Many planters, cash short, could not pay wages, leasing out land to farm laborers in return for a share of the crop. Planters had to buy seed and tools from merchants by borrowing against the expected crop. A bad season locked planters and sharecroppers alike into a debt cycle. Also, ill-inclined planters deliberately cheated their workers, keeping them trapped in dependent poverty. In effect, the agricultural South returned to the stagnation of a feudal system.7
The army and the Freedmen’s Bureau grasped the value of stability in these labor arrangements and so pressured African Americans to sign labor contracts that robbed them of geographic mobility and virtually returned them to slavery. We realize now that freeing the slaves without giving them an economic stake in society assured peonage. But the dominant “laissez-faire” theory of labor relations held that the right to bargain in the marketplace for the sale of one’s labor guaranteed the rise of the thrifty and industrious. In a free society, you could pull yourself up by your bootstraps; that most Southern poor people of both races did not even own shoes, never mind laces, apparently seemed beside the point.8
Although it suited the ruling class to have the poor, especially blacks, once again tied to the land after the social chaos of the last war years, the sharecropping system evolved primarily as a matter of necessity rather than cynical repression. However, deliberate calculation underpinned the systematic robbing of civil rights from African Americans, a theft backed up by extralegal force. In theory, the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution assured all Americans equal citizenship rights, including legal protection and the right to vote. But, as one commentator points out, many whites “never fully committed to that right,” but instead “speak of voting as a privilege that should be granted to people capable of meeting minimal standards imposed to safeguard the electoral process.”9
Steadily, such tactics as imposing a property qualification, requiring a written literacy test, or an annual tax receipt, disenfranchised most African Americans. The barriers also had an impact on many poor whites, but election officials “grandfathered” them into the system, waiving rules on their behalf. (Some observers find an echo in the modern push to demand a photo ID, a demand falling hardest on the poor who have the least opportunity and funds to meet the requirement. Proponents deny discrimination, saying the measure only aims to curtail supposed widespread voter fraud.)10
The postwar white South increasingly found sympathetic allies in the North as the thought of black equality sent shock waves through racist society. The late historian C. Vann Woodward pointed out long ago that Northerners took racial discrimination to a new depth, imposing “Jim Crow” segregation of housing, restaurants, theaters, restrooms, and public buildings. Enforced separation of the races had not characterized plantation society, emerging instead as a white urban response to blacks migrating into Northern cities.11
Even many whites that had officered black regiments abandoned the struggle for racial fairness once the technical legal issue of freedom had been decided in 1865. The liberally inclined rationalized their betrayal by arguing that the so-called law of natural selection, the inexorable operation of the survival of the fittest, doomed some species to inferior status and probable extinction. Walt Whitman felt comfortable in making the point bluntly, indicating the respectability of racist views at the time: “The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated: it is the law of history, races, what-not: always so far inexorable—always will be.”12
White Southerners, particularly Rebel veterans, jolted out of their despondency by the threat of racial equality, decided to give natural selection a helping hand, using violence to intimidate African Americans from exercising their civil rights. Starting in 1867, paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camelia sprang up, much like the Freikorps that would resist progressive tendencies in Germany after the Great War. General Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose cavalry had a particularly unsavory reputation for racial brutality in the war, became the first head of the Klan.13
The Liberator, mouthpiece for New England abolitionism, had warned as early as June 23, 1865: “The war is not ended as many fondly imagine.” The paper charged that the planters comprised “a brutal and vicious class of persons, whose treatment of the negro is infamous. He is cruelly whipped and frequently shot down and the perpetrator often goes off with impunity.” General, now college president, Robert E. Lee spoke out in 1867 against the war’s violent legacy in the wild behavior of young Confederate veterans toward their professors as well as black people (an interesting pairing). But even so revered a figure as Lee could not prevent the aggressive “redeeming” of the South. Before long, the paramilitaries held parades and openly wore Rebel gray.14
