Four Hundred Souls
Page 21
But in truth, the overturning of Dred Scott is an ongoing and incomplete project. The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, which ended national quotas on immigration, and the Twenty-fourth Amendment, which banned poll taxes as a condition of voting, are also part of that project. Every effort to extend equality into the heart of American citizenship, to erase the race line drawn by Chief Justice Taney, and to enlarge the “we” who belong to the American project continues the work of overturning Dred Scott.
Also implicated is the extent to which these questions can be left to democratic majorities or even empowered pluralities. Indeed, the doctrine of popular sovereignty would have left these questions to a vote. But true equality cannot be left to the whims of an electorate—it is the predicate for democracy and the vote, not their product. This, too, is a lesson from the period of the late 1850s: that a constitution or declaration constitutes the “we,” and that this act of constituting structures all other distributive decisions and identity itself. Thus, who we are, and who belongs, is the most fundamental question that we have ever asked or can ever ask. We are still struggling to get the answer to this question right. We are still coming up short.
COMPROMISE
Donika Kelly
I.
They tied it to the land like a dog,
the idea: compromise—which
the land alone is incapable of exacting
absent, on the one white hand, the North,
on the other white hand, the South;
incapable, absent the parchment
declarations and debate, all of which,
alongside the hoe the shovel the plow
the whip, broke the land open like skin.
A latitude welled with blood.
II.
To tell right it, refuse the theory
offered: the promise of property futures
masquerading as balance, the premise
of nearly, but not quite, a person. Refuse.
Hear instead Maria Stewart: And such is the powerful
force of prejudice. Let our girls possess
what amiable qualities of soul they may…
it is impossible for scarce an individual of them
to rise above the condition of servants.
Hear Bethany Veney: I have imagined myself
with a young girl’s ambition, working hard…
getting a little home with a garden…bringing
my sisters and brothers to share with me
these blessings of freedom.
Hear Mattie J. Jackson: The days of sadness
for mistress were days of joy for us.
We shouted and laughed
to the top of our voices.
Hear Lucy Anne Delaney: “You have no business
to whip me. I don’t belong to you”…
I rebelled against such government.
III.
Say the compromise is between a woman
who feels pain and another woman who feels
pain. Say both women are torn after giving birth
and from both arise a smell like rot, a pain
from being rotted inside. Say fistula.
Say only one woman is whole. Say the other
is ⅗ths. Which one do you sew with silver,
with pig gut, with lead? Whoever says, sews.
Whoever’s sewn gets no laudanum. Say cure.
Call it technique. Call it science. Whoever
calls it, keeps it, no matter Anarcha,
who took, after thirty procedures, the needle
and silk. A new compromise: take down
the statue, hooded and noosed, put into storage.
Concede: still only one woman is whole.
IV.
Concede in favor of balance.
Let the state petition for statehood.
Let the state say who is free.
Let the state enslave.
Let the state set the terms
for enslavement: three years.
The Lash Law.
Let the state set the clock for exile
once the term is complete.
Let the state call it grace:
three years for women,
two years for men.
Let the state refuse to ratify
the amendments: 14th and 15th.
Let the state Jim Crow before Jim Crow:
whites-only on every border.
Let the state keep its balance
in 1959 and ’73,
on campus in 1988,
or on the light rail in 2017:
a bat in its hand, a knife
in its hand, blood on its hand.
V.
They set the terms, rigged
the clock, the ship, colonized
the land. They would see us
free but gone.
Compromise.
But we convened,
decided the land that held
our blood, our kin—
decided we would stay,
show that one way
could be another.
VI.
Track the fissure of the first compromise,
then the second, then another running
fugitive through the foundation.
Follow it one century
to my great-grandmother’s birth.
A century more: just past her death.
It wasn’t that long ago
I was sitting on her porch swing,
hoping for a breeze.
It wasn’t that long ago
we were in the twenty-fourth state,
our bodies undoing the roads.
It wasn’t that long ago,
the latitude migrated, anchored
to the southern border: history looped.
This isn’t America.
It’s nothing else.
1859–1864
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Adam Serwer
By 1859, Frederick Douglass was a fugitive again.
The formerly enslaved Douglass had famously escaped bondage in 1838, fled north, and become one of the most eloquent abolitionist orators in the country. But in October 1859 his friend John Brown had led a failed raid on the federal arsenal in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, hoping to start a slave insurrection and end the peculiar institution for good. Douglass knew of Brown’s scheme but had declined to participate. Yet his association with Brown had made him a wanted man, and he fled to Britain rather than face trial in Virginia.
