some of America’s most inspiring prose had no formal education and used no focus group. Perhaps one element of Lincoln’s background needs further comment: he was a corporate lawyer who represented the Illinois Central Railroad on various matters, including taxes.
Seward is best remembered for his consistent anti-slavery position and his realism. The anti-slavery stance is sharply revealed in his famous “higher law” speech of 1850, in which he appealed to “a higher law than the Constitution” in his condemnation of slavery. Seward’s “higher law” was handed down by “the Creator of the Universe.” Seward the realist foresaw an “irrepressible conflict,” a “collision” over slavery: “[T]he United States, must and will . . . become either entirely slave-holding or entirely a free-labor nation” (1858). There was no equivocation about his position on slavery.
Seward’s attitude toward blacks was also clear. He saw slavery as the paramount issue—it must be abolished for the country to survive; but free blacks were of little concern. Like most other anti-slavery politicians, Seward held blacks, either free or enslaved, in low esteem. In 1860 he spoke of black inferiority and the impossibility of black equality.
The great fact is now fully realized that the African race here is a foreign and feeble element . . . incapable of assimilation . . . a pitiful exotic unnecessarily transplanted into our fields, and which it is unprofitable to cultivate at the cost of the desolation of the native vineyard.
This is a damning statement from the man who was clearer in his attack on slavery than even Abraham Lincoln.
“The North has nothing to do with the negroes,” Seward said in conversation in 1866. “I have no more concern for them than I have for the Hottentots. They are God’s poor, they always have been and always will be so everywhere.” These remarks, published in 1888, are perfectly consistent with Seward’s earlier statements. As much as white Americans would like their heroes to be racially enlightened by twenty-first-century standards, they must face the truth of pervasive racial animosity in the North as well as the South.
Seward strongly adhered to the plan (Lincoln’s and then Andrew Johnson’s) for a swift and lenient integration of the Confederate states into the reconstructed Union. He believed the states, not the federal government, should determine regulations for black suffrage. In a cabinet meeting in 1865 he voted against black enfranchisement. He also advocated vetoing the bill that would have renewed and strengthened the Freedman’s Bureau, the agency set up to oversee the welfare of freed slaves. In April 1866 Seward reiterated his views on a prompt reconciliation without concern for blacks, and advocated no federal intervention on their behalf.
I am ready to leave the interests of the most intelligent white man to the guardianship of his state, and where I leave the interests of the white I am willing to trust the civil rights of the black. The South must take care of its own negroes as the North does. . . . The North must get over the notion of interference with the affairs of the South. . . . The South longs to come home.
Seward supported black suffrage in New York State, where “their numbers were negligible,” but in 1867 he opposed a bill that enfranchised blacks in the city of Washington because of the size of the potential black vote. Only in time, he thought, would black enfranchisement be appropriate. He also thought that the civil rights legislation of 1866 was “unconstitutional on technical grounds.”
Today historians may concentrate on the racial implications of Reconstruction, but Seward and many of his contemporaries were consumed with the grand vision of international trade. According to Seward, commerce was “the chief agent of . . . advancement in civilization and enlargement of empire.” Thus despite his impeccable anti-slavery credentials, he declared that if necessary he would vote to admit California to the United States, “even if she had come as a slave state.” In the scheme of economic expansion, the preponderance of free blacks was assigned to their oppressive role of cotton laborers, with highly limited freedom and mobility.
A rather large and imposing statue of William Henry Seward rises on the southwest corner of Madison Park in New York City. By twenty-first-century norms of political correctness, Seward was distinctly anti-black and squandered an opportunity to assist free blacks. His words and actions clearly illustrate the distinction between Northern anti-slavery sentiment and anti-black attitudes.
Seward’s New York was decidedly anti-black. In 1790 the total black population of the state, both free and enslaved, was 6.27 percent of the total. A law providing for gradual emancipation intervened in 1799, and on the eve of the Civil War, in 1860, the black population of New York was 1.9 percent—representing an explosive growth in the white population and the numbers of slaves sold to the South. In 1821 New York eliminated a property requirement for white voters while increasing the suffrage qualification fee for blacks from $100 to a prohibitive $250. Thus in 1861 only three hundred blacks in New York City could vote. The state’s black voting restrictions were upheld in 1846 by a vote of 224,336 to 85,406. In state constitutional conventions of 1860 and 1869, a majority again defeated black enfranchisement by requiring a property value. In each case black inferiority became a talking point, and delegates overwhelmingly voted against black enfranchisement even with the state’s minuscule black population. New York voted against the Fifteenth Amendment, too. As ever, Northerners feared a black migration north.
The New York Times, a staunch supporter of Lincoln, advocated the reform of slavery rather than abolition. “We have admitted,” the Times argued on January 22, 1861, “the impossibility and the folly of immediate abolition of Slavery, [and] pointed out the ruin certain to flow from the sudden release of four millions of ignorant slaves from the dependence and control of masters. . . .” The great need of the South was a modification and amelioration of her system of slavery, which would keep blacks in the region’s cotton fields.
As white immigrants poured into New York during the eighteenth century, skilled black laborers were displaced and relegated to menial positions. Free blacks were left with jobs that whites did not want. Some blacks remained as sailors, but most became domestics in private homes, hotels, and boarding houses or worked as chimney sweeps, washerwomen, and “tubmen” (cleaners of privies). The gritty job of crawling down a chimney to remove soot was performed by black children between the ages of four and ten. These jobs, rather than stepping-stones to advancement, were forced steps backward.
Examples of race-based economic conflict illustrate the fragility of the blacks’ status. The historian Edgar McManus cited the former slave Austin Stewart’s 1857 description of their wretched plight:
Everywhere Negroes were shunned, cut off from free society, and excluded from most of the skilled occupations. Life held no promise for the Negro, for he was caught in a vise designed to crush, and degrade him. . . . Great numbers of Negroes sank to the level of pariahs condemned to a bitter existence on the fringe of free society. . . . The Negroes were in a very real sense a population in quarantine, trapped in a system of racial bondage.
