The Lost Key
As the Civil War drew to a close in the spring of 1865, news reports about the Confederate government, then not long for this world, prompted an anonymous writer for the New York Times to reflect on the nature and ultimate cause of the war. The Confederate Congress was in secret session—again. Its recent conduct, the writer said, “exhibits more clearly the rapid progress which that body has made toward pure oligarchy.” Prior to the war, Southern leaders had masked their oligarchy in pretended republicanism, but since the establishment of the Confederacy, they had dropped the mask:
Of their dislike to a broad Democracy like ours, we have been long aware. But the recent proceedings of their Congress prove that even a Government of freeholders was not what they aimed at, but a Government of wealthy men, large landed proprietors—what in short, Aristotle calls an oligarchy, without any responsibility, or any show of responsibility, to the rest of the community. . . . Much of the practical interest of this matter is of course destroyed by the probability that the present Confederate Congress is the last that will ever meet. But it will, nevertheless, always possess considerable importance for the philosopher and historian, as a very suggestive indication of the course that the Confederacy would have run, had it succeeded—of the secret aims of its leading managers, and in fact as a key to many of the most singular problems of “this strange eventful history.”1
As Northern readers of the New York Times knew, many Northern abolitionists and political leaders had been using Southern oligarchy as the key to decoding their “strange eventful history” as it unfolded, and the last gasps of Confederate government heaped up more evidence that they were right to have done so. For decades after the war, the prediction of the editorialist held, and the antebellum rise of the oligarchic regime in the South continued to “possess considerable importance for the philosopher and historian” who studied and wrote about the events of their age. These authors constituted the first school of literature on the antebellum conflict over slavery, the war, and postbellum American politics. This body of literature is best designated the Republican School, and its defining attribute is recognition of Southern oligarchy as the key to understanding American political development in the nineteenth century. Many Republicans who had served in the national government wrote memoirs, penned histories, and published their collected speeches on their epic struggle. The accounts of some of them who served in the Thirty-Eighth, Thirty-Ninth, or Fortieth Congress are sources for chapters 1–5 of this book. They contributed to the Republican School along with many others, before and after the war.
Union combat veteran Albion Tourgee wrote a historical novel exclusively focusing on Reconstruction that belongs to the Republican School. His book A Fool’s Errand (1879) was based on his personal experience in postbellum North Carolina and was popular in the North. For him, the residuum of antebellum Southern oligarchy remained the key to the difficulties of Reconstruction. He wrote that the South “was a republic in name, but an oligarchy in fact. Its laws were framed and construed to this end.” The attempt to change the regime was a “herculean” task, perhaps even impossible in his view, as the title hints.2
Other authors expanded and extended the analysis of the Republican School, arguing that the antebellum oligarchy had reconstituted and was still menacing American government as well as black Americans. One of these authors is Green Berry Raum, who won the Congressional Medal of Honor fighting for the Union in the Civil War, later became a U.S. representative from Illinois, and wrote The Existing Conflict between Republican Government and Southern Oligarchy (1884). Others were Henry Edwin Tremain, also a Union combat veteran and winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor and author of Sectionalism Unmasked (1907), and William Henry Smith, author of A Political History of Slavery (1903), who served Ohio as secretary of state during the war. The Republican School should include “the author of America,” William Cullen Bryant. In the fourth volume of his work A Popular History of the United States (1876–81), he declared “the central fact of the history of the United States to be, from the beginning of the century to the beginning of the slaveholders’ rebellion, a determination of a class to get possession of the Government for its own purposes.” The men in that class believed that “the best and truest government was an oligarchy” and that the logic of the regime required that “the many, who labor with their hands, should be, without regard to color or to race, in the absolute ownership of the few.”3
Native-born Southerners who accepted the premise of the Republican School were George Washington Cable, author of The Negro Question (1898); Joseph C. Manning, author of the political pamphlet The Rise and Reign of the Bourbon Oligarchy (1904); and William Skaggs, author of The Southern Oligarchy: An Appeal in Behalf of the Silent Masses of Our Country against the Despotic Rule of the Few (1924). For these Southern authors, the persisting rule of the antebellum Southern oligarchy after the war was personal. Like antebellum Southerners Hinton Helper and John Jacobus Flournoy, these postbellum Southerners criticized Southern oligarchy from inside its domain.4
The Republican School has a European wing of authors, among them J. Arthur Partridge, British author of The Making of the American Nation; or, The Rise and Fall of Oligarchy in the West (1866). This and the author’s companion volume, On Democracy (1866), were noticed by the North American Review in 1867 and, despite some defects, judged to be “contributions of value to political science.”5 Essays on America by fellow Briton John Stuart Mill and The Slave Power (1862) by Irishman John Elliot Cairnes both prominently featured Southern oligarchy in their analyses of the war and Reconstruction.6 For German scholar Hermann von Holst, Southern oligarchy was the primary impediment to the progress and development of American republicanism in his eight-volume study, The Constitutional and Political History of the United States (1876–92).
The literary dominance of the Republican School began to weaken after Redemption, the gradual return of Southern government to the dominant party in the South in the 1870s. National Republicans retreated, and their frail Republican allies in the South were left to fend for themselves. Failure exposed their interpretation of events to criticism and counterclaims.
Looking back at their work in the Reconstruction Congress, Republicans conceded defeat but remained hopeful that their goal would be realized over the long term. Reflecting on Reconstruction in an 1886 speech, John Sherman admitted that although they had tried to reshape Southern political society, “I am afraid it did not turn out very well.” Final reunion of the American people, he believed, could not be accomplished until every part of the nation supported, “without respect to race or color or condition, the equality of rights and privileges.” That principle “is now ingrafted upon our constitution” and “can never be erased.” Though men might flout the amendments to the Constitution in the interim, eventually, he predicted, the republican principle that the Reconstruction amendments embodied “will be recognized by every man and woman and child in this broad land, white or black, north or south.” In 1913 George Edmunds denied that the measures of the Reconstruction Congress were “measures of cruelty or tyranny, but of justice and hopefulness.” He acknowledged that “the Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution has, so far, almost entirely failed to accomplish its purpose,” but “it stands as an indestructible monument of liberty and equality.”7
Over the short term, the Republican retreat from Reconstruction shifted power in two ways. First, control of political development in the South would be decided by those who emerged victorious from the struggle for power within the Southern people. Second, the victorious power would thereafter become part of the national government, altering national political development. In the immediate aftermath of Redemption, the Republicans recognized that these consequences had hobbled their attempt to establish republicanism in the South and to refound a purer Republic. In 1879 Senator Zachariah Chandler had resumed his service in Congress and reported back to a Chicago audience that in twenty years, there was “not a particle of difference” in Southern statesmen. They “are just as much Rebels now, as they were,” he informed them. Because the constitutional formula for apportioning representation had applied to changed conditions, from counting three-fifths of four million slaves to a full accounting of four million former slaves, whose votes were suppressed with “fraud and violence,” the relative voting power of white Southerners in Congress had kept pace with the North. With that power, “they dare to dictate terms to the loyal men of these United States.” Upon his reentry into the Senate, Chandler found “precisely what I did twenty years ago,” that the “Rebel States . . . absolutely control all the legislation in this Government.” From Boston Nathaniel Banks observed the situation in Congress, exclaiming, “And this is the substantial result of a perpetual conflict of half a century to preserve the government of the Republic!”8
Though retired from Congress by 1880, George Boutwell lamented the brazen attack on free elections and civil rights in the South. He urged the Republican Party to be “determined, bold, aggressive” in demanding “a full, free vote and an honest count.” In almost “half of the States of the Union, . . . the bayonet must be employed to protect the ballot or republican institutions must disappear.” Boutwell invoked the guarantee clause, requiring intervention. The Constitution forbade state governments from robbing “the people of every right appertaining to a republican system.” But parchment protections of republican equal rights were unavailing. Senator George Edmunds was still serving in 1881 when he published a review essay refuting new literary works absolving the Confederacy, defending state sovereignty, and decrying the centralization of power due to the ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The amendments, it was charged, threatened the liberty of the people. Edmunds countered that they “gave liberty to millions” and were intended to secure “equality of rights and equality of protection under the laws.”9
In 1902 Judge Emory Speer of Georgia explained to a Northern audience that “the swift bestowal by the reconstruction acts of unlimited manhood suffrage upon members of the African race” had created instant unity of Southern whites against the national government. In other words, the immediate effect of the attempted imposition of black suffrage on the South by national Republicans was that they had lost the initiative in directing Southern political development from the nation’s capital. But the unity among Southern whites against the national government concealed unsettled differences between the formerly ruled whites and ruling whites in the South. In 1890 Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman was a rising star and a populist gubernatorial candidate in South Carolina. Although he sharply broke from Republicans on the policy of enfranchising black Americans, he validated their analysis of the South. In reply to his local critics, Tillman said, “Tillmanism had its origin 100 years ago. Before the war South Carolina was a pure aristocracy. We have never had a republican form of government in South Carolina.” Their “old Constitution” gave power to the planters on the coast, and “the people were oppressed. . . . There was continual warfare between the upcountry and the lowcountry. . . . That same warfare has sprung up under the new name of Tillmanism.”10 These claims were precisely what the Republicans had alleged for decades, but Tillman was one of the most inveterate opponents of black Americans in American history. An alliance between men like him and Reconstruction Republicans had been impossible. The ruling and ruled whites in the South would have to work out their differences themselves. The future of regime change in the South was no longer in the hands of Republicans.