By a political bargain struck in 1877, the Federal government ceased policing the South and admitted the failure of Reconstruction. Soldiers of color had expected much from their service. Sergeant Henry Maxwell put the case succinctly: “We want two more boxes besides the cartridge box—the ballot and the jury box.” A meaningful relationship with the U.S. army and government continued into the peace through service in regular black regiments such as the 9th and 10th Cavalry, the famous “buffalo soldiers.” The military had become a training ground for entry into public life, and the legacy runs straight to the desk of Colin Powell.15
But, in a broader social context, black veterans faced the marginalization of their history. Federal authorities banned African Americans from marching in the 1865 victory parades. The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the main Union veterans’ organization, often excluded blacks or relegated them to segregated chapters. Few public memorials acknowledged their service. Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ famous monument to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th, unveiled in 1897 on Beacon Street, Boston, carried the names of the white officers inscribed on the base, but not those of the black other ranks. African American veteran George R. Williams lamented that “nowhere in all this free land is there a monument to brave negro soldiers” who “have had no champion, no one to chronicle their record.” The neglect became palpable. As late as 1869, Union veteran Russell Conwell, correspondent for the Boston Daily Evening Traveler, expressed shock to see skulls of the men of the 54th still rolling in the surf of Charleston harbor. They “lay grinning, and filled us with sad sensations, which still haunt our dreams.”16
Racists employed crude interpretations of the new science of evolution to demean the black soldier. In 1869, the Sanitary Commission published its conclusions from a study of the racial profiles of Civil War soldiers. The report argued that “full-blooded” Africans had elongated heels and arms, resembling apes. The implications could not be missed. Six years later, the provost marshal general’s office published a massive study endorsing the earlier findings. Dr. Sanford B. Hunt wrote in his damaging contribution, “The Negro As a Soldier,” that autopsies of Union dead showed white brains to be 10 percent larger than black, with direct implications for relative intelligence. Men of color did not make good officer material, Hunt asserted, only acceptable privates, smart in drill because of their imitative and rhythmic traits, able to march well on splayed feet.17
In December 1898, as black soldiers fought the Spanish, Representative John Sharp Williams of Mississippi reaffirmed on the floor of Congress the old jungle-savage caricature: if 10,000 blacks were put on an island, he said, “in less than three years, they would have retrograded governmentally, half of the men would have been killed, and the other half would have two wives apiece.” Susie King Taylor, Union nurse and wife of Sergeant Edward King, wrote bitterly in 1902: “Was the war in vain? Has it brought freedom, in the full sense of the word or has it not made our condition more hopeless?” She charged: “we are burned, tortured, and denied a fair trial, murdered for any imaginary wrong conceived in the brain of the negro-hating white man.” In his Harvard commencement address of 1904, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who had commanded a black regiment, the First South Carolina (U.S.), begged his privileged white audience not to betray the men of color: �
��You built Shaw’s statue: can you calmly doubt that those who marched with him should vote, like you?”18
The tide of discrimination rolled on. In 1915, leading filmmaker D. W. Griffith released his virulently racist The Birth of a Nation, lauding the KKK and leading to its resurgence, beginning in the Union state of Indiana. Pulling once more on the antebellum stereotype of the African animal lusting for white women, the movie depicted a bestial attempted rape and other vile conduct by black soldiers. Bigotry trumped history. Despite service in both world wars, the black soldier continued to face discrimination and received no positive notice save in scholarly works.
Then, in 1965, the poet Robert Lowell brought back the 54th and its black soldiers to popular attention. Shocked by TV pictures of the terrified faces of African American children, attacked by rabid whites while on their school bus, he wrote “For the Union Dead.” Returning to Saint Gaudens’ statue, he felt that the stiff-backed colonel, eternally leading his black soldiers into battle, no longer served as an appropriate American symbol: “The monument sticks like a fish bone in the city’s throat.” In 1989 came Glory, with Matthew Broderick’s brilliant interpretation of the diffident, self-effacing Shaw. The movie revivified soldiers of color, even though some critics decried the use of African American stereotypes—the Uncle, the angry Buck, the uppity educated urban free black—when the film might have profiled real soldiers, such as Sergeant William Carney, who won the Congressional Medal of Honor for his conduct at Wagner.