In 1859 the historian Thomas De Voe lamented the plight of New York’s black population. Freedom had boundaries, he observed, for blacks were “poor, squalid, dirty, half-dressed, ill-fed and –bred, some . . . strong with an inclination to be thievish.” In fact, blacks were convicted of crimes at a rate three and a half times that of whites. De Voe blamed black poverty on the severe limits imposed by whites. In 1840 the New York State Convention of Colored Citizens described their situation:
We find ourselves crippled and crushed in soul and ability. . . . We were translated into the partial enjoyment and limited possessions of freedom. . . . The prejudice against us in the community has been more potent than the dictates of Christian equality.
Examples of successful black entrepreneurs in the North are scarce. In Philadelphia, James Forten was a well-known sailmaker who in 1929 employed forty workers, black and white. Stephen Smith, a lumber merchant in Philadelphia, had revenues of $100,000 in the 1850s. Among the amazing stories of black business enterprise, a Virginia slave, Robert Gordon, earned enough money to purchase his freedom by selling a coal by-product, slack, from a coal yard. He then moved to Cincinnati, where he continued building his business and invested in real estate. These and similar stories are inspiring but isolated instances in a prosperous world that was largely closed to antebellum black Northerners.
Despite overwhelmingly anti-black attitudes, white charity on behalf of the black community is a recurring theme in American history. Inspired by humanitarian concerns, such benevolence was so often strictly paternalistic that it led black groups to seek their own destiny. Whites hoped to create an uplifting process by which blacks would be “civilized” and accept Western norms, chiefly in the areas of education, jobs, and morality. One such endeavor, the racially separate African Free Schools, was founded in 1785 by the New York Manumission Society. Its members were heavily involved in the New York City Colonization Society, which began in 1817 and was followed in 1829 by the state organization. Both organizations encouraged sending blacks to Liberia. The Manumission Society also recommended Texas for black colonization because it was a less expensive solution than Liberia and because it was closest to “those states which are overcharged with the descendants of Africa.” For white Northerners, black freedom hopefully meant a black exodus.
Yet blacks for the most part rejected colonization. The frustrated black minister Henry Highland Garnet did encourage emigration to the West Indies and Africa in 1858, when he organized the African Civilization Society. In a symbolic but futile gesture, Garnet also promoted the Free Produce movement, which advocated a boycott of slave-produced sugar and cotton.
By the 1830s white New Yorkers had determined that blacks could not be assimilated. In 1839 a group of white women set up the Colored Orphanage Asylum, a racially segregated institution located between Forty-Third and Forty-Fourth Streets along Fifth Avenue. Most of the city’s upper-class white women were involved with the colonization society to encourage black emigration to Africa. The Hopper Home, a halfway house for Irish women, was established by the Women’s Prison Association in 1854, but it excluded African American women. The Society for the Relief of Worthy, Aged, Indigent Colored Persons began in 1843 as a distinctly segregated entity. In addition, the Colored Home of the City of New York had been established to care for destitute blacks. In all, blacks, with a tiny portion of the city’s population, accounted for 20 percent of the people on relief. The Colored Home’s 1851 annual report, called “Broken Gloom,” was explicitly pessimistic. “For the person of color, no future dawns with brightening ray,” the document read, “no star gild his horizon: his doom, if he remains in this his native land, is moral, intellectual and civil inferiority.”
Along with economic degradation, blacks in New York also had to contend with violence. White and black abolitionists in New York City were attacked in July 1834. During the Civil War, anti-black sentiment in New York erupted into the most violent civil disturbance in American history to that time. The stage was set in the spring of 1863 as the war was going poorly for the North. The well-chronicled Draft Riots began on July 12. New York’s working-class whites, protesting the military draft, rampaged through the city’s streets, lynching innocent blacks, roughing up white businessmen, and burning the Colored Orphanage Asylum. At least a hundred people were killed and a thousand wounded in the melee. New York was fortunate in that six thousand Union soldiers returned from victory at Gettysburg on July 4 to help quell the insurrection that had reduced the city to chaos. This was a race riot; white people were killing black people. The label “Draft Riots” should at least be changed to Draft Race Riots.
Through laws and customs, whites in New York pushed the black population into a separate, subordinate society, unfit to enter the assimilation process. Racial segregation was observed in virtually every aspect of life except in working-class taverns. By the opening of the Civil War, housing in New York City was segregated, with 86 percent of New York’s African Americans living below Fourteenth Street; fully 75 percent of the city’s streets were exclusively white. New York City did not have to wait for a large black migration to put residential segregation in place. When Seneca Village, the only area of significant black land ownership, was taken over by the city in 1857, its residents were poorly compensated and were unable to purchase land elsewhere.
Whites were particularly concerned about amalgamation, interracial sex, and interracial marriage. Lydia Maria Child, a prominent abolitionist, made it clear that she did not wish to violate the “distinctions of society by forcing the rude illiterate [blacks] into the presence of the learned and refined [whites].”
In the mid-nineteenth century, America was bursting at its boundaries, surging across a continent. Cotton was dragging race-based slavery in its westward wake. Slave expansion in the West had its limits because slavery spread only where climate and soil permitted. Nonetheless the free states—those in the North that had abolished slavery—wanted slavery’s extension prohibited. The political stakes were high, for the new states carved from the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 were reservoirs of power. The fight over the extension of slavery to the Western territories reached a climax with the presidential election of Abraham Lincoln, who clearly opposed the spread of the peculiar institution.
In portraying westward expansion, history often omits the distinction between black slaves and free blacks. While opposing the extension of slavery, white anti-slavery Northerners were also vehemently anti-black. This attitude toward race would, after emancipation, doom blacks to bondage in cotton production in the South. It was illustrated in the misunderstood Wilmot Proviso of 1846. A little-known Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, David Wilmot, forever secured his place in American history by introducing an amendment to a $2 million appropriations bill for the Mexican War:
Provided, that, as an express and fundamental condition of the acquisition of any territory from Mexico . . . neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime . . .
Americans were an acquisitive lot. Wilmot favored the annexation of Texas, supported the Mexican War, and wanted to buy New Mexico and California. His amendment passed by nineteen votes in the House but was defeated in the Southern-dominated Senate. Although the measure was thereby blocked, it fed the growing controversy over slavery, and its underlying principle helped bring about the formation of the Republican Party in 1854. For Wilmot, the issue was slavery but also race.
When territory presents itself for annexation where slavery is already established, I stand ready to take it, if national considerations require it, as they did in the case of Texas; I will not seek to change its institutions. I make not war upon the South nor upon slavery in the South. I will not first ask the abolition of slavery. I have no squeamish sensitivity upon the subject of slavery, nor morbid sympathy for the slave. I plead the cause of the rights of white freemen. I would preserve for free white labor a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which the negro slavery brings upon free labor.
Wilmot was not speaking in abstract terms about a technical economic classification of labor, either slave or free. He was voicing brute racial hatred. “By God, sir,” he exclaimed, “men born and nursed of white women are not going to be ruled by men who were brought up on the milk of some damn negro wench!” After he switched to the Republican Party and ran for governor of Pennsylvania in 1857, he made it clear that “It is not true that the defenders of the rights of free labor seek the elevation of the black race to an equality with the white. . . .” Wilmot wanted blacks, slave or free, excluded from the annexed territories. In 1857 Oregon was admitted to the Union as a state, having incorporated the Wilmot Proviso’s slave prohibition. The white South was extremely upset about the application of the proviso. Oregon also added a black exclusion law to its constitution at a time when the state’s black population was 128 people in a total population of 52,337:
No free Negro, or Mulatto, not residing in this state at the time of the adoption of this constitution, shall come, reside, or be within this state, or hold any real estate, or make any contracts, or maintain any suit therein; an [sic] the Legislative Assembly shall provide by penal laws, for the removal, by public officers, of all such Negroes, and Mulattoes, and for their effectual exclusion from the state, and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state, or employ, or harbor them.
The law passed by an eight-to-one majority, greater than the margin to prohibit slavery. The Oregon black exclusion law was not expunged until 1926.
The American West required an enormous flow of new labor but did not want black labor. In a period when millions of white European immigrants were being enticed to come to America and settle in the West, black labor was specifically excluded. Wilmot’s racial antipathy was historically based in the North and would reverberate through the Civil War and beyond, with dire consequences for African Americans.
Lincoln’s Illinois and all the states of the Northwest Territory, now the Midwest, followed their Eastern counterparts in disdaining the presence of free blacks. History texts and courses invariably mention that slavery was prohibited by law in the Northwest Territory in 1787. Slavery could not be established in the states of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota that would be carved out of the territory. But accounts generally fail to mention that the white populations of these states, once admitted to the Union, invariably legislated against blacks. “Exclusion laws” prevented free blacks from even moving there. The new states, like those of the colonial North, according to Eugene Berwanger, “dreaded the thought of a biracial society,” slave or free. The legal response to the imagined threat of a black invasion was drastic: exclusionary residence laws, racially segregated schools, denial of suffrage, prohibitions against miscegenation, the banning of blacks from jury service or from testifying against whites, denial of poor relief, flogging, and exclusion from the militia. The North gave the South a blueprint for racial control after emancipation.
Illinois was typical in its fear of a black invasion after emancipation. In 1830 the state had 2,486 blacks (1.6 percent of the population); by 1860 there were 7,698 (0.4 percent of the population). Nevertheless black laws were quickly enacted. In 1813 Illinois territorial laws provided that justices of the peace force every “incoming free black or mulatto” to exit. If a free black or mulatto did not leave, thirty-nine lashes were to be administered every fifteen days while the person was resident. Free blacks had to register with the local court and purchase documents attesting to their freedom.
In 1818, when Illinois was admitted to the Union, anti-slavery literature touted the state’s prohibition of slavery in order to avoid the inheritance of free blacks through manumission. In 1823 Governor Edward Coles, a staunch anti-slavery advocate, declared that slavery corrupted the morality of the white population. But his particular concern was miscegenation, “the shameful, the disgraceful, the degrading” practice of sex between the races. By 1829 free blacks had to post a $1,000 bond with proof of freedom in order to enter Illinois. Like Indiana, Iowa, and Michigan, Illinois outlawed interracial marriages and nullified any that had occurred.
Anti-black measures continued into the Civil War years. In 1848 Illinois citizens, by a voting margin of four to one, passed a black exclusion clause. When a black organization proposed in 1852 that the restriction on black testimony against whites be removed, the proposal was tabled. In January 1853 “An Act to Prevent the Immigration of Free Negroes into the State” passed the legislature by forty-five to twenty-three. Under this law, any person who brought a free black or mulatto into Illinois was subject to a fine of $100 to $500 and a jail sentence of one year. Blacks who entered and stayed in Illinois for ten days were subject to a $50 penalty. If the black person could not pay, his services were sold to pay off the fine. Although a black exclusion law was already in effect, Illinois citizens in March 1982, by a two-to-one majority, reinforced it. In August 1862 Illinois voters, by a five-to-one majority, renewed the prohibition on black suffrage—at a time when blacks comprised 0.4 percent of the population.
Like other nonslave states, Illinois wanted black people out of Illinois. Republican senator Lyman Trumbull opposed the extension of slavery as well as “giving Negroes . . . privileges” equal to white citizens. He favored colonization or any other plan to get rid of blacks “Godspeed.” In 1859 he declared, “We the Republican Party, are the white man’s party. . . . We are for the free white man.” He pondered the fate of emancipated slaves: “What will we do with them; we do not want them set free to come in among us. . . .”