Despite Tillman’s validation of the long-standing premise of the Republican cause and of the Republican School, Redemption drained national prestige from both. Step by step, the Republican School declined, and the American “philosopher and historian” lost the key to our “strange eventful history.” Former Confederates first cleared space for competing interpretations. The causes and significance of the Civil War were “being rapidly clouded over by the contributions of men who were on the wrong side,” wrote Rossiter Johnson in his blistering review of The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881), by former president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis. Postbellum leniency toward the defeated rebels permitted them to hatch a “literary conspiracy . . . to change the apparent motive of the war.” Davis had rested the Confederacy’s case on state-sovereignty doctrine, which, he had claimed, served “the cause of liberty.” This argument, Johnson argued, was illusory and spawned factitious history. President Lincoln had “officially declared his purpose not to interfere with the constitutional rights of the South.” Southern members of Congress “had only to sit still in their seats,” and slavery in the states where it existed “could have received no harm from the Government.” The move by most seceding states to bypass popular votes for secession belied the claimed devotion of Davis to popular liberty. The deeds of Davis showed that he cared nothing for “the sovereignty that resided in the people.” He and his coadjutors had sought “to convert the great slave republic into a virtual aristocracy; the slave-holders, of course, being the ruling class.”11
Although Johnson’s review was compelling, Davis was politically shrewd to rest the Confederacy’s case on state-sovereignty doctrine. The old oligarchy had invented state-sovereignty doctrine to shield its rule over the southern majority from the guarantee clause and national republicanism before the war. After the war, ruled and ruling whites in the South both opposed black suffrage. They could unite behind state-sovereignty doctrine, because it had successfully blunted the arm of the national government in the past and, in the future, could shield the suppression of black American citizenship from national government interference. Despite their oligarchic origins, state sovereignty and the Confederacy could enjoy popular revival among the white majority. Postbellum politics prepared the ground in which reappraisals of the past were planted. New literary works that vindicated state sovereignty were welcome, even if those works told “factitious” versions of Southern and national political history, vaunting the Confederacy’s devotion to popular liberty and burying the story of “warfare” between the ruling and ruled classes. In this way, Redemption of the Southern states strengthened the prestige of the new historical accounts authored by Confederates and diminished the prestige of the Republican School.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the “literary conspiracy” against the Republican School became systematic. A new group of scholars threatened to displace the Republican School and submerge its key premise. The Dunning School, led by Professor William Archibald Dunning of Columbia University, was composed of scholars who served as apologists for the oligarchy.12 One of these scholars himself acknowledged that they had rewritten the history of the period, to contest “the literary dominance of New England, where for years most of the histories were written.” Before the rise of the Dunning School, “‘the New England point of view’” came “to permeate the thinking of the greater part of the country. . . . The Southern cause was very much on the defensive in this battle of interpretations.” But the Dunning School led a new Southern offensive, with “revolutionary consequences upon the interpretation of the whole nineteenth century in America.”13
The unexpected rise of the Dunning School prompted replies from John Lynch, a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Mississippi. Lynch was a Republican and a member of the first class of black Americans to serve in Congress. He wrote The Facts of Reconstruction (1913) and Some Historical Errors of James Ford Rhodes (1922) to gainsay the emerging Dunning School scholars, whom contemporary scholars erroneously regard as the first school of writers on Civil War–era history. It is more fitting to regard them as the first school of revisionists. Lynch knew that he was fighting a rearguard action against their advance and was defending the older Republican literature and the Republican cause.
Like the Republican School authors who came before him, Lynch identified Southern oligarchy as the central problem of the age. He might be said to have been the last of the great authors in the Republican School, and his contribution was invaluable. Because he wrote at a later date, he was able to consider Reconstruction long after its end, from the Republican School perspective, and he could contrast his portrait of Reconstruction to the portrait painted by the Dunning School.
In The Facts of Reconstruction, Lynch recognized that equal citizenship had obviously been denied to black Americans, but had also eluded the white majority in the South. He connected the forces opposing equal citizenship to the old Southern oligarchy, which was central to understanding prior political history and political development thereafter. He wrote that the antebellum oligarchic regime threatened republicanism in the nation and finally had called the Republican Party to life in the 1850s. At that time, “the slave oligarchy of the South” controlled the Democratic Party, and because “the Whig party had not the courage of its convictions,” the “Republican party came to the front with a determination to secure, if possible, freedom for the slave, liberty for the oppressed, and justice and fair play for all classes and races of our population.” He understood that both black slaves and whites constituted the ruled element in Southern political society beneath “the slave oligarchy of the South.” In his discussion of Reconstruction, he said the Republican plan was both “serious and radical” because it proposed to break up “the established order of things” in the South: “It meant not only the physical emancipation of the blacks but the political emancipation of the poor whites, as well. It meant the destruction in a large measure of the social, political, and industrial distinctions that had been maintained among the whites under the old order of things.”14
Reconstruction meant wholesale regime change, as profound as if the United States had occupied a foreign nation ruled by a privileged class to the exclusion of all others and then had attempted to establish free government there. The prospective incorporation of the former slaves into the citizenry would have qualified as a modification of the political regime, but not a revolution in the form of government, if genuinely republican governments had previously existed in the South. But that was not the case. The difficulty for Lynch and the Republicans was that long before the war, the oligarchic political regime had been consolidating and, therefore, was more durable and resistant to externally imposed change.
Just as the project to establish republicanism in the South failed to overcome resistance, Lynch’s project failed to stem the rising tide of Dunning School revisionism. Both republican projects succumbed to revivified elements of the oligarchic regime. The key to America’s “strange eventful history” was buried and has remained buried for more than one hundred years. The reason that the key has never since been recovered and seriously applied to studies of the progress and outcome of Reconstruction was because, subsequently, scholars became consumed by the most salient moral question that remained after Reconstruction and ignored the central political problem to which the moral problem was connected. The scholars became engaged in the battles of civil rights and injected themselves into unfolding political history, while retelling past history in terms of the fundamental moral question with which they were engaged.
The Civil Rights Struggle among the Historians
The view of Reconstruction that prevails today is best captured by W. E. B. DuBois: “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery. . . . A new slavery arose.” When DuBois published Black Reconstruction in America in 1935, his was the minority view. By then, the Dunning School had triumphed. In their account, the freed slave was not a man who had briefly enjoyed the sunlight of freedom, but rather, in the words of Woodrow Wilson, he was one of a “host of dusky children untimely put out of school.”15 The question and answer prompted by such a statement are obvious. What does one do with children “untimely put out of school”? You declare the end of recess and put them back in, or at least as far as one can. The scholarship of the Dunning School could and did justify legal segregation, extralegal terror, and general oppression, the elements of the “new slavery” referred to by DuBois.16
But another new wave of revisionist scholarship attacked the moral basis of the Dunning School and substituted that of DuBois. The normative position of the revisionists favored the equal rights of the emancipated slave, and they began retelling the history of Reconstruction as the history of the black American struggle for citizenship. The rise of this revisionism corresponded with the rise of the modern civil rights movement.17 Functionally, the new histories of Reconstruction served the cause that led to the legal enforcement of equal civil rights in America, much in the same way that the stories of the Christian martyrs served the cause that led to the legal enforcement of toleration in the Roman Empire.18 The perseverance of the oppressed was highlighted; the tyranny of oppression was exposed.
Reflecting on the history of Reconstruction scholarship, Michael Les Benedict claimed that the work of revisionist historians John Hope Franklin, Kenneth Stampp, and John Cox and Lawanda Cox all “restored the question of racial accommodation to its central place in the conflict—‘the issue of Reconstruction.’”19 But this statement is imprecise, and its imprecision is badly misleading. The question of racial accommodation was always central to the Dunning School, too. What separated the groups of scholars were their contrasting normative views of racial accommodation.
Adherents on both sides adopted clear and sometimes strident moral positions on the question, and both often condemned Reconstruction Republicans, either for supporting black citizenship or for not supporting black citizenship. A Dunningite lamented that “savage political leaders” like Senator Charles Sumner (“whose chief regret had been that his skin was not black”) gave the ballot to “three millions of former slaves, some of whom could still remember the taste of human flesh and the bulk of them hardly three generations removed from cannibalism.”20 Scholars on the other side of the issue blamed Republicans for allowing “counter-revolution in the South after Reconstruction,” which “was as dramatic as it was ugly,” ending in “constitutional disfranchisement, state-sponsored segregation, widespread spectacle lynching and black rural poverty.”21 And the scholars attacked each other’s positions on the central question that divided them. A contemporary Dunningite praised the “excellent scholarship” of Claude Bowers, averred that “Dunning and his disciples provided accurate descriptions of ex-slaves,” and attacked the “Marxist revisionists” for being outraged by those descriptions.22 A critic of the Dunning School imputes to them the view that “blacks were inferior beings . . . little better than beasts.”23
For more than one hundred years, Reconstruction scholarship has been shaped by moral warfare of this kind. The phases of this war determine the divisions in Reconstruction historiography reviewed by Eric Foner in the preface to Reconstruction.24 He divided Reconstruction into the Dunning, revisionist, and postrevisionist schools. But although the breaks between them are ostensibly marked by time, even more so the contrasting moral positions that have changed with time distinguish those breaks. The Dunning School deplored the Reconstruction Congress for imposing black citizenship on beleaguered Southern whites. The revisionists of the second phase vindicated the Reconstruction Congress for attempting to affirm the citizenship of black Americans and lauded the efforts of the emancipated to live as free citizens. The postrevisionists of the third phase deplored the Reconstruction Congress for not doing enough to defend or advance black citizenship. Twenty-five years later, the fundamental structure of Foner’s historiography is still generally accepted, and the names Dunning School, revisionist, and postrevisionist are still standard currency in Reconstruction scholarship.
