PRESIDENT ANDREW JOHNSON issued his Reconstruction proclamations on May 29, 1865, deflating the high hopes of civil rights activists. He offered amnesty, property rights, and voting rights to all but the highest Confederate officials (most of whom he pardoned a year later). Feeling empowered by President Johnson, Confederates barred Blacks from voting, elected Confederates as politicians, and instituted a series of discriminatory Black codes at their constitutional conventions to reformulate their state in the summer and fall of 1865. With the Thirteenth Amendment barring slavery “except as a punishment for crime,” the law replaced the master. The postwar South became the spitting image of the prewar South in everything but name.
Of course, lawmakers justified these new racist policies with racist ideas. They proclaimed that the Black codes—which forced Blacks into labor contracts, barred their movement, and regulated their family lives—were meant to restrain them because they were naturally lazy, lawless, and oversexed. “If you call this Freedom,” a Black veteran asked, “what do you call Slavery?”
Southern Blacks defended themselves in the war of re-enslavement, lifted up demands for rights and land, and issued brilliant antiracist retorts to the prevailing racist ideas. If any group should be characterized as “lazy,” it was the planters, who had “lived in idleness all their lives on stolen labor,” resolved a Petersburg, Virginia, mass meeting. It had always been amazing to enslaved people how someone could lounge back, drink lemonade, and look out over their fields, and call the bent-over pickers lazy. To the racist forecasts that Blacks would not be able to take care of themselves, one emancipated person replied, “We used to support ourselves and our masters too when we were slaves and I reckon we can take care of ourselves now.” When President Johnson evicted Blacks from their forty-acre plots in the summer and fall of 1865, Black people protested. “We has a right to the land we are located,” Virginia’s Bayley Wyatt griped. “Our wives, our children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates upon.”1
In September 1865, Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens, arguably the most antiracist of the “Radical Republicans” favoring civil rights, proposed (and did not get approval for) the redistribution of the 400 million acres held by the wealthiest 10 percent of southerners. Every adult freedman would be granted forty acres, and the remaining 90 percent of the total would be sold in plots to the “highest bidder” to pay for the war and retire the national debt. Congress forced only one group of slaveholders to provide land to their former captives—the Confederacy’s Native American allies.
The most popular defense against land redistribution was that it would “ruin the freedmen” by leading them to believe they could acquire land without “working for it,” as the antislavery cotton manufacturer Edward Atkinson suggested. Did Atkinson really believe his own argument? This rich entrepreneur knew more than anyone that many rich men had not been ruined when they had inherited land without “working for it.” Most Republicans wanted the government to create equality before the law, with all men having the same constitutional and voting rights. After that, they believed the government was finished. “The removal of white prejudice against the negro, depends almost entirely on the negro himself,” declared The Nation, a periodical devoted to equal rights founded in July 1865, with Garrison’s third-oldest son, Wendell, as assistant editor.2
William Lloyd Garrison and so many of the abolitionists he inspired chose not to engage in the political struggle against racial discrimination. Garrison failed to realize that it was his genius that had transformed abolitionism from a complex, multi-issue political project with unclear battle lines and objectives into a simple, single-issue moral project: slavery was evil, and those racists justifying or ignoring slavery were evil, and it was the moral duty of the United States to eliminate the evil of slavery. Garrison did not use his genius again for antiracism, in declaring that racial disparities were evil, and that those racists justifying or ignoring disparities were evil, and that it was the moral duty of the United States to eliminate the evil of racial disparities. He was too bogged down by the assimilationist idea that Black people needed to be developed by northerners. In the final months of The Liberator, Garrison allocated substantial space and praise to the northern missionaries’ project of building southern schools for emancipated people. Never mind that the northern missionaries were not just handling the building and fund-raising but also planning to control and staff the schools and “civilize” the students.