Other Illinois politicians agreed. Republican congressman Owen Lovejoy, brother of the slain abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy, opposed slavery but held that blacks were inferior and that the United States was meant exclusively for white people. General (and future governor) John M. Palmer, a Republican, wrote that freedom was not the issue. For him it was “the presence of the negro race; a race which the sentiments of our people doom to a condition of racial and political inferiority beyond the reach of all efforts for their elevation.” In 1863 Illinois’s Republican governor, Richard Yates, suggested that competition with white labor would lead blacks in the North to a life of “pauperism and neglect.” His belief that the benefits of freedom in the South would rid the North of blacks soon became commonplace in the North. The black migration to Illinois did not appear until the labor shortage induced by World War I ignited it. It was then an economic, not a humanitarian, event.
Lincoln, a lifelong opponent of slavery and its extension, was an advocate of both colonization and “diffusion”—the forced distribution of blacks according to population. His hometown Springfield paper, the Illinois State Journal, was both Republican and a supporter of Lincoln and offered a strong whiff of prevailing Northern racial sentiment and an endorsement of free blacks only “at a distance.”
The truth is, the nigger is an unpopular institution in the free States. Even those who are unwilling to rob them of all the rights of humanity and to labor and to enjoy the fruits of their toil, do not care to be brought into close contact with them. . . . Now we confess that we have, in common with the nineteenth-twentieths of our people, a prejudice against the nigger. . . .
Lincoln has been pardoned for his own racially inspired derogatory comments about blacks. His admirers justify his approach as necessary pragmatism required for winning elections. In 1854, in Peoria, Illinois, Lincoln spoke against black equality: “I am not contending for . . . political and social equality between blacks and whites.” His statement presupposes an electorate to which racial antipathy appeals. In an attempt to deify Lincoln and remove any racial stigma, he is further exonerated by interpretations of his evolving enlightened attitude toward blacks. Thus he gets a pass on the late-twentieth-century racial litmus test, and there has been no outcry to tear down the Lincoln Memorial. As an example, the historian George M. Fredrickson euphemistically describes the prewar Lincoln as “clearly a white supremacist, but of a relatively passive or reactive kind.” Lincoln knew that slavery was the “root cause” of the Civil War and that cotton was its economic base; he wanted slavery abolished by gradual means, by force if necessary. But he had no plan for the millions of freed slaves.
Colonization, according to V. Jacque Voegeli, was Lincoln’s “favorite answer to the race problem.” In 1862 he posed the question to a black audience, “Why should the people of your race be colonized? . . . You and we are different races. . . . You suffer very greatly by living among us while we suffer from your presence.” Lincoln approved a plan to colonize blacks on the Chiriqui land grant on the Isthmus of Panama. His secretary of the interior contracted in September 1862 with the Chiriqui Improvement Company. In August 1862 Lincoln told a group of blacks, “There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us.”
Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. A day earlier he had signed a bill authorizing $500,000 to fund colonization schemes. One such plan, presented by the promoter Bernard Kock, would have removed five thousand blacks from America to Ile Vache, an island owned by Haiti, at a cost of $250,000. The first four hundred black colonists left in 1863; the surviving 368 returned in 1864 after the attempt failed. The man whom America credits for freeing the slaves also wanted them out of America. Lincoln was not alone in seizing the colonization solution. Republicans John A. Bingham, Owen Lovejoy, and George Julian voted for $500,000 in federal funds to finance the “removal of freed slaves freed in the District of Columbia” and the South.
Again, historians attribute Lincoln’s colonization comments and concrete efforts as clever maneuvering to gain political support in the border states and elsewhere in the North. Eric Foner, for example, points out that Lincoln never mentioned colonization after the Ile Vache fiasco. Foner considers this an example of Lincoln’s pragmatism and evolved position and proof that he was never a true supporter of colonization. In reality, Lincoln realized that colonization was impractical and impossible.
His search for ways to deal with free blacks led Lincoln to a “diffusion” policy. Like most white Northerners, he was concerned with a mass migration north. In 1862 he paid homage to the diffusion principle by which “Equally distributed among the whites of the whole country . . . there would be but one colored to seven whites. . . . Could the one, in any way, disturb the seven?” In the North, Lincoln overlooked the fact that across the region and throughout the nineteenth century, a ratio of even one black person to one hundred whites already greatly disturbed white populations.
Diffusion made its way into proposed legislation. In April 1864 Kentucky senator Garrett Davis proposed that Congress redistribute blacks to Northern states in “proportion to their white population,” but the Senate “scorned” his plan. In June that year a “milder form” of dispersal was presented by West Virginia senator Waitman T. Willey and met with an equally negative response. Willey wanted to give the Freedmen’s Bureau permission to contact Northern governors and city leaders to arrange sending freedmen north. This, Senator Willey thought, would relieve labor shortages and provide guidance for the freedmen.1
Abolitionist Massachusetts was very much against having blacks distributed to their state. The Radical Republican Charles Sumner thought that dispersal was “entirely untenable.” His Massachusetts colleague Senator Henry Wilson thought the diffusion idea would “have a bad influence in the country.” Radical Republicans recognized that the white North wanted no free blacks despite a labor shortage—except in the one case of supplying blacks for the Union Army to help the Northern states fill their draft recruitment quotas.
The day of reckoning for Massachusetts and the Northern states came in 1862. No longer could they attack the institution of race-based slavery without confronting the question of the disposition of free blacks. As the Union Army marched through the South, tens of thousands of enslaved blacks were freed as plantations were abandoned. The federal government had no policy with regard to the destitute thousands whom they had set free. Plans evolved by necessity in different areas of the South, each policy subject to interpretation, violation, and different degrees of enforcement.
The containment policy, a form of domestic colonization in the South, evolved as the white North faced racial judgment day. Thousands of freed slaves, designated as contraband, appeared behind the lines of the Union Army in Virginia. General William Tecumseh Sherman viewed them as a nuisance, “an irritating distraction from winning the war.” But the question of what to do with freed slaves in Confederate territory was no longer abstract. A precipitating event occurred in September 1862 when General John Dix, an anti-slavery Union commander in Virginia, requested that the governors of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maine accept two thousand needy former slaves. Massachusetts governor John Andrew rejected the plea. Andrew had optimistically expected that free blacks in the North would gravitate south, where their “peculiarities of physical constitution” were better suited.
