Anti-racist Idealism During and After the Civil War
Thus it came to pass that during the Civil War and Reconstruction, especially in the North, most whites defined slavery as the problem, to which fuller civil rights for African Americans, exemplified in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, would be the answer. As a result, for a time right after the war, anti-racist idealism played a dominant role in American political life. During this time, northern Republicans reinterpreted the Declaration of Independence to include African Americans among the “all men created equal,” a process begun by Lincoln at Gettysburg. According to historians Shepherd McKinley and Heather Richardson, “Northern Republicans in 1865 had little doubt that upon setting the slaves free in southern society, they would overcome all temporary barriers, ... accumulate capital, and achieve self-sufficiency.” Congress passed important civil rights acts protecting black rights, and especially during U.S. Grant’s first term (1869–73), the federal government even tried to enforce them. Consequently, African Americans lived under
better
conditions between 1865 and 1890—and not just in the South—than they would in the sad decades after 1890.
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After the Civil War, it was in Republicans’ political interest to demand the right to vote for African American men, and the GOP led the nation to pass the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, granting African Americans this vital prerogative of citizenship. Suffrage without regard to race was not just in Republicans’ interest, however, but also in the national interest: black votes were needed in southern states to elect public officials who would support the United States rather than try to revive secession. Moreover, Republicans did not support rights for African Americans solely to advance their party. They also did so because they believed it was just. In Iowa, for example, before the Fifteenth Amendment passed nationally, Republicans thrice brought before the people a proposal to allow African Americans to vote. Although it took three tries, it finally passed. Republicans hardly did this for political gain; it enfranchised fewer than a thousand African Americans. They did it not to garner those few votes, but because it was the right thing to do.
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The Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1868, also shows this anti-racist idealism. Often called the “equal rights amendment,” this shining jewel of our Constitution conferred citizenship on all Americans, including state citizenship, and guaranteed every person, including African Americans, “due process” and “the equal protection of the laws.”
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Although the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments are called the “Reconstruction amendments,” they also had important implications for the North, which, not having seceded, never underwent political reconstruction. The Fourteenth Amendment made moot the prewar state laws keeping out African Americans. The Fifteenth enfranchised African Americans, which only a handful of northern states had done prior to its passage.
In 1866 and 1868, white voters returned “radical” Republicans to Congress in landslides across the North that signaled their satisfaction with this anti-racist national policy. Republicans also won control of most northern state governments, even briefly of Maryland, formerly a slave state.
Welcoming African Americans, 1862–1890
Many towns and counties throughout the North reflected this anti-racism by welcoming African American immigrants during and after the Civil War. Often veterans played a direct role. For example, the Reverend J. B. Rogers from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, chaplain of the 14th Wisconsin Volunteers, got reassigned to Cairo, Illinois, which had become a place of refuge for hundreds of African Americans dispossessed by the fighting farther south along the Mississippi River. Rogers set up a school and taught more than 400 ex-slaves. He then helped bring a group of his students, all former slaves, to Wisconsin. Sally Albertz, Fond du Lac historian, pictures the scene that October day in 1862:
As a great crowd of people congregated at the train depot, a “car-load” of ex-slaves arrived at the Fond du Lac depot, chaperoned by Rev. Rogers. Word had spread throughout the area that anyone who wanted to “engage a contraband” or to help in any way should be at the depot. After the excitement had died down, local women served the weary travelers a welcome meal. They were then given rooms at the American Hotel until they could be hired out.
Whites in most Republican areas showed similar anti-racist behavior, and returning veterans brought African Americans whom they had met during the war home with them to many parts of the North.
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To be sure, anti-racism was hardly the sole response to the Civil War. Before the war, Democratic Party rhetoric had already been overtly racist to justify slavery. After the rise of the Republicans in the late 1850s, Democrats turned on the Republicans as the “party of miscegenation,” a term for interracial sexual relations coined by Democrats in 1863. As the war continued, antiwar Democrats increasingly blamed “the Negro” for the conflict. Some Democratic towns in the North responded to their party’s rhetoric, and to the frustrations generated by the long and bloody conflict, with a wave of forced expulsions of African Americans. Chesterton, Indiana, near Lake Michigan, drove out its African Americans in about 1863. That same year, a mob of twenty-five men led by an Anna, Illinois, doctor forced forty African American Civil War refugees, employed as farmworkers, to flee Union County. Also in 1863, white residents of Mason County forced out five African American residents; the county remained forcibly all-white for more than a century. The next chapter tells of an incident in 1864 in which LaSalle residents drove out a group of African Americans passing through that town en route to enlisting in the army. Since LaSalle lies in northern Illinois, Mason County in central Illinois, and Union County in southern Illinois, expelling African Americans during the Civil War was obviously widespread,
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albeit mostly in Democratic areas.
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Nevertheless, in Republican communities, in the period 1865–90, letting in African Americans was seen to be the appropriate, even patriotic thing to do. It was in tune with the times. Many Americans really were trying to give our nation “a new birth of freedom”—freedom for African Americans—for which, as Lincoln had suggested, Union soldiers had died at Gettysburg.
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Opening one’s community to black families after the Civil War seemed right—like opening one’s college campus to black students after the Civil Rights Movement a century later. Congress said so: the 1866 Civil Rights Act declared that “citizens of every race and color . . . shall have the same right . . . to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property.” Presidents said so—James A. Garfield at his inauguration in 1881, quoted at the head of the chapter, clearly stated that the nation had granted equal rights to African Americans and that this was fitting and proper. Quakers in particular, abolitionists before the war, now made it their business to welcome African Americans to their communities, hire them as farmworkers, blacksmiths, or domestics, and help them get a start. So did Unitarians, Congregationalists, and some Methodists and Presbyterians. We can see the result in census figures, summarized in
Table 1
in the next chapter (page 56): African Americans went everywhere after the Civil War. By 1890, all across the North—in northeast Pennsylvania river valleys, in every Indiana county save one, deep in the north woods of Wisconsin, in every county of Montana and California—African Americans were living and working.