In the 1990s, extralegal white militias proliferated, often sprouting in the old Confederate states. They revivified the paramilitary character of the KKK as they prepared to resist a Sherman-style blitzkrieg invasion by a sinister “new world order.” This comprised an unholy alliance of the United States and the United Nations, both bent on robbing white Americans of their local sovereignty. The appeal of these militant organizations seemed to dissipate somewhat, however, as the new century dawned. But racial tensions heightened again in 2008, with the election as president of Barack Obama, a biracial candidate. Prominent whites continued to question whether this man of color really had been born in Hawaii and could possibly be a legitimate American.19
Despite this milestone election, for many members of the minority community not too much had changed. African Americans remained disproportionately represented in the ranks of the poor, the unemployed, the prison population, the dispossessed. Social commentator Jonathan Kozol reports that, from the 1990s on, America’s public schools have been re-segregated. Peter Whoriskey adds that even Little Rock’s schools, where desegregation began and equal attendance by both races had been achieved by 1980, now have an 80 percent black profile. Vouchers, charter, and parochial schools have drawn away white pupils. In a provocative article, March 2011, Darryl Pinckney, looking at the disparity in incarceration rates for blacks and whites throughout the country, argues that jails have become the new frontier of Jim Crow, authorities once again more concerned with the control of the dispossessed than with justice for all.20
Did America keep faith with the black regiments? Harper’s Magazine reported in May 2012 a Federal government appropriation of $14.5 million to restore Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ beach home, Beauvoir, in Biloxi, Mississippi. Tourists may take home souvenir pennies machine stamped with the head of Jefferson Davis, obliterating the bust of Lincoln, the “great emancipator.” The gift shop plans to stock copies of Little Black Sambo.21
Many women who thought that war service as nurses, board members of volunteer organizations, propagandists, and bread-winning heads of households would bring them public recognition, found their aspirations thwarted. The Women’s Loyal League collected 400,000 signatures in support of the 13th Amendment to free the slaves. Surely, they reasoned, the nation could do no less than lift legal restrictions based on gender as well? Some women, such as Mary A. Livermore, went from organizations like the Sanitary Commission into the suffragette movement, seeing a clear correlation. Progressive males, such as the Rev. Henry W. Bellows, supported them. War service, he asserted in 1867, “did more to advance the rights of woman by proving her gifts for public duties, than a whole library of arguments and protests.” The U.S. Supreme Court would shortly disagree.22
The Fourteenth Amendment seemingly gave the franchise to all citizens. In 1872, activist Susan B. Anthony determined to test this proposition by casting her ballot in New York elections. Two weeks later police arrested her on a charge of “illegal voting.” The court fined her $100, a substantial figure at that time. Three years later, the Supreme Court weighed in, decreeing that the Federal government could not bestow the franchise as a universal right; states allotted the privilege of voting to whom they wished. Thus, in a states’ rights decision, the Court overrode the U.S. Constitution, declaring females not necessarily empowered citizens in the public arena. So women took their case to individual states, where they found a better reception. Western states began the trend, perhaps because men respected women’s hard work on the farm, and fewer black females lived there to queer the political brew. Wyoming granted women the ballot in 1869. Still, it took until 1920, sixty years after Sumter, for Congress to pass the Nineteenth Amendment, making the female franchise universal.23
Conventional wisdom in the immediate post–Civil War period held that women should neither vote nor work outside the home. Yet, in fact, thousands of war widows and spouses of crippled vets needed paid work to eke out a living for themselves and their families. Women also sought employment if their marriages collapsed due to the violent and abusive behavior of husbands emotionally damaged by war service. Twenty-four-year-old Charlotte Cross applied for a Treasury Department job in 1866 because she had left her husband. He had enlisted from Buffalo, New York, in 1863. His spouse described him then as a good man, but he had returned alcoholic, “rendering him unfit for work, for society, and too soon unworthy of a wife’s care, forgiveness, or endurance.” Women (and children) earned slave wages in factories, department stores, or teaching school, leading Harriet Beecher Stowe to worry, in her Atlantic column, that women must sink into “vice,” that is, prostitution, to survive.24