For the . . . [former slave refugees] to come here for encampment or asylum would be to come as paupers or sufferers into a strange land and climate—a trying event to its habitués . . . to a busy community where they would be incapable of self-help—a course certain to demoralize themselves and endanger others.
Governor Andrew is best known to American movie audiences for his role in supporting the placement of black soldiers in the Union Army in the movie Glory (1989). But the film does not mention that less than a year before Andrew’s authorization of the legendary black Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, he had denied asylum to black refugees. Western governors likewise warmly supported the policy of keeping black refugees in the South.
In February 1864, however, Governor Andrew changed his tune. He wrote to President Lincoln complaining that Union commanders in Virginia refused to allow contraband to emigrate to Massachusetts, where there was a labor shortage. The governor’s real agenda—pursuing blacks in order to fill Massachusetts’s military quotas—was transparent. Lincoln replied with undisguised sarcasm.
If I were to judge from the letter, without external knowledge . . . I would suppose that all the colored people of Washington were struggling to get to Massachusetts; that Massachusetts was anxious to receive them as permanent citizens; and that the United States Government here was interposing and preventing this. But, I suppose these are . . . [not] the facts. If . . . it be true that Massachusetts wishes to afford permanent home within her borders, for all, or even a large number of colored persons who will come to her . . . I would not for a moment hinder [them] from coming.
The conscription of Northern troops, as we have seen in New York, was a combustible burden. Driven by expediency, Andrew had initiated a meeting of governors at Altoona, Pennsylvania, to demand the recruitment of black troops. Iowa’s governor, Samuel Kirkwood, did not mince words when he insisted on some “dead niggers” in addition to dead white men on the battlefield.
The West had to face a similar situation. When the accumulation of black refugees in the lower Mississippi Valley—in Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas—prompted federal action, in September 1862 the Union Army began sending freed slaves north. Many were sent by Union commanders to Cairo, Illinois. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton validated this policy by requiring the Union general in Cairo to care for the blacks. In one of America’s extreme racial ironies, Illinois still had a black exclusion law. More important, Stanton was turning a blind eye to racial animosity in the state. As the railroad began carrying trainloads of black refugees to Illinois, white reaction there was instantaneous and predictable. Pike County citizens attacked Secretary Stanton for resettling a “worthless negro population” in their midst. At Olney, Illinois, black refugees were halted and forced to return to Cairo. The mayor of Chicago refused to set up a committee to help resettle the freed slaves. According to the Chicago Tribune, Republican governor Yates declared that the “scattering of those black throngs should not be allowed if [it] can be avoided. . . . The mingling of blacks among us will mean that we shall always have trouble.”
On October 13 Stanton countermanded his order, halting the shipment of black refugees to Cairo. Stanton’s brief foray into the racial cauldron of the white North has been described as a tactical “blunder.” In fact, the secretary of war had inadvertently exposed America’s racial nerve. Lincoln and Stanton learned a hard lesson about Northern white hostility in Illinois, the “Land of Lincoln,” and also in Massachusetts, the land of Charles Sumner, William Lloyd Garrison, and John Andrew.
In the wake of this experience in Illinois and Massachusetts, the federal government settled on a “containment policy”: freed slaves would be kept in the cotton fields of the South. The new policy was enunciated publicly by the army’s adjutant general, Lorenzo Thomas. He outlined his plan to Secretary Stanton on April 1, 1863, leaving no doubt as to why it was necessary.
It will not do to send [the black refugees] in numbers into the free states, for the prejudices of the people of those states are against such a measure and some of those states are against such a measure and some have enacted laws against the reception of free negroes. . . . You all know the prejudices of the Northern people against receiving large numbers of the colored race.
Instead the freedmen were put to work on abandoned cotton plantations, where they were often exploited by Northerners who rented the land. Some ex-slaves leased abandoned plantation land, with mixed results.
As Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Iowa demonstrated, Illinois’s racial animosity was no aberration. Ohio in 1810 counted 1,889 blacks (0.8 percent) in its population; by 1860 there were 36,673 blacks (1.5 percent) in a total population of 2,302,838. Soon after admission to statehood in 1803, Ohio passed a series of “black laws” designed to prevent blacks from coming into the state. An 1804 law required blacks or mulattoes to prove they were free before they could enter Ohio. An 1807 law mandated that blacks and mulattoes post a $500 bond to ensure “good behavior and self-support.” In 1832 an Ohio legislative committee described “free blacks” as without “moral constraint” and “more idle and vicious than slaves.” Free blacks were considered a “distinct and degraded class” who “demoralized whites simply by association.” Anyone with one-quarter black blood could not join the militia, vote, serve on a jury or testify against a white person in Ohio. In 1859 the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that any child who had “any visible taint of African blood” could not attend a school for white students.
Cincinnati, a major trading city of the Old Northwest, was a scene of frequent racial strife. In 1829 violence erupted when the city’s trustees demanded that blacks pay the $500 bond or leave the city within thirty days. When blacks did not comply, a riot ensued. Mobs of whites, who could not be controlled for three days, attacked blacks, murdered some, and damaged homes. Almost a thousand blacks fled for Canada, where they founded the town of Wilberforce. In 1841 yet another race riot exploded in Cincinnati.
Blacks in Cincinnati found solace in their own communities. Some managed to accumulate property. The riots provoked them to build their own schools. In Cincinnati as in other Northern cities, education was, the historian Carter G. Woodson noted, the “greatest problem” for blacks. By 1856 they were allowed to elect trustees of their own schools. One black school, the Gilmore High School, was used by white Southern planters to educate their mulatto children. Although the black exclusion laws were repealed in 1849, the city’s “black laws” stood basically unaltered until after the Civil War, when fear of a black migratory invasion subsided because of government policy designed to keep blacks in the South.