Foner organized the historiography in Reconstruction in 1988 so that the scholarly schools he defined corresponded to political positions. So did Dunning School historian Charles Ramsdell fifty years earlier.25 Another way to reframe the same body of literature, a way that more explicitly recognizes the organizing principles of the respective groupings, is to dispense with time altogether and to divide all of the scholars into one of the two camps into which they consciously settled: an equalitarian camp for black citizenship and a white-supremacist camp against black citizenship. The difference between the so-called revisionists and postrevisionists is really between equalitarians and uncompromising equalitarians, reflecting the difference between more and less demanding standards by which they judge prior conduct. The Dunning School also divides into moderates and extremists, a difference not captured by Foner’s historiography. One moderate Dunningite, for example, acknowledged “the successful employment of negro soldiers” by the Union and noted that “it became evident,” during Reconstruction in Mississippi, that “the admission of the negro to the witness stand and the jury box would not be accompanied by the terrible results predicted.” But another Dunningite claimed that slave revolts were not common, because “the negro lacked the capacity for organization” and that “freedom . . . was something that he did not exactly understand.”26
Scholars in both camps have always recognized that their work necessarily drew them into their contemporaneous battles over civil rights, because their work has had real political consequences in assisting respective movements for and against equal citizenship. The lines between scholarship and political activism have always been blurred, down to the present day. In a Columbia Law Review article, Eric Foner is critical of “the legal profession and the courts [for having] been slow to embrace the revolution in Reconstruction historiography” and served as an expert witness in one of the University of Michigan affirmative-action cases in 2000 that was eventually decided by the Supreme Court. Because scholarship has played a role in the battles for civil rights, it has been difficult to maintain philosophical distance. This has occurred despite the urging of Howard K. Beale to maintain that distance in his 1940 essay, “On Rewriting Reconstruction History,” which began, “For many years both Northerners and Southerners who wrote on Reconstruction were dominated by sectional feelings still embittered by the Civil War.” As a result, Beale noted, our “understanding of the bewildering complexity of conflicting interests and social phenomena of the day has been lost in the midst of historians’ proud or unconscious partisanship.”27 The long duel between the equalitarian and white-supremacist camps has influenced how scholars, the American public, and the government have thought about Reconstruction ever since. But the cost of sacrificing philosophical distance to meet the demands of contemporaneous political battles has been blindness. Our eyes have lost sight of the all-encompassing background of the prior drama, the clash between the two regimes in the nineteenth century.
When the struggle for equal citizenship began, the freed slave was the protagonist in the foreground of the drama. Later, the Dunning School scholars took to the stage and joined the antagonists of the freed slave. Then came the revisionists, who joined the supporting cast of the protagonist. While the parties of the protagonists and antagonists fixed the attention of the audience on the foreground of the stage where the scholarly duel took place, the background receded from view. By the time we reach Foner’s review of Reconstruction scholarship in 1988, Southern oligarchy had dropped out as a factor of any kind, a sideshow to the unrelated issue of equal citizenship. The old oligarchy is a kind of historical curiosity, and its existence is given no significant role in the shape and form of the nation. Regime change and black citizenship are decoupled.
Today, the question of black citizenship from the nineteenth century forward is mostly regarded as a moral problem isolated from the problem of Southern oligarchy, rather than bound together with the regime, if the regime is recognized at all. This common view that prevails today corresponds to another one, namely, that America was always a democracy since its birth, though an imperfect democracy, and that the American democracy has gradually cast off its imperfections and become more expansive and inclusive. The central issue of Reconstruction scholarship is framed as the prospective expansion of American democracy, from white democracy to “biracial” or “interracial” democracy. That would be true if those who were excluded from the sovereignty constituted a minority. A regime so constituted is, from the perspective of the Declaration of Independence, a morally flawed republic, but a true republic nevertheless. In that case, the exclusion of some from citizenship would have been a moral problem, as the equalitarian and racist camps treat it. That may be a proper way to frame Reconstruction in some places within the free states, like Illinois or Oregon, where black Americans had been legally excluded, but it is not how to frame Reconstruction in its primary theater, the South.28
By diminishing the visibility of the Southern oligarchy, the long scholarly duel has hamstrung our ability to understand the regime and to see its profound impact not only on equal citizenship for black Americans, but also on the general political development of the United States. The longer that time passes since the height of the vitality of the oligarchy, the harder it will be to restore it to its influential place in American history and political development. Its power was indisputable. It nearly destroyed the regime from which it broke away, before expiring in a great war. Strength such as this suggests that the regime was once capable of extending its influence, penetrating even into the free states and national government, and stamping its character on new and repurposed institutions, customs, laws, and constitutional interpretation, some of which are still with us. We are susceptible to the error of imputing evidence of oligarchic institutions, customs, laws, and constitutional interpretation in the American past to republicanism rather than more properly recognizing that they were deviations from republicanism caused by oligarchic influence. If we do not analyze the United States in the nineteenth century within this two-regime framework, we run the risk of massive misattribution, conflation, and misinterpretation. It is a mischaracterization of the whole to define it by indisputable evidence found in one of its two halves. All America was neither completely republican nor completely oligarchic, but divided. The influences of each regime over the whole Union waxed and waned. In short, it seems advisable to group political phenomena by the two contending regimes that struggled for ascendancy against each other for many years in peace and in war within the same Union.
Seen in that context, the struggle for equal citizenship for black Americans is part of interregime struggle. Oligarchy ranks all members of its political society according to the principle of inequality and cannot tolerate the doctrine of “equality before the law” that distinguishes republican society. Historically, the rise of the antebellum oligarchy in the South preceded the emergence of second-class citizenship for black Americans, and the sequential order suggests a causal link. Scholars have not examined this link because, paradoxically, the civil rights struggle among the scholars over the past one hundred years has diminished our understanding and even our recognition of the oligarchy. This has precluded us from looking to the oligarchy in explaining questions to which contemporary historians and Americans most want answers, questions about race and equal citizenship. What follows is a brief explanation of black inequality and discrimination that emerged from Reconstruction, showing that the primary causal factor was the oligarchy.
The Failure of Regime Change in the South
One prominent scholar addressed the failure of Reconstruction by reminding us of what the standards of the time were and then argued that according to that standard, it was not a failure at all. He saluted the anemic progress of Reconstruction. The benchmark, he maintained, for evaluating the partial investiture of the emancipated with equal rights was the Dred Scott decision in 1857, which had declared black Americans “neither citizen nor alien but rather a kind of subject national without any rights.” Measured against that low standard, the small steps taken during Reconstruction toward equality represented “an abrupt change.”29
He would have been right to use the opinion of Roger B. Taney in the Dred Scott decision as a good benchmark for measuring the gains of Reconstruction if it had been generally true in the nation that black Americans were “neither citizen nor alien . . . without any rights.” But the opinion does not accurately reflect the universal legal status of black Americans before the short period, from 1857 to 1868, when the decision had legal standing. Taney’s opinion attempted to nationalize a distinct view of black American status that had originated in the southernmost end of the Union and that had finally infected the opinion of the national Court. According to James Ashley, the antebellum oligarchy, led by Calhoun, found a way to control appointments to the federal judiciary for years, and Taney’s opinion that nationalized their standard was the result. His opinion was the product of an infinite number of attempts of the antebellum oligarchy to convert the whole of the United States gradually into an oligarchic political regime when the Union was torn by interregime political conflict.
If we use Taney’s opinion to characterize the national legal status of black Americans, we are mischaracterizing the whole by a standard that originated in the oligarchic part of the American Union. Equally true, if we use the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to characterize the national legal status of black Americans, we would be mischaracterizing the whole by a standard that originated in the republican part of the American Union. Both the amendments and the decision of the Taney Court met resistance by one part of the Union where contrary principles prevailed.