Antiracist southern Blacks were not waiting on northern assimilationists. “Throughout the entire South an effort is being made by the colored people to educate themselves,” reported the Freedmen’s Bureau’s superintendent of schools, John W. Alvord, in early 1866, after touring the South. These emancipated people were neither looking at the White missionaries as superior nor considering them their saviors. Black Georgia educators, for instance, said in February 1866 that they hoped White teachers were not in the South “in any vain reliance on their superior gifts . . . or in any foolish self-confidence that they have a special call to this office, or special endowments to meet its demands.”3
On December 18, 1865, the United States officially added the Thirteenth Amendment to its Constitution. “At last, the old ‘covenant with death’ is annulled,” Garrison wrote in the second-to-last issue of the voice of abolitionism. The Liberator had been established to destroy chattel slavery, he said in the final issue, on December 29, 1865. Now that slavery was dead and buried, it seemed only fitting to let The Liberator’s “existence cover the historic period of the great struggle.”4
Without The Liberator, Garrison soon felt “like a hen plucked of its feathers.” After two bad falls in early 1866 took him out of commission, he largely watched Reconstruction from the sidelines. He watched Frederick Douglass head a delegation of Black male suffragists into the President’s House on February 7, 1866. The meeting quickly turned combative when President Andrew Johnson said state majorities should decide voting rights. When someone retorted that Blacks were a majority in South Carolina, a miffed Johnson elaborated on his true fear: that Black voters looked down on poor Whites and would forge a political alliance with planters to rule them. When Douglass proposed “a party . . . among the poor,” Johnson was disinterested.5
Whether Douglass admitted it or not, some—perhaps most—Blacks did look down on poor Whites. They denigrated the Whites who did not enslave them as “White trash.” Actually, some uncorroborated reports suggest that enslaved Blacks created that term. Blacks had seen poor Whites doing the master’s dirty work, as overseers, or on slave patrols, while clinging to the stinking fallacy that the lowest of them was still better than the highest Black person. And if poor Whites were “White trash,” then what were elite Whites? Black consumers of racist ideas had come to associate Whiteness with wealth and power, and education and slaveholding. Only through the “White trash” construction could ideas of superior Whiteness be maintained, as it made invisible the majority of White people, the millions in poverty, by saying they were not ordinary Whites: they were “White trash.” Similarly, the upwardly mobile Blacks were not really Black: they were extraordinary. At some point, racist and classist White elites started embracing the appellation to demean low-income Whites. “White trash” conveyed that White elites were the ordinary representatives of Whiteness.6
AS IT WAS, Black people no longer needed Andrew Johnson to secure some of their postwar rights. Republican senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois stayed true to his 1862 Free Soil word: “Our people want nothing to do with the negroes.” He felt the fervid panic that Blacks would flood the North in reaction to the violence, the Black codes, and the reelection of Confederates in 1865. To secure Black people in the South, Senator Trumbull and his anti-Black Republican comrades allied with the Radical Republicans in February 1866 to extend the Freedmen’s Bureau. The “immense patronage” would hinder the “character” and “prospects” of emancipated Blacks who caused the South’s problems by desiring to lead a “life of indolence,” President Johnson argued in his stunning veto of the Freedmen’s Bureau bill on February 19, 1866 (Congress overrode the veto in the summer).7
Senator Trumbull and company moved on to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1866 in March. The bill bestowed citizenship rights on all born in the United States and barred the “deprivation” of “any right secured or protected by this act” on the account of one’s “color or race.” Congress did not consider voting to be an essential right of US citizenship. Though aimed at southern Black codes, the act also invalidated northern Black codes that had discriminated against Blacks for decades. But the bill was limited in that it did not target private, local, or race-veiled laws of racial discrimination. Discriminatory racial language (not racial inequities) became the proof of racism for the federal courts—the apparatus charged with the huge burden of enforcing equal treatment. It was like writing laws for premeditated murders and not writing manslaughter laws for murders that the state could not prove were premeditated. The shrewdest discriminators switched tactics, and simply avoided using racial language to veil their discriminatory intent, to get away with racial murder.
President Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 even in its limited, moderate form. Only from the perspective of someone who refused to acknowledge discrimination in racial disparities, who wanted to maintain White privileges and the power to discriminate, could this bill be seen as “in favor of the colored and against the white race,” to use Johnson’s words. Johnson came from a Democratic Party busily shouting that to give Blacks voting rights would result in “nigger domination.” If there was any semblance of equal opportunity, these racists argued, then Blacks would become dominators and Whites would suffer. This was—and still is—the racist folklore of reverse discrimination. Andrew Johnson crafted this form of racism. And long after Congress impeached him, he still topped lists of the worst US presidents.8
In early April 1866, Congress overrode the presidential veto, turned its back on the president, and strode toward the Radical Reconstruction of the South. Southern violence against Blacks made congressmen move more quickly and forcefully to stop Blacks from coming north. In early May 1866, White mobs in Memphis killed at least forty-eight Black people, gang-raped at least five Black women, and looted or destroyed $100,000 worth of Black-owned property. Federal authorities slyly blamed nearby Black troops for provoking the violence, and they used their lies to substantiate redeploying them as “Buffalo Soldiers” out West. As southern Black citizens were killed over the next few decades to make way for Jim Crow, Buffalo Soldiers killed indigenous communities in the West to make way for White settlers.9
The irony was cruel—as cruel as the elite Blacks who blamed rural migrants for the race riot and urged their removal from Memphis. During and after the war, rural Blacks across the South had fled to southern cities and heard racist southerners—many Black elites included—predicting that the migrants would descend into idleness and criminality. It was said that God had made Black people to cultivate the soil (actually, Black elites diverged on this point). Black urbanites, new and old, were resisting discrimination and building schools, churches, and associations, achieving a modicum of economic security. And yet, their uplift did not improve race relations. Their uplift—and activism and migration—only fueled the violence in Memphis and beyond.10
As White southern violence spread, Democratic newspapers published stories arguing that masters’ loss of control was energizing the Black crime wave. Southerners also read stories of the “murder and mutilation” of Whites in Jamaica by “infuriated negro savages, bent on destroying the civilization which surrounds and vexes them.” Jamaica’s 1865 revolt was, in fact, a freedom fight against British slavery in everything but name. So it made sense that those who were trying to re-enslave the emancipated in the United States feared another Jamaica. They used any opportunity to attack Black communities to prevent it, and every racist idea to justify their attacks.11
DAYS BEFORE THE Memphis riot, a compromise proposal appeared before Congress that incorporated all of the divergent postwar issues into a single constitutional amendment, including denying Confederates the ability to hold office and placing Confederate war debt on southern laps. The Fourteenth Amendment’s first clause pleased the Radical Republicans: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” For the sake of the amendment’s passage, most Republicans rejected demands to define this statement’s terms. Republicans did not deny Democrats’ charges that the amendment was “open to ambiguity and . . . conflicting constructions.” The ambiguity effectively ensured that both antiracists and racists would vie for the amendment’s power. Indeed, both the defenders of equal opportunity and the defenders of White “privileges or immunities” would vie for the riches of the Fourteenth Amendment after its passage on June 13, 1866 (and ratification in 1868).12
For not guaranteeing Black male suffrage, Wendell Phillips blasted the Fourteenth Amendment as a “fatal and total surrender.” Republicans argued that omitting suffrage was strategically necessary. They told Black male suffragists that “‘the negro must vote,’ but the issue must be avoided now so as ‘to keep up a two thirds power in Congress.”13
Suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton believed the woman must vote, too, and they joined Black male suffragists in founding the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) in 1866. “I would not trust [a Black man] with my rights; degraded, oppressed, himself, he would be more despotic . . . than ever our Saxon rulers are,” Stanton said at the AERA’s first annual meeting in 1867. With the “elevation of women,” it would be possible to “develop the Saxon race into a higher and nobler life and thus, by law of attraction, to lift all races,” she added. Stanton offered an enduring rationalization for the racist idea of the hypersexist Black male, of Black men being more sexist than White men. It was the consequence of his racial oppression; the abused becoming the abuser.14
Sojourner Truth rose to defend Stanton’s opposition to the Fifteenth Amendment. “White women are a great deal smarter,” Truth said, “while colored women do not know scarcely anything.” After wielding racist ideas against colored women, the eighty-year-old legend turned her racist ideas onto colored men. Colored women “go out washing . . . and their men go about idle,” she said. “And when the women come home, they ask for money and take it all, and then scold because there is no food.”15