Despite some changes, the black populations of Ohio cities remained in dire straits after the Civil War. Peter Clark, a respected Cincinnati black community member, noted that racial animosity “hampers me in every relation of life, in business, in politics, in religion, as a father or as a husband.” Anti-slavery Cleveland was also a hostile environment for free blacks. The prominent black John Malvin “found every door closed against the colored man . . . excepting only the jails and penitentiaries, the doors of which were thrown wide open to him.”
Ohio indulged in the “most extensive colonization” rhetoric during the 1840s. In 1849 Ohio citizens pledged $11,000 to fund an “Ohio in Africa” resettlement. A bill providing $25 each for up to fifty black people a year failed to pass when legislators realized that there was no way to monitor blacks who might enter Ohio expressly to collect the money. The legislature did petition the federal government to establish a black reservation on land recently obtained from Mexico.
If blacks could not effectively be excluded or deported, white Northerners—either Eastern or Western—wanted them to remain in the South or move there. If this could be accomplished there would be no need for further worry about a black migration north. The Ohio Democrat Jacob Brinkerhoff wanted slavery excluded from Western territories, but his views were essentially racial: “I have selfishness enough greatly to prefer the welfare of my own race to that of any other and vindictiveness enough to wish . . . to keep the South with the burden which they themselves created.” The Republicans George Julian of Indiana, Albert G. Riddle of Ohio, and Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, as well as Salmon P. Chase, governor and senator from Ohio before he became Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury, voiced hope that emancipation would “drain” the tiny Northern black community southward. Democrats and Republicans were aligned at least on the notion of keeping free blacks out of the North.
The important Ohio Republican senator John Sherman, brother of the Union general, declared matter-of-factly that Ohioans were both anti-slavery and anti-black. Ohioans, according to Sherman, were “opposed to having many negroes among them,” and blacks in general “were spurned and hated all over the country North and South.” Sherman supported colonization. In June 1852 he worried that an emancipation bill “would have made Southern Ohio uninhabitable or driven us to the enactment of harsh and cruel [exclusion] laws.” He spoke of the impossibility of assimilation and the immutable “law of God. . . . The whites and blacks will always be separate, or where they are brought together, one will be inferior to the other.” After emancipation, Senator Sherman wrote to his brother, “No one cares about the negro except [that] as . . . he is the cause of the war he should be made useful in putting an end to it.” The senator was advocating the drafting of blacks into the Union Army.
Salmon P. Chase gained visibility in Ohio by defending fugitive slaves. Later, as chief justice of the US Supreme Court, he admitted the first black lawyer to practice before the court. He had been a strong anti-slavery advocate and supported black suffrage, yet he wanted blacks out of the North, “at a distance.” In July 1862 he encouraged General Benjamin Butler, commander of the Union forces in the Gulf States, to emancipate the slaves in his territory. Chase’s motive was to make the area attractive to Northern blacks. After emancipation, he reasoned, blacks would gravitate toward the more appealing Southern climate.
Ohio’s newspapers were outspokenly anti-black. In 1862 the Cincinnati Enquirer vehemently opposed “confiscating,” the term used for freeing the slaves: “The hundreds of thousands, if not millions of slaves it will emancipate will come North and West, and will either be competitors with our white . . . laborers, degrading them by the competition, or they will have to be supported as paupers and criminals at public expense.” The Columbus Crisis raised the specter of miscegenation, suggesting that Ohio’s “farmers and mechanics were not prepared to mix up four million of blacks with their sons and daughters . . .” Ohio’s Western Reserve, in the northeastern part of the state, was reputed to be relatively tolerant, yet a Republican editor there who had opposed black exclusion laws voiced his desire to rid Ohio and the country of blacks: “We have no special affection for negroes. We neither desire their companionship or their society. . . . We would be glad if there were not one in the State or one in the United States.”
Ohio’s involvement with the Underground Railroad that helped fugitive slaves in their journey to freedom in Canada has been widely acknowledged by historians, historical memorials, and a museum in Cincinnati. None give the full story of Ohio’s antipathy toward blacks. American historians and heritage professionals in general focus on slavery and the South rather than the crucial impact of Northern racial hostility. The Underground Railroad was a transit line to carry fugitives through the state, not welcome them as residents. In 1862 an Ohio farmer waxed proudly about his state to an English visitor but added, “There is but one thing sir, that we want here, and that is to get rid of the niggers.”
White Northerners occasionally made insincere gestures about bringing free blacks north. During the Civil War a Minnesota minister advocated bringing “ten thousand Negroes” to his state. The black migrants would be forced to work for their employers, who would pay the cost of their trip. The benevolent minister would have the free blacks “fined or imprisoned” if they did not fulfill their contract with their sponsor. Nothing happened. At the time Minnesota had fewer than three hundred blacks (0.2 percent of the population); fifty years later, Minnesota’s black population totaled seven thousand (0.3 percent of the population).
Meanwhile the white population of Minnesota was exploding, rising from 169,000 during the Civil War to more than two million in 1910. Neighboring Wisconsin had a similar growth trajectory with blacks intentionally almost invisible. Wisconsin’s black population in 1860 numbered 1,171 (0.1 percent) and was still denied suffrage by an overwhelming vote. The state had been admitted to the Union in 1848; by 1855 the Wisconsin State Colonization Society was established to send its thousand-plus blacks to Africa. Strapped for money, the Society managed only to pass an ineffectual resolution. The intent was nonetheless clear: Wisconsin wanted no blacks. Wisconsin Republican newspapers cited fears that emancipation would produce a “Negro infestation.” Wisconsin Democrats raised the specter of miscegenation. If blacks could vote, they asserted, black men would “marry our sisters and daughters and smutty wenches . . . [would marry] our brothers and sons.” Republican senator James R. Doolittle favored colonization in order to “keep our Anglo-Saxon institutions as well as our Anglo-Saxon blood pure and uncontaminated.” Doolittle wanted blacks colonized in Florida.
Ultimately the fallback position of Northerners was the containment of blacks in the South. In 1863 the Wisconsin Assembly determined that the most effective way to keep blacks out of the state was to ensure that they had “freedom, homes and employment” in the South. Northern blacks, it was thought, could be coaxed into the South. They could not compete in the North because the Northern boss was an “exacting taskmaster” while the Southern manager “has less repugnance to the black man’s shiftless ways. They understand each other better.”