The reaction of Massachusetts to the Dred Scott decision shows that the oligarchic standard of black status in Taney’s opinion was not universal. Upon receiving news of the decision, and realizing that, by way of the Supreme Court of the United States, the ancient South Carolina standard of black status was about to be imposed on them, the Massachusetts Legislature immediately took up the matter. One representative deemed the Court’s decision “a great calamity,” for it “deprives 10,000 of our citizens of their rights. It outlaws and exiles them. . . . It is our duty to yield nothing to the general government, and to place ourselves, if necessary, in antagonism to it.” Another denied that the decision proceeded from “the people of the country, but of men who had been seared in their feelings of justice.” A report from the Committee on Federal Relations denied that Massachusetts had ever “delegated to the Supreme Court of the United States, nor to any other power upon earth, the right to make color a test of citizenship within her borders.” Ever since statehood, the report continued, “people of color equally with whites, have been heretofore admitted to all the privileges and franchise of citizenship in Massachusetts.” Finally, the legislature enacted resolves that directly countermanded the Court’s decision, affirming that “all negroes, not aliens, domiciled within her limits, are citizens of Massachusetts” and were also, therefore, “citizens of the United States.”30
That was Massachusetts, one might say. Indeed, but in the early national period, most of America was busily modeling itself after Massachusetts before the rise of the Southern oligarchy. In 1865 Representative James Garfield gave a speech on Reconstruction in which he showed his Ohio constituents that the history upon which Taney had based his opinion was simply false. Suffrage for free and freed black Americans was not revolutionary at all, and, in fact, the denial of the right to vote for free black Americans departed from a national standard that was nearly universal and much older than the Dred Scott decision. Rather, he said, “to grant suffrage to the black man in this country is not innovation, but restoration. It is a return to the ancient principles and practices of the fathers.”31
Garfield pointed out that all but one state (South Carolina) during the years of the American Revolution had accepted free black suffrage. He might also have added that ten of the thirteen original states accepted free-black votes in the year that the Constitution was ratified, but he did mention that of the ten federal laws enacted before 1812 to establish new territories, none inserted color as a test for suffrage. In 1812 South Carolina again was in the vanguard of the movement to proscribe the rights of free blacks and was finally successful. Congress inserted a color line for the first time in legislation establishing the territory of Missouri. Then, Garfield noted, “One by one the Slave States, and many of the free States, gave way before the crusade of slavery against negro citizenship.” The capitulation of the free states to restrictions on free-black citizenship in this period should be viewed as the result of interregime penetration, the influence of the emerging oligarchy on republican states. Nevertheless, free blacks could still vote in some slave states, in North Carolina until 1835, and in Tennessee until 1834. Measured against the principles and policies of the America’s deeper past, opposition to black suffrage was, in Garfield’s words, “apostasy,” and restoration of the right of suffrage for black Americans was a sacred trust that the Declaration of Independence demanded and that “God has committed to us.”32
The explicit ambition of the Republican Party after the war was to achieve exactly what Taney tried to achieve with his decision: to nationalize their own view of the proper legal status for black Americans. But the Republican standard was the opposite of Taney’s, had been more prevalent during the early Republic, and still prevailed in Massachusetts. In 1868 Senator Oliver Morton, Republican of Indiana, said that his party’s postwar policy was to reconstruct the Republic on the “right basis” in “every part of this Union.” The right basis, he said, was “the broad platform of the Declaration of Independence.”33 The Republican Party’s 1868 national platform, the first framed since the end of the war, embodied Morton’s sentiment. The platform affirmed “the great principles laid down in the immortal Declaration of Independence” and hailed “with gladness every effort toward making these principles a living reality on every inch of American soil.”34
The party’s next national platform in 1872 equated the suppression of the rebellion, the emancipation of four million slaves, the security of equal citizenship for all, and universal suffrage with the “solemn duties of the time.” The second article maintained that the recently ratified Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments “to the national Constitution should be cordially sustained because they are right, not merely tolerated because they are law, and should be carried out according to their spirit by appropriate legislation, the enforcement of which can safely be trusted only to the party that secured those amendments.” The third article carried the party’s moral imperative further, saying, “Complete liberty and exact equality in the enjoyment of all civil, political and public rights should be established, and effectually maintained throughout the Union, by efficient and appropriate State and Federal legislation. Neither the law nor the Administration should admit of any discrimination in respect of citizens by reason of race, creed, color, or previous condition of servitude.”35
Such were the aims of the Republicans, and they seemed to have sufficient means to achieve them. By the close of the war in 1865, the Republicans had accumulated awesome powers, and the South seemed defenseless. The national government commanded a large, battle-tested, and victorious army, and Republicans, strengthened by the absence of representation from the insurrectionary states, controlled the national government. Numerically, at least, they remained in control for most of the remaining years of the nineteenth century. Despite President Andrew Johnson’s four years of obstruction from 1865 to 1869, six of the next seven presidents were Republicans and veteran officers of the Union army, beginning with Ulysses S. Grant, the general in chief. Between the end of the Civil War and 1900, Republicans held the Senate for twenty-nine years and the House for nineteen of those thirty-five years.
Because the Republicans possessed control of the national government and clearly expressed their mission, their standard is the appropriate one by which to judge the outcome of Reconstruction. We should ask: Why were not the civil rights achievements of the 1960s achieved in the 1860s? This question may seem naive to our modern sensibility that is conditioned to accept racism as an uncaused primary cause and as a universally acceptable explanation for many phenomena. But if we lazily stop with racism as the explanation, we elide the correct premises that the question lays bare, that the intention of the Republicans was to achieve aims similar to those that the 1960s achieved, and that they seemed to have had sufficient power to achieve what they intended.
Instead, their genuine attempt to transform the political regime of the slave South from oligarchic to republican produced a new kind of oppression for black Americans. Regime change is unpredictable and often produces deformed progeny rather than the perfect offspring prayed for. Undoubtedly, few today would agree that oligarchy is a superior regime to a republican regime founded on natural right. Nevertheless, even the destruction of the worst regime and the attempt to substitute a better regime can release unanticipated new evils into society that had been held in abeyance by the old regime.
Recently, America learned anew that a clear intention to change a terrible regime and possession of vastly superior power are not sureties that regime change will succeed. American arms were sent to destroy a tyranny in the Middle East and plant a democracy over its ashes, but underneath the tyranny were deep mutual hatreds among the people that were unseen by the American government. When the tyranny fell and the day of liberation and democracy was announced, the people fell upon each other. A new terror and mass dislocation were the result. The new regime did not create the new terror, but the attempt to transform the tyranny politically into a republican form of government did inadvertently precipitate the violence. America withdrew.
Similarly, regime change in the South after the Civil War precipitated appalling violence upon black Americans. The prior oligarchic regime created the hatreds and rivalries, but while the oligarchy ruled, it restrained mass violence. When the armies of the North brought republican government to the South, they not only liberated the people, but also unchained those latent hatreds. Before regime change had achieved success, the American government withdrew then, too.
The South was not a wax tablet, ready and willing to receive an impression in the likeness of the political society of the occupier. When the leaders of the outside power attempted to inscribe their likeness into the South, the South showed that it still possessed the resources to contest their aims. After formal conflict ended, white Southerners continued to maneuver and resist, and the violence sometimes verged on a renewal of formal, organized warfare.36 The murdered included the president of the United States, a sitting member of Congress, delegates to Southern state constitutional conventions, Southern state legislators, transplanted Northerners, Southern-born white Republicans or scalawags, black Republicans, and, worst of all, ordinary freedmen minding their own business.
An afternoon spent randomly flipping through the multivolume account of the Ku Klux Klan Hearings, published in 1872, yields case after case of brutalized innocent people.37 The freedmen passed through the portal of emancipation to find themselves in a dark Hobbesian world wherein they were the targets of insult, arson, beatings, torture, rape, and murder, undeterred by age or condition. The inescapable conclusion is that at some point previous to Reconstruction, the core idea upon which America was founded, the idea that each one of their stories matters, ceased to guide political society in a great part of the nation where slavery had obtained.
Although atrocities throng the thirteen volumes of the Ku Klux Klan report, the investigating subcommittees were ad hoc and received testimony in only one narrow slice in time, from a limited sample of the former slave states. Twenty-one members from the House and Senate presided over the Ku Klux Klan Hearings for six months in 1871, but most of their work was delegated to a subcommittee of eight, which received testimony in Washington, D.C. That subcommittee further divided into one subcommittee of three and two subcommittees of five that were organized to travel to seven of the fifteen formerly slaveholding states and receive testimony, but records exist of hearings convened in just five states for a total of eighty days. On average, each subcommittee sat for sixteen days in one area, sometimes at just one location, within each of the five investigated states, and so witnesses had to brave the dangers and distance of travel to give testimony.38 Yet the committee produced 8,166 pages, including testimony, indices, and the majority and minority reports. With recently available computer-based tools, it is now possible to run analytics against the digitized text of this report. The results reveal an astounding intensity of violence: On those 8,166 pages, the word shot appears 4,021 times and the words kill and its variants killed and killing appear 9,476 times.
Besides this one systematic effort by Congress, the military and the Freedmen’s Bureau also attempted to quantify the violence, but officials sometimes remarked that the depredations outstripped their ability to prevent or record them. A greater number of depredations than recorded can be inferred from the circumstances of the reports.
In 1868 General J. J. Reynolds reported that in Texas, “The murder of negroes is so common as to render it impossible to keep accurate account of them.” Freedmen Bureau commissioner General Oliver Howard added, “The civil authorities have been overawed, and in many cases, even the bureau and military forces have been powerless to prevent the commission of these crimes.”39 In Louisiana the case was the same. Howard reported that perpetrators of “outrage and crimes of every description” against the freedmen avoided apprehension and punishment due to the complicity of the “local magistracy,” or they had “overawed the civil authorities.” Louisiana and Texas were two of nine former slave states not investigated by the Ku Klux Klan Hearings. Those uninvestigated states (Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Delaware, and Maryland) contained nearly half of the total population of former slaves.40 Indications of epic violence were reported in most of them.