Douglass would later write in his autobiography Life and Times of Frederick Douglass that he felt Brown “was about to rivet the fetters more firmly than ever on the limbs of the enslaved.” Despite Brown’s entreaties, Douglass recalled, “my discretion or my cowardice made me proof against the dear old man’s eloquence—perhaps it was something of both which determined my course.”
As for his escape, “I knew if my enemies could not prove me guilty of the offence of being with John Brown, they could prove that I was Frederick Douglass,” the orator wrote, “and I knew that all Virginia, were I once in her clutches, would say ‘Let him be hanged.’ ” He took pleasure in the irony, however, that it was the men who wanted him clapped in chains who would themselves soon rise up in armed insurrection. Perhaps, Douglass wrote, the Democrats on the Senate committee investigating Brown’s failed rebellion “saw that by using their senatorial power in search of rebels they might be whetting a knife for their own throats.”
If Brown was a lone radical in 1859, several events would enlist the North in a quest for the violent abolition of slavery by 1
861. In the interim, Douglass had quietly returned to the United States to mourn the death of his ten-year-old daughter, Annie. As the Southern Confederacy rose, each state proclaiming the principle of human bondage at the center of the rebellion, Douglass was convinced the North would ultimately see the necessity of abolishing slavery. After all, the catalyst for the South’s secession was the election of Abraham Lincoln, who by that point had merely vowed to limit slavery’s expansion, not to abolish it. But if the South could not maintain its control over American democracy through the expansion of slave states, then it would destroy it through insurrection.
During this period, Douglass became more than just an orator or a journalist: he became a prophet of a United States who embodied the courage of its convictions, a country that, as Douglass put it, “shall not brand the Declaration of Independence as a lie.” At the time, it was horror to the white South and a foolish dream to much of the white North. Today Douglass’s vision of America is so pervasive that even its strongest opponents pretend to believe in it: an America that actually recognizes that all are created equal, where the rights of citizenship are not abridged on the basis of accidents of birth.
“The republic was undergoing a second founding, and Douglass felt more than ready to be one of its fathers,” historian David Blight writes in his biography of Douglass. “The old nation might now be bludgeoned into ruin, and a new one imagined.”
Yet Douglass also understood intimately that much of the white North, and not just the South, would have to drastically revise its vision of America. Although Northern states had abolished slavery, most had also severely restricted Black rights and suffrage. Right up until the beginning of the war, many Northern whites, even those hostile to slavery, saw abolitionists as just as culpable for the sectional conflict as slave owners. Abolitionists faced murder, censorship, and mob violence, even in Northern states like Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.
In his speeches and writings, Douglass laid out his vision of this new America. “We stand in our place today and wage war, not merely for our selves, but for the whole world; not for this generation, but for unborn generations, and for all time,” Douglass declared in his “Mission of the War” speech in 1864. The North, Douglass insisted, was “like the south, fighting for National unity; a unity of which the great principles of liberty and equality, and not slavery and class superiority, are the corner stone.”
One of the most crucial developments in what Douglass hoped, and many in the white North feared, would become an “abolition war” was the recruitment of Black soldiers. By 1862, President Abraham Lincoln had authorized the recruitment of Black troops, and two of Douglass’s sons, Charles and Lewis, had enlisted. But the Northern reaction to that decision illustrated another one of Douglass’s observations, that an America that truly lived up to its own beliefs would have to confront prejudice in the North as much as rebellion in the South.
“The recruitment of black soldiers did not produce an instantaneous change in northern racial attitudes. Indeed, to some degree it intensified the Democratic backlash against emancipation and exacerbated racial tensions in the army,” the historian James McPherson writes in Battle Cry of Freedom. “The black regiments reflected the Jim Crow mores of the society that reluctantly accepted them: they were segregated, given less pay than white soldiers, commanded by white officers some of whom regarded their men as ‘niggers,’ and intended for use mainly as garrison and labor battalions.”
Douglass was no stranger to such attitudes. “It came to be a no[t] uncommon thing to hear men denouncing South Carolina and Massachusetts in the same breath,” Douglass wrote, “and in the same measure of disapproval.” He had faced jeering racist mobs at his Northern speeches; he had bitterly denounced the Lincoln administration’s flirtations with “colonizing” the Black population of the United States to Africa; and he had warned the proslavery “peace camp” that “as to giving the slave States new guarantees for the safety of slavery…the South does not want them, and the North could not give them if the South could accept them.”