Even as Wisconsin and other states in the North were excluding or discouraging black settlement, they were attempting to augment their sparse populations by actively promoting white European immigration. Wisconsin formalized its white immigration policy in an 1852 law that established an immigration commissioner to be located in New York City. (Iowa passed a similar law in 1860.) The commissioner’s office was a conduit for information about Wisconsin to white European immigrants and worked with a Dr. Hildebrandt, a Wisconsin native who represented America in Bremen, Germany. The office disseminated thirty thousand German-language brochures, half of them to Europe. Wisconsin continued to publish these brochures throughout the nineteenth century.
Thousands of immigrants sought information at Wisconsin’s New York office. The orchestrated effort involved contact with foreign consuls as well as railroad and steamship companies. Immigration to the state surged. In 1853 Wisconsin received the following white European immigrants: 16,000 to 18,000 Germans; 4,000 to 5,000 Irish; 3,000 to 4,000 Norwegians; and 2,000 to 3,000 others. The recruitment efforts succeeded; by 1900, 710,000 (34 percent) of Wisconsin’s two million people were of German lineage. There was never an attempt to entice blacks from the South.
Each of the states of the Old Northwest followed the same pattern of black exclusion, either by law or by custom. In 1860 Iowa had a truly inconsequential black population of 1,059 (0.2 percent) in a total of 673,844 residents, yet exclusion laws appeared as early as 1827. Iowa demanded from entering blacks a $500 bond and proof of freedom; intermarriage was made illegal; blacks could not serve in the militia; jury service was prohibited; nor could they vote. In 1857 Iowans voted 49,511 to 8,489 against black suffrage. The state’s colonization society encouraged formal recognition of Liberia so that Iowa’s black residents would be tempted to move there. “As long as blacks are here,” declared J. C. Hall at the Iowa colonization convention of 1857, “they must be treated as outcasts and inferiors.” As the threat of black migration eased, Iowa abandoned its exclusion laws in 1864.
Michigan’s anti-black, anti-slavery stance was similar to that of its neighbors. By 1860 the state had 6,799 black residents (0.9 percent of the total population). A $500 bond requirement for entering blacks was passed in 1827; black suffrage was prohibited in 1836 with the comment, “[T]he negro belonged to a degraded caste of mankind.” A law against miscegenation followed in 1846. The Radical Republican senator Jacob M. Howard was upset when confronted in 1862 with the possible relocation of 123,000 freed slaves to Michigan. After it became apparent that blacks would be contained in the South, Senator Howard voiced his opinion that freed slaves “ought to be created as equals before the law.” He promoted black equality only when they were “at a distance.” The city of Detroit suffered its first race riot in 1863.
Lincoln and the Aftermath of War
The abolition of race-based slavery, the close of the Civil War, and the tragic death of Abraham Lincoln concluded an era. The posthumous Lincoln has been given supernatural powers by historians. Despite their efforts to divine what Lincoln’s Reconstruction policy might have been, they shed little light on postwar events.
Lincoln did, however, espouse the very American view that “every man should have the means and opportunity of benefiting his condition.” To deprive anyone of the “fruits of their labor,” he declared, was tyranny. The black man therefore had a “right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, [in that regard] he is my equal . . . and the equal of every living man.” Lincoln was adamant about the need for work; his philosophy of “root, hog, or die” applied to blacks as well as whites. But he was noticeably silent on specifics. He expressed no views on land redistribution and the famous concept of “forty acres and a mule” for the freedmen.
Frederick Douglass and other blacks, in anticipation of Booker T. Washington, echoed the self-help and economic independence philosophy of Abraham Lincoln. “Learn trades or starve,” advised Douglass in 1853, “and learn not only to black boots but to make them.” In 1831 black state and national conventions recommended “their people to shift from menial jobs to mechanical and agricultural pursuits, to form joint-stock companies, and mutual-savings banks . . . to pool capital for the purchase of real estate, and to patronize Negro-owned businesses.” More adamantly, the “Negro Convention” of 1848 antedated Booker T. Washington’s views on the critical nature of economic self-sufficiency: “To be dependent is to be degraded. . . . Men may indeed pity us, but they cannot respect us.” Black attitudes, according to the historian Leon Litwack, held that “it was nonsensical for Negroes to prate about political and social equality” without economic independence. Avoiding the dependency trap meant understanding the values of business and proper training.
Historians have pushed the idea of the “evolving” Lincoln beyond the boundaries of nineteenth-century America’s racial realities. Lincoln’s last public address, on April 11, 1865, is said to foreshadow his intent to deliver full citizenship with political and economic equality to the freed slaves. Lincoln said he would “prefer that [suffrage] were now conferred on the very intelligent and those who serve our cause as soldiers.” This was not a dictum or ultimatum, it was a recommendation to the state of Louisiana. This limited endorsement of suffrage for freedmen has been given broad and speculative meaning that has had a soothing effect on the conscience of later generations of white Americans.
Lincoln’s nod to the “very intelligent” black is a recurring theme in American history, where one can find a pattern of recognition by white America of a black elite. The few blacks accorded this status were useful to white America as role models for progress as well as persons of influence within the black community. In the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville, that most famous of all foreign observers of America, remarked on the separation of the races and on the possibility of an individual attaining equality. He was convinced that “the white and black races will [never] . . . be upon an equal footing.” Tocqueville does allow that an “isolated [black] individual may surmount the prejudices . . . of his race . . . but a whole people cannot rise above itself.” And the exceptional individual would have little impact on the whole of society. Lincoln’s invitation to the powerful black abolitionist, orator, and writer Frederick Douglass to visit the White House for a meeting in 1862 acknowledges white America’s recognition of a black elite. This instance, and later when Theodore Roosevelt hosted Booker T. Washington for dinner at the White House, were gestures to the black community of the esteem for a few exceptional individuals.