For example, in 1868 Howard accounted for “outrages reported as committed by whites upon colored people in the State of Kentucky during the year” amounting to “murders, 26; rapes, 3; shootings, 30; otherwise maltreated, 265; total, 327.” These numbers doubtfully reflect the reality. Two paragraphs later, he reviewed the mode of procedure to prosecute perpetrators, but admitted that they could rarely punish offenders due to the inability to make arrests, which was difficult “in some parts of the state, and in others, impossible. The people of the locality where the outrages occur warn, conceal, and protect the evil-doers.” Howard gives an example of a man who murdered “David Coulter, an inoffensive colored preacher, in cold blood.” The known murderer rode openly around the country, with armed companions. If the authorities could not apprehend criminals, why would witnesses or victims report the crimes and risk the probability of unapprehended criminal retaliation? Howard provided a clue to the scope of violence with a singular unexplained and undocumented sentence: “The outrages perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan have caused a great exodus into other States.” A quick analysis of Kentucky census data confirms this assessment. In the 1860 census Kentucky contained 236,167 slaves and free blacks, inclusive. By 1870 the noncolored Kentucky population increased by 19 percent, or 179,208, and the colored population decreased by 6 percent, or 13,957, over the prior decade.41
One haunting story that is representative of the mass of stories in the report was told by Charlotte Fowler to the investigating congressional subcommittee in Spartanburg, South Carolina. She and her husband, Wallace, and their three grandchildren lived on a subsistence farm, three miles from Glen Springs. One night, while Charlotte lay ill in bed, masked men loudly forced their way into their home. The intruders shot Wallace in the head in full view of the young children, who cried out to Charlotte that the men had killed their grandfather. But the shot did not immediately kill him. Roused by the noise and shouted threats, Charlotte arose from her bed to find her husband mortally wounded on the floor. Every time Wallace breathed, his brains and blood leaked over his eyes. With a gun in her face, Charlotte was compelled to participate in the gruesome work while the children watched. Seeing that Wallace was not dead, the masked invaders forced her to give them a flame, which they used to build a fire on his prostrate chest. Wallace Fowler died slowly, succumbing the next day. The record shows that during her testimony, Charlotte interjected, “My old man is dead and I am left alone.” She began to weep, and the interview soon ended. The chief murderer was the white father of a boy whom Wallace had caught stealing his watermelons.42 No prosecution is mentioned in the transcript.
In North Carolina freedman Essic Harris parenthetically remarked during his testimony that during slavery, nobody could have knocked his door down and escaped the punishment of his master. Following up, a surprised senator asked, “Are the colored people in a worse condition now than when in slavery?” Harris replied, “Of course.” Too often, emancipation did not afford, as Lincoln imagined, “an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race for life,” but instead meant exposure and vulnerability to a hostile world that could not let go of the past.43
Events in the South showed that the aims of Reconstruction measures touched a deeper nerve in Southern political society than the war ever did. During the war, resistance to the Union was directed by the officers of the Confederate government and required conscription. Resistance to Reconstruction sprang up from the people, and participation was voluntary, entailing great risk. Many examples can show that the spirit of resistance emerged from the primal substance of their way of life. One example suffices: a Southern woman dedicated her hagiography of the original Klansmen to her mother and other Southern women, who “Designed and Manufactured with Their Own Fingers the Regalia for the Ku Klux Klansmen and the Trappings for Their Horses.”44 To defeat the aims of Reconstruction and defend their own aims, they were willing to go so far as to adopt the tool of cruelty at the cost of sacrificing their own humanity. They knew that their occupier had the means to annihilate them, yet they pressed forward anyway.
The circumstances of the Colfax Massacre illustrate their audacity. Between 1870 and 1871, Congress passed three enforcement acts that criminalized private and state-sponsored assaults upon the civil and political rights of black Americans.45 Grant, the general who had subdued the Confederacy’s military, presided over the branch of the federal government responsible for executing those laws. In 1871 Grant announced that he was willing to use that power. He declared martial law in nine South Carolina counties, suspended habeas corpus, and sent in the army and federal prosecutors, who rounded up hundreds of terrorists and put them on trial.46
In his second inaugural address, in March 1873, Grant announced his intention to sustain the rights of the emancipated. The freed slave, he said, “is not possessed of the civil rights which citizenship should carry with it. This is wrong, and should be corrected. To this correction I stand committed, so far as Executive influence can avail.” Between that inaugural address and the Colfax Massacre, the New York Times republished an address in the Atlanta Press by former Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens, in which he encouraged “all ex-Confederates of every grade and class to cling closer to the glorious principle of self-government for which they had contended in the day of fratricidal strife.” This was populist revisionism. The Confederacy had contended against republican self-government. Stephens recast the war as a struggle to remove outside interference in Southern government, which suited the popular political goal to suppress black American citizenship, imposed from outside. Stephens was using his standing in the South to rally and hearten the Southern people, telling them that their war, as he reinterpreted it, was not over and could still be won. He promised that “the day is not distant, when their ‘leaders’ in the late ‘rebellion,’ so called in the language of Andy Johnson, will no longer be ‘branded’ with the dishonoring name of traitors, but denoted in history in the rank of self-sacrificing patriots.”47 In saying this, Stephens was lending his reinterpreted version of past events and his role in those events to the new popular cause, so that opposition to black citizenship could rehabilitate his reputation and the reputations of Davis and other failed leaders of the Confederacy. Stephens’s “glorious principle of self-government” won the day. Despite Grant’s power and reputation as conqueror of the Confederacy, white Southerners slaughtered at least sixty-two black Americans attempting to protect the integrity of the vote in Colfax, Louisiana, only one month after Grant’s address.48
When all other means fail, the Republicans knew, and we know, how to deal effectively with this kind of desperate rebellion: one can meet and overmatch cruelty with greater ruthlessness and use spectacular killings to overawe incipient resistance. But among a people who live by the Declaration’s anti-Machiavellian principles, few have the stomach for the Machiavellian prescription, the bloody arts that Cesare Borgia practiced upon the occupied people of the Romagna who resisted him and then practiced upon his betrayed henchman, Remirro de Orco.49 It is one thing to engage in “speculative audacity” and to conduct “armchair bloodbaths” from a safe distance; it is quite another to be there and to put the noose around the necks of men, even guilty men, especially if their names are Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens.50 The softer course adopted by the Northern people and their representatives during Reconstruction raises the questions again that Lincoln invoked at the outset of the war, whether there is “in all republics, this inherent and fatal weakness?” And “Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”
To endure and to preserve justice, modern republics must find a mean between these two excesses. They must respect liberty but toleration cannot be unlimited. They must meet oppression with firmness. If republics tolerate corrigible oppression within or without their borders on the mistaken idea that our principles of justice require this kind of toleration, they embolden weak threats and permit them to gather strength and become formidable. They invite greater injustice and their own overthrow. In sum, they allow the enemies of liberty to exploit liberty in order to defeat liberty.51 In their short history since 1776, modern republics have repeatedly erred in this way. As a result, they have sometimes expired or nearly expired at a great and avoidable cost. Their toleration of oppression has earned them blame, not praise, from future generations, and exposed them to doubts in their fidelity to principle.
After the war the Republicans and the Northern people lacked neither principle nor power. Their resolve was outlasted by the foes of regime change in the South, who were far weaker in material strength. For this deficiency of will, the Republicans exposed themselves to reproach. One American scholar blames them for lacking the “will to use available power” against the Ku Klux Klan. Apart from one Republican governor, none showed “stern resolution to act against the terrorists.”52 Another scholar, as coauthor, refers to Republican acquiescence to ending Reconstruction and the resumption of normal state-federal relations as “the abandonment of the freed slaves to the prejudices of their former owners.”53
Both of these scholars wrote publicly about the continued American occupation of Iraq during the administration of George W. Bush. Setting aside that administration’s merits and demerits and primed by their writings on Reconstruction, we would expect their policy reflections to have centered, above all, on the lives, liberty, and property of the Iraqi people, for surely they valued Iraqis no less than the freedmen of Reconstruction. We would expect the one to have urged the U.S. government to show “stern resolution to act against the terrorists” and the other to have discouraged the abandonment of the Iraqis “to the prejudices” of terrorists and tyrants. We would expect them to have praised or blamed the administration according to the same standard, fidelity to the rights of humanity. In fact, both favored American withdrawal and harshly censured the occupation, one deriding “regime change.” The insecurity of the liberty and lives of the Iraqi people did not even receive their sympathetic comment.54 Their language is strikingly similar to Northern arguments for putting an end to Reconstruction, which those scholars had criticized.
The point here is not to hold these scholars to account, but to use their published writings to hold all of us to account who profess the same principles that they evidently do. How many of us, who are not on record, lament the retreat from Reconstruction in our past but have held back from firmly supporting the rights of humanity in our present? Repeatedly, modern republics have struggled to hold together strong political coalitions that back the tough but necessary measures to check advances against liberty. This is the deeper problem with modern republics that Lincoln diagnosed. The deeper cause of this problem that the American example shows, is that when our own liberty is safe, we do not easily see that our commitment to the liberty of all is not only a duty but also is compassed by our self-interest properly understood.
For decades before the war, the North was divided and opposition to the oligarchy was weak. Although a majority of New Englanders undoubtedly shared Garrison’s antislavery and republican principles, they dragged him through the streets of Boston with a rope around his neck because he refused to tolerate oppression. Due to the Northern policy of toleration and appeasement, the oligarchy grew bolder. Only when their own liberty was in danger did Northerners discover their will to confront the threat. After the war, their liberty was safe once again, but liberty in the South was insecure. Narrow self-interest no longer reinforced Northern resolve to check oppression and achieve the aim of Reconstruction. Many intelligent Northerners did mock and demand an end to regime change in the South, sapping Northern will and resulting in retreat.
Poor Whites, the Swing Votes of Reconstruction
From the point of view of Republicans in Washington, D.C., the power that opposed and outlasted them did not come from the expected source. It is not clear how many former members of the ruling class initially resisted and how many accepted the Republican program in the South. Some changed their political principles, became Republicans, and favored equal civil and political rights for the emancipated. John Lynch listed an impressive roll call of repentant aristocrats and suggested that even aristocratic Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and P. G. T. Beauregard acquired Republican sympathies.55 Some scholars attribute authorship of postbellum violence against blacks to unreconstructed members of the old ruling class.56 Studies of the Klan have found that these violent movements were equal-opportunity employers and that all classes of whites participated, though the old oligarchy usually led them.57 Yet no matter how many of the former rulers resisted or accepted the Republican program, their conduct was not decisive. They were, by definition, a minority. The outcome of regime change depended on the conduct of the white majority. The Republican attempt to weaken and destroy the oligarchic regime in the interest of establishing republicanism loosened the restraints that held back the multitude. They could finally use the power of their numbers to sway events as they wished. Poor whites controlled the balance of power, and their conduct determined the destiny of the South. The swing votes of Reconstruction were in their hands.