WHEN MIDTERM ELECTORS in 1866 sent the two-thirds majority of Republicans necessary to override presidential vetoes back to Congress, President Johnson was not dismayed. If Republicans brought Black male suffrage before Americans, a Johnson aide said, then “we can beat them at the next Presidential election.” Republican congressmen and their voters were a motley crew: it included segregationists, who were seeking to confine Black “brutes” to the South by eliminating racial discrimination; assimilationists, who wanted to humanize the “imbruted” Blacks and eliminate racial discrimination; and a handful of antiracists, who wanted to eliminate racial discrimination and afford equal Blacks equal opportunities.16
Nowhere was opportunity as unequal as in work, where rural Blacks’ desires for secure land and urban Blacks’ desires for secure jobs hardly registered in the political discourse. Every union should promote “one dividing line—that which separates mankind into two great classes,” said labor editor Andrew Carr Cameron at the 1867 convention of the newly founded National Labor Union (NLU). Cameron obscured the color line in the first-ever national labor agenda. From then on, this denial of racism allowed racist laborers to join with racist capitalists in depressing Black wages, in shoving Black workers into the nastiest jobs, in driving up their rates of unemployment, and in blaming the racial disparities they helped create on Black stupidity and laziness.17
African Americans and their allies tried to create their own opportunities by establishing dozens of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the late 1860s. Antiracist educators and philanthropists who viewed southern Black students as intellectually equal to White students were almost certainly involved, but they were not nearly as numerous or as powerful as the assimilationist educators and philanthropists. These assimilationists commonly founded HBCUs “to educate . . . a number of blacks,” and then “send them forth to regenerate” their people, who had been degenerated by slavery, as one philanthropist stated. Black and White HBCU founders assumed New England’s Latin and Greek curriculum to be the finest, and they only wanted the finest for their students. Many founders assumed “white teachers” to be “the best,” as claimed in the New York National Freedman’s Relief Association in its 1865–1866 annual report. HBCU teachers and students worked hard to prove to segregationists that Blacks could master the “high culture” of a Greco-Latin education. But the handful of “refined,” often biracial HBCU graduates were often dismissed as products of White blood, or as extraordinary in comparison to the ordinarily “unrefined” poor Blacks.
Not all the HBCUs founded in the aftermath of the Civil War adopted the liberal arts curriculum. African Americans “had three centuries of experience in general demoralization and behind that, paganism,” the 1868 founder of the Hampton Institute in Virginia once said. Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the former Union officer and Freedmen’s Bureau official, offered teaching and vocational training that tutored acceptance of White political supremacy and Blacks’ working-class position in the capitalist economy. Hampton had a trade component that aimed to work its aspiring teachers hard so that they would come to appreciate the dignity of hard labor and go on to impress that dignity—instead of resistance—onto the toiling communities where they established schools.18
For all their submission schooling, Hampton-type HBCUs were less likely than the Greco-Roman-oriented HBCUs to bar dark-skinned applicants. By the end of the century, a color partition had emerged: light-skinned Blacks tended to attend the schools with Greco-Roman curricula, training for leadership, and darker-skinned Blacks ended up at industrial schools, training for submission. In 1916, one estimate found that 80 percent of the students at the HBCUs offering a Greco-Roman education were light-skinned or biracial. The racist colorism separating HBCUs was reflected in Black social clubs, in housing, and in the separate churches being built. Across postwar America, there emerged Black churches subjecting dark-skinned visitors to paper-bag tests or painting their doors a light brown. People darker than the bag or door were excluded, just as light-skinned Blacks were excluded from White spaces.19
CONGRESS PASSED FOUR Reconstruction Acts between March 2, 1867, and March 11, 1868, that laid the groundwork for the new state constitutions and for readmission of ten of the eleven southern states into the Union. Confederates were forced to accept Black male suffrage, while northern Free Soilers soundly rejected Black suffrage on their ballots in the fall of 1867. Confederates roared hypocrisy at these northerners, who were “seeking to fasten what they themselves repudiate with loathing upon the unfortunate people of the South.” Republicans stripping the vote away from “respectable” southern Whites and handing it to the “unrespectable” southern Blacks was “worse than madness,” President Johnson said in his Third Annual Message to Congress on December 3, 1867. “No independent government of any form has ever been successful in [Black] hands,” he added. With voting power, Blacks would cause “a tyranny such as this continent has never yet witnessed.” Johnson engaged in a debate that was over before it began. Since the very presence of Blacks was deemed to be tyrannical, racists would only see tyranny no matter what Black voters and politicians accomplished in the coming years.20
During the 1868 elections, Democrats pledged to free White southerners from the “semi-barbarous” Black male voters who longed to “subject the white women to their unbridled lust,” as stated by a vice presidential candidate, the fanatical Missouri politician and Union general Francis P. Blair Jr. The Democratic platform attacked Republicans for subjecting the South, “in time of profound peace, to military despotism and negro supremacy.” The Ku Klux Klan, founded originally in 1865 as a social club in Tennessee, made a charade of the “profound peace.” With Johnson’s anti-Black military appointments looking away, the Klan commenced a “reign of terror,” assassinating Republicans and barring Blacks from voting.