On February 26, 1865, the New York Times candidly predicted and endorsed black separatism in the South and the possibility of the occasional exceptional black: “White ingenuity and enterprise ought to direct black labor,” editorialized the Times. “Northern capital should flow into these rich cotton-lands on the borders of the Atlantic and Gulf. . . . The negro race . . . would exist side by side with the white for centuries being constantly elevated by it, individuals of it rising to an equality with the superior race. . . . [Cotton production requires] the white brain employing the black labor. . . .”
The tendency to select gifted individuals from the black masses continues in the twenty-first century. The white psyche has always had room for a black elite. During the 2008 presidential race, the Senate Democratic Majority Leader, Harry Reid, referred to the candidate Barack Obama as notably “light-skinned” and having no black dialect “unless he wanted one.” In the same year, then Democratic senator Joe Biden extraordinarily remarked, “I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. . . . I mean that’s storybook, man.”
Some in the black community have recognized the limits of Lincoln’s racial enlightenment. The black journalist Lerone Bennett Jr.’s book Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (1999) describes the reactionary nature of Lincoln’s actions. The book, published by the black media giant Johnson Publishing Company, also the publisher of Ebony magazine, has been widely criticized by white historians. In his 1965 book, Robert Penn Warren asked some black “big brass” what they thought about Lincoln. “I think that Lincoln is vastly overrated,” said Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell. “I think that he did nothing at all except that which he had to do, and he did it in terms of winning a war.” Roy Wilkins, the venerable executive director of the NAACP, was more nuanced: “I have mixed feelings about Lincoln. . . . I think that you’d have to judge Lincoln in the context of his climate, and in that context I still would give him . . . credit.” Malcolm X thought Lincoln “did more to trick Negroes than any other man in history.” Malcolm put Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, and Eleanor Roosevelt in the same category as Lincoln. Interestingly, in 1964 the White Citizens’ Councils exalted Lincoln as the “patron saint” of racial segregation. “Negro colonization,” wrote historian John Hope Franklin, “seemed almost as important to Lincoln as emancipation.” Lincoln, according to Franklin, hoped for colonization until the end of the war.
Lincoln’s greatness needs no exaggeration. Without Lincoln, America would have splintered. He saved the Union and hastened the end of America’s most enduring tragedy, race-based slavery. White historians wince when blacks challenge Lincoln’s racial credentials. But Lincoln, despite the efforts of historians, did not conform to the racial standards of the twenty-first century.
The closing scene of the Civil War and the practical end of race-based slavery occurred at Appomattox, Virginia, on April 9, 1865. The Emancipation Proclamation could now take full effect. The surrender ceremony had none of the drama of the bloody war or the struggle for human dignity and human rights in the land of the free and the home of the brave. There was no conversation; the signing of documents took twenty-three minutes. The cordial and respectful interaction between the victor, General Ulysses S. Grant, and the vanquished, General Robert E. Lee, was symbolic of the reunion of white America. Black America would remain excluded from the American mainstream.
What transpired at the small courthouse would be quite instructive for the black experience after Emancipation. The meeting of the opposing generals is particularly noteworthy because of the current demonizing of Confederate symbols, including statues of Lee. Both Lee and Grant were antagonists in a war that felled hundreds of thousands of soldiers, but the scene at Appomattox was anything but vengeful. Both generals had been graduates of the US Military Academy. Grant would become president of the United States for eight years of the postwar Reconstruction period; Lee would live a quiet life as president of what is now Washington and Lee University.
Lee was immediately paroled. Despite the fact that Grant viewed the Confederate cause as immoral, his respect for the Confederate general was genuine. Grant recorded that his “own feelings were sad and depressed.”
I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and so valiantly. . . . [Lee and I] soon fell into a pleasant conversation about old army times. . . . [O]ur conversation grew so pleasant that I almost forgot the object of our meeting.
In the annals of military history, the discussion between and the disposition of the two warring combatants at this surrender was arguably unique. On June 13, 1865, a mere two months after Lee surrendered, Grant ordered a pardon application for Lee with his personal “earnest recommendation.” Within five years the leader of the secessionist army would be hosted in the White House by President Grant. Again, the friendly invitation by the victorious head of state to his defeated foe is unusual, to say the least.
As the historian C. Vann Woodward wrote, “. . . when the chips were down, the overwhelming preponderance of views of the North on [black equality] were no different from those of the South—and never had been.” But the key difference between North and South was that four million black people lived in the South before the Civil War, compared with only 250,000 in the North; and unlike the North, the South depended on black labor for cotton production.
Black America would remain excluded from the American mainstream. A combination of white Southern racial intransigence and white Northern racial antipathy would effectively chain blacks to the cotton fields until World War I. Though unstated, a racial containment policy was in effect, sanctioned by white America. The issues of equality, black political and social rights, separation, exclusion, and economic independence had uncomfortably surfaced in the white antebellum North. Only the question of race-based slavery had been put to rest. America would struggle to resolve its myriad remaining racial problems.
1 There is a current ring to the diffusion policy. The founding father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, an ethnic Chinese, in 2013 recommended to the United States a policy of diffusion. Singapore, a multiracial entity—Chinese, Tamil, and Malay—did not employ diffusion because of its small area, but it had adopted English as the national language in order to promote social cohesion and discourage ethnic competition. Lee thought that large numbers of Hispanics, if they settled in one area such as California, would threaten the successful Anglo-Saxon culture there. He was not speaking about race or the complete negation of Hispanic heritage. “If they come in dribs and drabs and you scatter them across America, then you will change their culture,” Lee continued, “but if they come in large numbers . . . and stay together in California, then their culture will continue, and they may well affect the Anglo-Saxon culture around them.” Lee, an admirer of American society and values, had a keen sense of the proper place of culture within ethnic groups. His aim was the social cohesion necessary for a nation to function effectively.
The diffusion idea was also raised during the 1960s civil rights era by Georgia senator Richard Russell, who suggested that blacks be distributed to the states in proportion to their population.