When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Douglass would get his abolition war. Yet Douglass understood that many in the North believed that “abolition, though now a vast power, is still odious.” Such people, he said, “despise the only measure that can save the country”—that is, the end of slavery.
Douglass predicted in 1863 that “a mightier work than the abolition of slavery” lay ahead. This was an understatement. The lingering hatred of abolition and racial equality, North and South, would eventually cement into a fierce opposition to Black political rights. Early in Reconstruction, Douglass would be provided with a glimpse of the North’s lingering ambivalence toward Black freedom. Elected a delegate to the National Loyalists’ Convention in 1866, he would be urged by his Republican colleagues not to attend.
“They dreaded the clamor of social equality and amalgamation which would be raised against the party, in consequence of this startling innovation,” Douglass wrote of it years later. “They, dear fellows, found it much more agreeable to talk of the principles of liberty as glittering generalities, than to reduce those principles to practice.”
Southern rebellion had forced the Union to adopt Brown’s methods for the abolition of slavery, but it was nevertheless a long way from Douglass’s vision of inclusive nationhood. Only Southern intransigence and violent resistance would persuade Republicans in Congress to adopt the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, establishing birthright citizenship and barring discrimination in voting on the basis of race. Although a believer in woman suffrage, Douglass would endure a bitter split with his white feminist allies, who saw the Fifteenth Amendment’s enfranchisement of Black men but not women as a grave insult, disgusted that “Patrick, Sambo, Hans, and Yung Tung” would be enfranchised before them.
But the freedoms of the Reconstruction amendments would be short-lived, at least for Black people. Whether because of the terrorism of the white supremacist so-called Redeemers in the South who overthrew the Reconstruction governments by force and intimidation, or because of the Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices who rendered the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution useless to the emancipated, Douglass’s dream of a new nation proved more elusive than it must have seemed at the war’s end.
“The Reconstruction amendments do not occupy the prominent place in public consciousness of other pivotal documents of our history, such as the Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence,” the historian Eric Foner has written. “But even if we are unaware of it, Reconstruction remains part of our lives, or to put it another way, key issues confronting American society today are in some ways Reconstruction questions.”
Even today, American political conflicts are defined by the limits of American citizenship and who is allowed to claim it. In this sense, Douglass understood that until Black Americans could claim full citizenship, the nation he envisioned could not exist.
“Men talk of the Negro problem. There is no Negro problem,” Douglass declared in 1894, as the shadow of Jim Crow fell across the nation. “The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their Constitution.” More than a century later, that problem is still with us.
1864–1869
THE CIVIL WAR
Jamelle Bouie
By August 1864, as General William T. Sherman prepared his forces for an assault on Atlanta, nearly 400,000 enslaved people had escaped to Union lines. They had won themselves freedom in the process.
As fighting intensified, tens of thousands would join the Union Army as soldiers alongside their freeborn counterparts. By the war’s end, approximately 180,000 African Americans fought in thirty-nine major engagements as soldiers in the U.S. Colored Troops.
But the significance of Black soldiers went beyond their military prowess. Every revolution produces a class of people com
mitted to its fulfillment. The Civil War was no exception. The free and freed men who took up arms for the Union would, in the war’s aftermath, become an important force for equal rights and democracy, part of a vanguard of Americans who fought to give meaning to the great sacrifice of the war.
At the start of the Civil War, the Lincoln administration didn’t want Black soldiers. When “300 reliable colored free citizens” of Washington, D.C., offered to defend the city from Confederate attack, the War Department rejected them. Likewise, at various points in 1861 and 1862, President Lincoln pushed back against efforts to arm former slaves. When battlefield commanders tried to organize Black regiments in Kansas, occupied Louisiana, and the Sea Islands of South Carolina, the Lincoln administration refused to authorize them.
Lincoln’s resistance was met with the pressure and advocacy of abolitionists, Black leaders, and radical Republicans. These advocates made the case that the Union could win the war and end slavery if it embraced African Americans as soldiers.
Lincoln eventually relented. On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in all the seceded states except specified areas of Louisiana and Virginia. The proclamation also stated that former slaves would be “received into armed service of the United States to garrison forts” and “to man vessels of all sorts.” Black enlistment had arrived. By March, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had sent Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas to organize regiments of African American soldiers in the Mississippi Valley. Other army camps sprang up near Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., where thousands of Black Americans enlisted.
Black soldiers fought and died under the Union flag. In doing so, they didn’t just help win the war and abolish slavery, they also set the terms for the aftermath. Frederick Douglass recognized this: “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket,” declared Douglass in 1863, “and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.”