Government departments began hiring women in 1862. Elizabeth Custer, in D.C. during September 1864, already witnessed “an army of black [clad] and weary creatures who had lost their husbands or sons in the war and were working for themselves or their children.” At quitting time, they could be seen “hurrying home to cook dinner for their children.” By the early 1890s, women held nearly 33 percent of clerking jobs in the U.S. government’s executive departments and by 1900 occupied 29 percent of clerking positions nationwide. They remained underrepresented at the senior levels in both private and public sectors.25
The United States has never had a female head of state. A common rationale for this anomaly cites women’s lack of combat experience and a supposed want of the aggressiveness needed to be commander-in-chief. At the same time, until recently, the military deliberately denied women frontline assignments. Mary Walker won the Congressional Medal of Honor for duties performed as the first female surgeon in the U.S. Army, serving in the field throughout the Civil War. In 1917, Congress rescinded her award, saying she lacked “actual combat with an enemy,” even though her life had been endangered many times. Only in 1977 did she again receive the honor, posthumously.26
The labor movement in general hoped for improved working conditions as a result of a war seemingly fought to expand freedom. Some union leaders at the time, and historians since, have placed the conflict in the broad context of an ongoing struggle to improve the lives of ordinary people. Once again, the expectations remained unfulfilled, causing one historian of the period to conclude that “among the masses of Americans there were no victors, only the vanquished.”27
Labor spokesmen reasoned that, having broken the slave oligarchy, the nation would support benefits for the working class, such as reduced hours per shift, child labor laws, safety regulations, workers’ compensation, collective barga
ining, and full employment. The first blow came with military demobilization in 1865–66, creating a flood of one million unemployed. This number failed to recede, creating a surplus labor pool that benefited bosses who could threaten militants with replacement.28
It quickly became apparent that workers’ organizations had few allies in the establishment: owners, managers, and their political allies staunchly opposed reform. The Rochester Daily Union and Advertiser warned that the war had made wealth greater and more powerful; “the capital thus concentrated is to be used in a greater or lesser degree to defeat the objects sought by the working men.” Even many former abolitionists opposed so-called “artificial” restraints on the free play of the labor market. When New England Brahmin radical Wendell Phillips told his friend, the poet James Russell Lowell, that he had a plan for an eight-hour working day, Lowell responded that he opposed this measure. He feared it would create a “material and unideal” (i.e., middle-class consumer) culture that the versifier “would not care to live in.”29
To turn public sentiment against strident workers, opponents raised the specter of the communist menace. Washington, D.C.’s National Republican, July 21, 1877, pronounced in righteous anger “that communistic ideas are very widely entertained in America by the workmen employed in mines and factories and by the railroads. This poison was introduced into our social system by European laborers.” The writings of Marx and Engels, along with the recent (1871) attempt of Paris, France, to form a separate, self-governing, egalitarian commune, poured gasoline on the flames.
Violence erupted as workers took the struggle to the streets, striking, picketing the worst employers, and roughing up scabs. The war made surplus guns readily available and many found their way into the hands of labor militants. Authorities, accustomed since 1861 to putting down sedition, struck back with force, using police and troops against even peaceful protesters. The Independent, a Congregationalist magazine, on August 2, 1877, editorialized: “If the club of the policeman, knocking out the brains of the rioter, will answer, then well and good; but if it does not meet the exigency, then bullets and bayonets, canister and grape … constitute the one remedy.”
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