The white majority had a strong political incentive to befriend the emancipated and make common cause for color-blind equal citizenship. They needed each other. Advancing under the republican banner together, they could have prevented the reestablishment of the old oligarchy, which had ruled them both before the war, and erased its traces from a new South. The oligarchy had deprived the poor whites, too, of their right to be free and equal republican citizens. Northern statesmen were well aware of the old and deep animosity between the ruled and ruling whites and were well aware of their antebellum intrastate broils. The frequent, bitter attacks on the ruling class before the war by Southern representatives of the poor whites, men like Andrew Johnson, Francis Blair, and Hinton Helper, seemed to offer evidence that the white majority in the South would vote Republican at the nearest opportunity and pull up the old oligarchy by the roots. With a Republican Congress at their backs, ruled whites and the emancipated slaves could join their political fortunes, just as many did when they both fought with the Union army. Had the white majority joined with the emancipated as a unit and sustained their mutual claims to equal citizenship and liberty, it is hard to imagine that the weakened oligarchy could have prevailed against them, backed by the Northern people and the national government.
Instead, the white majority turned against the emancipated. While some formidable white-black coalitions formed in many states during congressional Reconstruction, the scalawags were a minority, and while they mostly did brave terrorism to support black citizenship, their support was generally weak or equivocal.58 The path of the white majority ended where the career of onetime civil rights crusader Thomas Watson ended, in supporting black oppression.59
The results of the war emboldened the white majority, and the old oligarchy could not control them. Their iron rule slackened. Events confirmed the impotency of the former rulers, while revolution swept the South. In a revealing public letter in 1874 written by Representative Charles Hays of Alabama, the South was the picture of chaos. Hays had been the largest slave owner of Alabama and an officer in the Confederate army. Since the end of the war, he had joined the ranks of former slaveholders who had abandoned their former views and become Republicans. His letter documents shootings, drownings, hangings, and mutilations visited upon blacks and white Republicans in multiple Alabama counties. Hays attributed the violence to a “spirit of rebellion against the laws and Government of the United States.” The “riots, murders, assassinations and torturings” were all one-sided, against the friends of the national government, and were “more common than they have ever been at any hour since Lee surrendered to Grant.” The bewildered Hays wrote, “I thought I knew the feelings and passions of our people.”60
Revolutionary chaos shone a bright light on the former ruler’s naïveté. By necessity, ruled people quietly conceal their disaffection, but revolution tears away the mask. Hays admitted that he was sadly incorrect to have believed that the people “would quietly accept that destiny, which the fiat of disastrous war had so emphatically placed upon them.” He had previously thought that by 1874, they would “be a free, united and happy people.” But the aristocrat could not command the whirlwind, tossing the broken parts of the oligarchic regime in a violent swirl. He looked for “the strong arm of Federal power” to restore order. Before the war, an appeal for assistance such as this by a prominent slaveholder from the proud ruling class would have been incredible. Now his former slaves were returning to him, begging his protection for “themselves and their little ones from murder and destruction.” But he could not “save them from the reign of the drunken desperado and the midnight marauder.” The former ruler admitted, “I am powerless to help them,” and, in fact, he admitted that his life was in danger also.61
Even leaders who opposed the Republican program of regime change seem to have lost the power to command the multitude, and such was the case of widely respected Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. His biographers relate the story that Forrest’s intention in joining the Ku Klux Klan was to keep blacks “in their place.”62 When he said this, it was evident that he meant a subordinate place for blacks, informed by prior custom. If not in slavery, then he quite possibly meant a place not too distant from slavery. His intention was stasis, insofar as possible. Forrest seems to have believed that the purpose of the Klan was the preservation of the status quo ante, and this intention directly opposed the Republican project, which aimed at the highest order of change. By joining and becoming the national leader of the Klan, Forrest intended to preserve the old order. Contemporaries remembered that the “best men” of the South organized the Klan.63
But soon, these “best men” were confronted by unexpectedly violent conduct by the rank and file of their organization. One of Forrest’s coadjutants in the Klan, former Confederate general George Gordon, issued an astonishing public message that dissociated the Klan from outrages committed in the Klan’s name. He claimed that the Klan was a protective organization, the friend of good whites and blacks, and that blacks had nothing to fear “as long as they behave themselves.” Then he singled out other Klansmen and concentrated his dark threats on them. He directly addressed the perpetrators of the atrocities, ominously warning these “imposters” that if the Klan found them, their fate at the Klan’s hands would discourage other men from the same conduct.64
Gordon’s message indicated that ruled whites were not obeying, and the old oligarchy was prepared to brandish the sword against them, clandestinely if necessary, to bring them into line. Forrest also reacted strongly to the violence of the rank and file and issued an order to the Klan to disband.65 But the rank and file ignored orders and threats and continued to perpetuate violence.66 When called to testify before the investigating congressional committee, Forrest insisted that the original aims of the organization had nothing to do with the subsequent terror and that he had done all he could to stop and suppress outrages.67 Later, he offered his services to Governor John C. Brown of Tennessee, another ex-Klansman and his former subordinate general officer, proposing to apprehend and “exterminate the white marauders who disgrace their race by this cowardly murder of Negroes.”68 At any other time, a determination such as this from the feared General Forrest might have caused men to shudder, but revolutions are uncommon times.
One of Forrest’s biographers concluded that his opinions about race “developed more in the direction of liberal enlightenment, than those of most other Americans in the nation’s history.” This seems to be an overstatement, a misinterpretation of the old slave trader who joined the Klan to keep blacks in their place. Just because the violence disgusted Forrest does not mean that he acquired Republican convictions. Forrest and the “best men” of the South organized the Klan to preserve the oligarchy, and the insubordination of the rank and file just as well impeded a successful restoration of the regime as did the Republican policy in Congress. But the reviewers of Forrest’s biographies also seem to misjudge Forrest. They did not see anything significant in his repudiation of the Klan and rather doubt his sincerity when the organization turned to wanton violence. One reviewer argued that financial self-interest explains his repudiation. Another dismissed the idea that Forrest was “repulsed by the racial terrorism of the organization,” but offered no argument to counter Forrest’s public protestations and his offer to the governor of Tennessee to exterminate the perpetrators of terror.69
What both biographers and reviewers seem to miss about the case of Forrest and the Klan is that it demonstrated that ruled whites were shaking off their former rulers. The insubordination of rank-and-file Klansmen and the threats of Gordon and Forrest against them indicated that a civil war had broken out afresh within the ranks of the Klan, just as civil strife had occasionally broken out between ruled and ruling whites in times past. This time, and unlike antebellum times, the “best men” of the South who sought to preserve the old order could not easily regain control of the rank-and-file whites. The aim of these defenders of the old order did not seem to have been to murder and terrorize the emancipated, but to control and rule them along with everyone else, and restore the oligarchy. Antebellum history substantiates the sincerity of the disgust of the “best men” for wanton assaults on and murder of blacks. Although the prewar Southern oligarchy was built on the principle of inequality, they nevertheless criminalized the abuse and murder of slaves. In the decades before the war, the conviction rate for murders of slaves even in South Carolina did not lag far behind the overall murder conviction rate, 32 to 46.7 percent. Appellate courts in the antebellum South more often than not upheld convictions for slave murders.70 This practice of the old regime contrasted with the conduct of rank-and-file whites during Reconstruction.71 These whites created the terror and disregarded the command to cease even by the feared General Nathan Bedford Forrest.
But why did they turn against the emancipated? In light of the noisy, vituperative, and pathetic demands for republican liberty in antebellum times by ruled Southern whites and their representatives, it is surprising, almost incomprehensible, that they refrained from unifying with the freedmen, at the price of risking the loss of their own liberty for which they had so long clamored. By forgoing a durable political coalition with blacks, the ruled whites ensured political division, and division between ruled whites and blacks gave the surviving ruling class an opportunity to reclaim as much of their prior superiority over all of them as they could. Eventually, the ruling class saw and seized this opportunity. Prior to the rise of the Republican Party, the ruling Southern minority had skillfully divided the North and used this division in order to rule the nation. Now they were using this wedge strategy again, but this time in their own section to preserve their local political mastery. Southern rulers learned to foment and exploit the division between poor whites and blacks. The poor whites played right into the oligarchy’s hands. Their hostility and violence drove blacks back into an uneasy coalition with the oligarchic class. Upper-class whites afforded protection for blacks in exchange for black votes, which were used to overcome the Southern white majority.72 This exchange between the white oligarchs and the blacks was the same as in antebellum times, protection in exchange for submission, but with a difference. Black Americans were no longer slaves, and at least they could choose, but their alternatives were between great and greater evils. The animus of the poor whites against blacks guaranteed these gloomy alternatives. When put to the test, the poor whites seemed to hate black liberty more than they loved their own liberty. In order to drown black hopes, they drowned their own hopes. They ensured the incompleteness of regime change.
In his reflections on the division between poor whites and blacks, William Julius Wilson argues that competition between poor white labor and black labor caused racial hostility. Because the ruling class owned scarce capital assets, the Southern laboring classes depended on the rulers for employment and were more easily divided against each other.73 This explanation seems plausible, but it does not go far enough into root causes. Does postwar economic scarcity and competition necessarily divide laborers and drive some to murder others? Surely, other postwar reconstructions did not produce violence among laborers, and many cases come to mind in which laborers unified and quickly rebuilt their nations.