Millions of Blacks voted for president for the first time in armed southern Black counties that the Klan would not dare to enter, swinging the 1868 presidential election to a Republican war hero, General Ulysses S. Grant. Blacks voted into life what segregationists would begin their struggle to kill—the Black politician. “Nigger voting, holding office, and sitting in the jury box, are all wrong,” blared Mississippi’s Columbus Democrat. “Nothing is more certain to occur than these outrages upon justice and good government will soon be removed.”21
Numerous Republican congressmen, such as Ohio’s James A. Garfield, were privately expressing “a strong feeling of repugnance” about Blacks being “made our political equal.” But when these racist Republicans calculated the serious advantages the “loyal” Black vote could give them in swing states, they finally gave their support to Black suffrage. As with the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, these powerful congressmen had not been morally persuaded to open the door to Black rights. It was about self-interests. On February 27, 1869, the Republican-dominated Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. It forbade the United States and each state from denying or abridging voting rights “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Congress empowered itself to “enforce this article by appropriate legislation,” but refused to go any further. Protections for Black politicians, uniform voting requirements, and the prohibition of race-veiled measures to exclude Blacks, however, were denied.22
Denied, too, was any serious discussion of enfranchising women. This issue caused dissension between White and Black suffragists at the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) meeting on May 12, 1869, weeks after Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment. It stung leading suffragist Susan B. Anthony to think the Constitution had “recognized” Black men “as the political superiors of all the noble women.” They had “just emerged from slavery,” and were “not only totally illiterate, but also densely ignorant of every public question.” Ironically, sexist men were using similar arguments about women’s illiteracy, women’s ignorance of public questions, and noble men—as the natural political superiors of all women—to oppose Anthony’s drive for suffrage rights.23
For instance, George Downing, a Black activist and businessman who attended the meeting, spoke of women’s obedience being God’s will. The AERA meeting went from bad to worse. Feminists challenged him. Downing and other organizers of the Colored National Labor Union (CNLU) came under fire again for this view at their founding meeting later in the year. A Black woman from Downing’s home state of Rhode Island expressed her disappointment that “poor women’s interests were not mentioned.” In the end, the CNLU admitted its “mistakes.” It would have been wholly hypocritical for the CNLU to refuse to address gender discrimination, after developing in reaction to the National Labor Union’s refusal to address racial discrimination. Then again, hypocrisy had normalized in the American reform movements. Racial, gender, ethnic, and labor activists were angrily challenging the popular bigotry targeting their own groups at the same time they were happily reproducing the popular bigotry targeting other groups. They did not realize that the racist, sexist, ethnocentric, and classist ideas were produced by some of the same powerful minds.
The National Labor Union welcomed Black delegates to its 1869 convention and proclaimed that it “knew neither color nor sex on the question of the rights of labor.” Antiracists and feminists would have preferred for the NLU to accept neither racism nor sexism on the question of the rights of labor. But that was hardly forthcoming.24
After George Downing’s debacle, Frederick Douglass tried to smooth things over by suggesting that AERA members support any measure that extended “suffrage to any class heretofore disenfranchised, as a cheering part of the triumph of our whole idea.” Stanton and Anthony rejected the resolution. Poet Frances Harper, representing the guns of Black feminism, chastised “white women” for only going “for sex, letting race occupy a minor position.” Sojourner Truth had come to agree with Harper and Douglass. “If you bait the suffrage-hook with a woman, you will certainly catch a black man,” Truth advised, as only the Truth could. The division over the Fifteenth Amendment dissolved the AERA and severed the suffrage movement. The suffrage struggle limped into the 1870s and would not be resolved for women until nearly half a century later.
If it had been left up to the first generation of Black male politicians, women may have received voting rights in the 1870s. All six Black Massachusetts legislators, and six of seven Black US representatives from South Carolina, for example, supported women’s suffrage. Susan B. Anthony may have privately realized that Black men were not “densely ignorant of every public question,” including her right to vote.25
Democrats tried to block the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, demeaning it as a “nigger superiority bill” meant to establish horrific and barbaric Black supremacy. They had no luck. The amendment was ratified on February 3, 1870. Black people from Boston to Richmond to Vicksburg, Mississippi, planned grand celebrations after the ratification. For their keynote speaker, several communities invited a living legend.26