Historians have long recognized the importance of this era called Reconstruction, but they have usually confined their analysis of it to the South. Legally, Reconstruction did apply only to the South. But Reconstruction was also an ideological movement, and the ideological currents that motivated Reconstruction not only touched but emanated from the North. Historian Lerone Bennett called it “the first and, in many ways, the last real attempt to establish an interracial democracy in America.” But most historians have not included the increased acceptance of African Americans across the towns and counties of the North as part of our national narrative. Reconstruction was a period of possibility for African Americans in the North, as in the South.
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Northern communities, especially where Republicans were in the majority, enjoyed something of a “springtime of race relations” between 1865 and 1890. During those years, African Americans voted, served in Congress, received some spoils from the Republican Party, worked as barbers, railroad firemen, midwives, mail carriers, and landowning farmers, and played other fully human roles in American society. Their new rights made African Americans optimistic, even buoyant. “Tell them we is risin’!” one ex-slave said to a northern writer, come to see for himself how the races were getting along in the postwar South. The same confidence fueled the black dispersal throughout the postwar North.
The “Fusion” Period, 1877–1890
Supporters of white supremacy did not fold their tents and depart, however. With increasing tenacity and Ku Klux Klan violence, Democrats fought the interracial Republican coalitions for control of each southern state.
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In Louisiana, for example, in the summer and fall of 1868, white Democrats killed more than a thousand people, mostly African Americans and white Republicans. The intimidation continued for eight more years, until by the beginning of 1877, the Democrats had more or less won control across the South. But their victory was incomplete. African Americans still voted—though not freely. Democrats set up “Fusion” tickets, giving blacks some minor offices while Democrats won the governorships and dominated state legislatures. But Democrats were never sure they could keep control of southern state governments against possible coalitions of African American voters and white Republicans, Readjusters (William Mahone’s party in Virginia), and Populists. In Virginia, North Carolina, and Alabama, interracial coalitions briefly won statewide and would have won more often had elections been fair. African Americans still had the rights of citizenship—at least formally—until the 1890s.
In the North, the impulse to grant blacks rights and welcome them did not die with the end of Reconstruction either. Ironically, this is demonstrated by Waverly, Ohio, noted in Chapter 1 as one of the few towns in America to be sundown from its inception, before the Civil War. Waverly’s treatment in the massive 1884
History of Lower Scioto Valley
includes this optimistic prediction:
Although the traditions of hostility toward his race keeps alive the fears of the black man, yet with the new order of things the people here, as elsewhere, have changed in their prejudices and it is altogether probable that now a Negro could take up his residence here in perfect freedom.
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Unfortunately, “the new order of things” was destined to last only six more years. In 1890, trying to get the federal government to intervene against violence and fraud in southern elections, the Republican senator from Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge, introduced his Federal Elections Bill. It lost by just one vote in the Senate. After its defeat, when Democrats again tarred Republicans as “nigger lovers,” now the Republicans replied in a new way. Instead of assailing Democrats for denying equal rights to African Americans, they backed away from the subject. The Democrats had worn them down. Thus the springtime of race relations during Reconstruction was short, and it was followed not by summer blooms but by the Nadir winter, and not just in the South but throughout the country. In Ohio, Waverly remained all-white for another century and boasted a sundown sign until after World War II.
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The “Three
I
’s”
What caused this collapse? From the formation of the Republican Party in the mid-1850s through 1890, anti-racism had constituted its clearest point of difference vis-à-vis the Democrats. Now this contrast faded. The idealism spawned by the Civil War was fading too, as memories of the war dimmed. By 1890, only one American in three was old enough to have been alive when it ended; a still smaller proportion was old enough to have any memory of the war.
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Millions more immigrated to the United States long after the war’s end and played no role in it.
The ideology of anti-racism was further strained by three developments—“the three
i
’s”—having nothing directly to do with black rights. The first was Indian wars. Although the federal government had guaranteed the Plains Indians their land “forever,” after whites discovered gold in Colorado, the Dakotas, and elsewhere, they took it anyway. In 1890, the army destroyed the last important vestige of Native American independence in the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. If it was OK to take Indians’ land because they weren’t white, wasn’t it OK to deny rights to African Americans, who weren’t white either?
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Second, immigrants remained a problem for Republicans. Irish, Italian, and Polish Americans persisted in voting Democratic, no matter how Republicans tried to win them over. Republican intolerance of alcohol and of Catholicism played a role. On the Democratic side, the new hyphenated Americans immediately learned that it was in their interest to be considered “whites,” differentiated from “blacks,” who were still at the bottom of the social hierarchy. In the West, white miners and fishermen were competing with Chinese immigrants and hating them for it, and Democratic politicians shouted, “The Chinese must go!” In the East, the Democrats’ continued white racism appealed to new European immigrants in competition with African Americans for jobs at the wharves, in the kitchens, on the railroads, and in the mines. Perhaps Republicans converted to a more racist position to win white ethnic votes. Or perhaps their anti-immigrant thinking, manifesting itself in jokes, slurs, and anti-immigrant cartoons, spilled over into increased racism vis-à-vis African Americans. Senator Lodge, who had pushed for black rights in 1890, helped found the Immigration Restriction League a few years later, to keep out “inferior” racial strains. How can a party claim to be basically superior to immigrants and still maintain “that all men are created equal”?
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