Somehow, great political meanings fused to nominal biological differences. Black skin became hateful, so much so that the value of a black life shrank to insignificance and his murder became desirable. The prior oligarchy is the factor that explains why the white majority in the South violently turned against the freedmen, rather than unite with them and quickly establish republicanism during Reconstruction. Each master-slave dyad on a private estate had been a seminal building block of an oligarchic political regime, and this incipient germ of public despotism adversely affected everyone who was neither a slave nor a master in its vicinity. From the perspective of poor Southern whites during Reconstruction, slavery had been the foundation of the political regime that robbed them of their liberty. The origin of the persistent disdain and hatred of poor whites for blacks, the origin of the construction of profound categorical difference from nominal biological differences, began with oligarchic rule in the South, which arose from entrenched domestic slavery. Oligarchy magnified the perception of black inferiority that infected the nation through interregime penetration, which probably led to theories of racial classification generally. By injuring poor whites, oligarchy produced the hatred of poor whites for blacks in the South, where violence and discrimination against nonwhites were worst.
The Perception of Black Inferiority
Since Ronald Takaki’s influential Iron Cages (1979), scholars who study race have reached a general conclusion that race is a human-made concept. This view does not deny nominal biological difference among racial categories, but does advance the view that the major differences ascribed to race are determined by society and politics. Several thoughtful Americans during the early Republic presented accounts of the formation of racial categories that are in harmony with these contemporary scholars. These early Americans observed how the perception of black inferiority developed within the structure of oligarchy. By tracing the logic of this development, it is easier to understand why the perception of black inferiority and its logical adjunct, contempt, were stronger among poor whites of the antebellum South than in any other part of America.
When St. George Tucker pressed for Virginia to abolish slavery in 1796, he demonstrated a keen understanding of its antirepublican effects. On the title page of the first edition of A Dissertation on Slavery (1796), he quoted Montesquieu: “Slavery not only violates the Laws of Nature, and of civil Society, it also wounds the best Forms of Government: in a Democracy, where all Men are equal, Slavery is contrary to the Spirit of the Constitution.” In his initial note to his reader past the title page, he writes that “the Abolition of Slavery” is “an object of the first importance, not only to our moral character and domestic peace, but even to our political salvation.” The reason the perpetuation of slavery might doom their republican political aspirations was that with respect to slaves and masters, bondage “unfit the former for freedom, and the latter for equality.”74
The premise of his analysis was that all human beings are created with a capacity for equal liberty to which they are entitled by natural right, the basis of American republicanism, but the agency of slavery ruined their character. Slavery conditioned some for subservience and others for dominance. Habitual domination at home shaped slaveholders’ expectation to rule in all things. Leaving the plantation and entering political society, they could not adjust well to republican equality. Subservience at home halted the slaves’ development of their faculties for personal self-government. Leaving the plantation and entering political society, they could not adjust well to republican liberty. Neither a man with the character of a master nor one with that of a slave was fit for republican citizenship, upon which the growth, strength, and preservation of the young Republic depended. Tucker opposed immediate abolition on the grounds of prudence. Both masters and slaves needed a reeducation to prepare them for republican citizenship, because “the mind of man must in some measure be formed for his future condition.”
The idea that the inferior condition of slaves was due to slavery and not biological difference was strong in the founding era.75 In 1789 Benjamin Franklin wrote that “the unhappy man” “who has long been treated as a brute animal, too frequently sinks beneath the common standard of the human species. The galling chains, that bind his body, do also fetter his intellectual faculties. . . . Accustomed to move like a mere machine, by the will of a master, reflection is suspended; he has not the power of choice; and reason and conscience have but little influence over his conduct.” That is, nature and nature’s God created all members of the human family equal, but the experience of slavery took “half the man away.”76
The degrading effect on the enslaved was compounded by another problem, the specific type of slavery that the founders inherited from the British monarchy. Tucker contrasted American slavery to other types of slavery that had existed in the Roman Empire and to villeinage in feudal England. The key difference was that in the other systems, slaves were not marked by heritable, physical traits.77 In Rome and in England, a freed slave shared the same physical traits as the rest of the population. Other subjects or citizens would not be able to identify former slaves or the descendants of slaves, except by their conduct. If a former slave could acquire the habits and bearing of a freeman, he could expect social acceptance, because his former enslavement could remain unknown to strangers. It made no difference that a stranger might be inclined to unfairly discriminate against a former slave if the freedman’s former enslavement were not known. Because the stranger could not distinguish a freedman with good character from someone born free, discrimination against former slaves was nearly impossible. Former slaves and the descendants of slaves could more easily assimilate into the main body of subjects or citizens.
In America the memory of enslavement followed all former slaves and even their children and their children’s children, who were never slaves, in perpetuity. The only sure preventative of unfair discrimination was that successive generations might blend through immigration or intermarriage. In America former slaves and their descendants had to overcome not only the debilitating effects of slavery itself, but also political society’s easy association of them with slavery. Even a slave society that used the ugliest imaginable mark for slaves, a brand scarring the face, was in a better position to be free of discrimination than slave society in America. A brand might expose the former slave to discrimination after emancipation, but a brand dies with its owner. The children who had never been slaves would not suffer from the same discrimination.
James Madison also recognized that the association of color with slavery made life far more difficult for the emancipated. He noticed that some states were erecting a color line among free persons, and he pinpointed the cause: “All these perplexities develope [sic] more & more the dreadful fruitfulness of the original sin of the African trade.”78 His specific mention of “the African trade” is important. Had the slave trade originally been European and not African, the result of emancipation in America would have been similar to emancipations in Rome or England. When the slaves were freed, they would have had the same appearance as free persons, and nobody would have known who had and had not been enslaved.
This salutary ignorance could also have been achieved if whites and blacks had both been slaves and had both been free citizens in relatively equal proportions. Such was probably the actual case in the early colonial period in Virginia. At that time and place, slaves were indentured servants and were both white and black. Only later did indentured servitude transform into Africanized chattel slavery.79 Evidence drawn from those earlier times showed that “Virginians during these years were ready to think of Negroes as members or potential members of the community on the same terms as other men and to demand of them the same standards of behavior. Black men and white serving the same master worked, ate, and slept together, and together shared in escapades, escapes, and punishments.”80 Had slavery and freedom remained biracial institutions, the goal of the republicans in the founding and Reconstruction eras would have been easier to attain.
Tucker recognized that a republican people needed and prized virtue to perpetuate the republican political institutions. They rightly rejected both slavish and domineering character in principle. Examples of this moral concern are found in the early national period when Tucker was thinking about the problem of American slavery. In the debates from December 1794 to January 1795 in the U.S. House of Representatives, leading to the Naturalization Act of 1795, nobody assigned higher or lower capacities for citizenship to race. Nobody expressed a need to preserve “whiteness” as some sort of national goal. The entire debate turned on how to test for character compatible with republicanism and what culturally defined classes of people exhibited that character and what cultural classes did not.
One member proposed that immigrants swear attachment “to a Republican form of Government.” Others worried that immigrants would assume a European meaning and not the improved American meaning of “republican.” Many agreed that immigrants should renounce hereditary titles if they held them in their native countries. One representative argued that on the same reasoning, the laws should prohibit Catholics from entering because they had been habituated to obey an aristocracy of priests. Another proposed to add these words: “And also, in case any such alien shall hold any person in slavery, he shall renounce it, and declare that he holds all men free and equal.” Notably, Representative James Madison from Virginia announced that he was inclined to vote for the proposal to exclude immigrants bringing slaves. In the course of the lengthy debate, only one representative suggested limiting immigration on the basis of origin. The place of origin he proscribed was Europe—the likely origin of all the members of the House. The people, from that “quarter of the world so full of disorder and corruption, . . . might contaminate the purity and simplicity of the American character.” He preferred admitting none to admitting that corruption into America.81
A letter from John W. Gurley, the attorney general of the Orleans Territory in 1804, offers further proof of the strength of their generation’s determination to protect the nation’s republican character and that racial characteristics did not determine fitness for republican citizenship. Congress had recently organized the Orleans Territory from lands gained by the Louisiana Purchase. Like most American citizens in the existing states, the French inhabitants of the Orleans Territory were European in origin. This kindred relation did not stop Gurley from writing a devastating assessment of their unreadiness for republican self-government, for which reason he urged against admitting them as citizens. “A large majority of ye population” were “ignorant of ye first principles of republicanism and very generally attached from habit and prejudice to ye forms of their antient government.” They were accustomed not to self-government but rather “to rule as well as to obey.” They were “at ye same time servile & proud.”82 The monarchy (“their antient government”) had created ranks, and within those ranks, subordinates were “servile” and superiors were “proud,” or, to borrow Tucker’s language, monarchy had “unfit the former for freedom, and the latter for equality” in the Orleans Territory.
But in America, an incidental physical appearance was widely associated with slavish character and collided with this moral aim to protect the character of republicanism. Contact with former slaves and their descendants tempted the prejudice of American citizens in a way that the prejudice of other societies could not be tempted. Those societies had to judge former slaves by the content of their character, because there was no easy way they could identify them as former slaves. In America, prejudice heightened discrimination against freed slaves and their descendants, and Tucker recounts the many “civil incapacities” that followed the freed slave “and his posterity, of the same complexion with himself.”83 The stigma of slavish character that had been attached to the changeable condition of bondage transferred to unchangeable biology. Republican political society especially aggravated prejudice and discrimination because in that society all were cosovereign and the survival, strength, and prudent governance of the free whole depended on the republican character of each. Every citizen depended on the republican character of every other citizen to maintain the integrity of the whole, their common possession. They rightly deplored bad character, but they unjustly ascribed bad character to color.
In the debates over the Missouri Constitution presented to Congress for acceptance in 1820, Representative John Sergeant of Pennsylvania recognized the unique problem for the emancipated that American slavery created when he objected to a clause discriminatory to free persons of color. Black Americans were naturally equal and not inferior to whites, he argued, but because slavery was associated with skin color, the stigma of slavery survived their emancipation. Addressing the slaveholding members of the House, he lamented, “Nature has placed upon them an unalterable physical mark, and you have associated with it an inseparable moral degradation, either of which opposes a barrier not to be passed, to their coalescing with the society that surrounds them. They are, and forever must remain, distinct.”84 Representative Louis McLane of Delaware agreed with Sergeant on the cause of discrimination against blacks, and its injustice, but nevertheless supported the discriminatory clause. He had read “Judge Tucker” and approved of his analysis but argued that there was no other solution to the problem.85
Among the Romans the bondman wore the same color with the free population, and was no otherwise distinguishable from the rest of the community than by his subjection to his master; when his shackles were loosened, he readily mixed with his fellow men like a drop added to the stream, and floated on with the mass of the community to a common destiny. But very different is the unhappy African race within the United States. Their servitude is not their only distinguishable feature; they never can mingle or assimilate with the white population, more than oil with water.86
Because slaveholders had drawn a color line separating slavery from freedom, white Americans saw unrepublican slavishness when they saw black Americans, whether they were actually enslaved or free. McLane understood that this was a great misfortune, and to him it apparently seemed that the association of color with slavishness was unjust. Nevertheless, the white populations’ perceptions were a fact, and a fact that would persist, until all citizens “shall be compelled to yield to the law of force.”87 Until force compelled men to adjust to a biracial republican society, McLane said, he could not consent to equalizing citizenship between whites and blacks but had to yield to facts.
Even though McLane showed that he perfectly understood the problem for the emancipated created by racialized slavery, he believed that “civil incapacities” were a necessary measure, which further compounded the problem. Social and political discrimination invited by skin color doubtlessly impeded former slaves from acquiring the expected republican character and further hindered their adjustment from slavery to freedom. Franklin and Tucker understood that any human being leaving slavery needed assistance to become fit for citizenship. But because former slaves could not shed the badge of their former enslavement, they encountered discrimination from other citizens rather than assistance.
From the perspective of free whites, the perceived inability of the emancipated to develop republican character justified more “civil incapacities,” which further harmed the development of the republican character of this portion of the citizenry. White discrimination became self-justifying. The outcome of this vicious cycle supported the growth of the opinion that blacks were naturally inferior, which collided with the fundamental principles of the republican regime.
Reinforcing the vicious cycle, the revolutionary oligarchy in the antebellum South rejected those fundamental principles altogether and was the primary agent in the spread and growth of racialized slavery, which deepened the problem. They unapologetically expanded slavery while touting the principle of inequality. The degradation of their slaves and the difficulty of the emancipated to acquire republican character, which was made more difficult by their prejudice, could be used to support their self-serving argument about natural incapacity of black Americans based on a nominal biological difference.
Surprisingly, it was the author of the Declaration of Independence who became the first prominent American statesman after 1776 to question natural equality between blacks and whites. After advancing many startling speculations about their biological differences in the Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson concludes, “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks . . . are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”88 Nevertheless, his speculations were fodder for more speculations. From the weed of his suspicion grew a great tree of conviction in America that blacks were inferior.
In the antebellum South, the conditions in which these perceptions of black inferiority developed were far more pronounced than in the North, because racialized slavery was concentrated there. Everywhere poor whites could see that their rulers had chosen blacks for their slaves, and their rulers’ choice implied a rationale: those who expected to master others chose others best suited to be mastered. In 1894 Theodore Roosevelt explained this logic that was bound up with the oligarchic regime. He wrote, “The presence of the negro in our Southern States is a legacy from the time when we were ruled by a trans-oceanic aristocracy.”89
Stolen from their homes, transported across a vast sea, and settled in bondage in a strange land, Africans had nowhere to go and few ways to conceal themselves within the white population, even if they escaped. Circumstances in America favored slavery marked by color. Their marked difference in color more easily facilitated the permanency of their enslaved condition, which degraded their human character, and as a result, their degradation was attributed to color and not to condition. From the point of view of poor whites, their rulers’ choice reinforced the perception that blacks were biologically inferior and incapable of republican citizenship.
Poor Whites’ Hatred toward Blacks
Due to their remoteness from slavery, Northerners did not experience its bitter fruit, the development of oligarchy in their midst. Northerners could develop the perception of black inferiority, but their republicanism was untouched. The political effects of slavery did inflict a grievous injury on poor whites in the South, who lost their liberty. Poor white hatred and violence against blacks were the result and are, therefore, political in origin.
John Adams provided an early clue to the origin and development of non-slaveholders’ hatred for slaves. Reflecting on his life in republican Massachusetts, in 1795 Adams wrote, “I never knew a jury, by a verdict, to determine a negro to be a slave.” As disinterested members of a jury, the people judged slavery to be unjust to the slave. Yet had Massachusetts gentlemen “been permitted by law to hold slaves, the common white people would have put the negroes to death, and their masters too, perhaps.” As interested members of political society, the people would defend themselves, Adams supposed, with savagery. He explained that the real cause of slavery’s demise in Massachusetts was “the multiplication of labouring white people, who would no longer suffer the rich to employ these sable rivals so much to their injury.”90
Adams strongly hints that the common people knew that slavery destroyed republicanism and raised up untitled lords over them. Stripped of their republican liberty, the common people of the South viewed slaves and their ruling masters as coordinate parts of the machinery that humiliatingly crushed them. From their point of view, the perceived natural inferiority of blacks was the cause of black slavery, and black slavery was the cause of the oligarchy that ruined them. Their hatred for black Americans was not a hatred borne in spite of blacks’ cruel enslavement; they hated blacks because of it. Their rage focused on both the ruling class and anyone who bore the mark of the slave. Their resentment of the injury done to them, and their anger toward slaves, who had displaced them from their rightful social and political position, was apparent before the war.
When Representative Francis Blair of Missouri undertook to defend poor whites on the House floor in 1858, he repeatedly emphasized that the ruling oligarchy loved their slaves more than citizens of the Republic. Blair’s speech shows that he knew that poor whites despised the allegedly affectionate, symbiotic relations between master and slave that the ruling oligarchy celebrated. In a report published that same year, the South Carolina Legislature exulted, “One of the charms of plantation life consists in the pleasant intercourse between master and slave; characterized, as it generally is, by kindness of feeling on both sides.”91 Those same sentiments had just been elaborated in the Senate by James Hammond of South Carolina, before Blair answered him in the House. While praising the affectionate relations between master and slave, Hammond had heaped contempt on poor, laboring citizens, demeaning both the poor whites of the South and Northern “mudsills.”
Blair claimed to speak on behalf of all crushed poor whites in the South who lacked a political voice and targeted “the oligarchy which rests upon this servile institution.” Then he dramatically read Hammond’s galling remarks into the record, railing:
It is very clear that the Senator from South Carolina does not prefer the citizens of the Republic to his slaves. He has, in his recent speech, shown that he was the mouthpiece of the privileged classes—the Cicero of this new oligarchy, and not a tribune of the people. . . .
Sir, he prefers his slaves to the citizens of the Republic, and would have the latter deprived of the right of elective franchise, as his negro slaves are. He denounces the man who lives by daily labor, and the whole class of manual laborers and operatives, as slaves. He characterizes our foreign population as a horde of semi-barbarous emigrants, and he would deny them a share of the public lands upon which to build their homes, and educate their children. . . .
Here is a colossal aggregation of wealth invested in negroes, which undertakes to seize this Government to pervert it to its own purpose, and to prevent the freemen of the country from entering the Territories except in competition with slave labor; and the Democratic party, instead of standing where it used to stand, in opposition to these anti-Democratic measures, is as servile a tool of the oligarchy as are the negro slaves themselves. . . .
If there is one class of people on this continent more interested than another in putting a stop to this extension of slavery into the Territories, it is the free white laborers of the South. They have infinitely more interest in the matter than any other class of the people, because they have felt the pressure of the institution. They have been shut out from all ownership in the soil, and driven out of all employment in the States where slavery now exists.92
Straining at the restraints of parliamentary decorum, Blair’s seething rage at the effrontery, insolence, and injustice of the oligarchy spilled over the floor of the House. He would sweep America clean of both slaves and masters.
In “Why Free Workingmen Hate the Slaves,” Charles Nordhoff explained to a Northern audience the same rationale that Blair did: “They hate the slaves because slavery oppresses them. Turn where he will, the southern free mechanic and laborer finds the negro slave preferred before him.” Nordhoff recounted example after example of slave owners’ preferment of their slaves and the abject, wageless, and unemployed condition of Southern freemen. In one case quoted by Nordhoff, a boat’s mate on a ship transport was asked why the Irish and not the slaves were assigned the more dangerous job of loading cotton bales. He replied, “The niggers are worth too much to be risked here; if the Paddies are knocked overboard or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything.”93 The violence of the poor whites during Reconstruction showed that they felt this contempt, and they vented their rage on the ones whom the poor whites perceived to be their coddled antagonists.
Like Blair, Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee also came from a border-slave state and also presumed to speak for the crushed poor whites in the South. He, too, railed against the “pampered, bloated, corrupted aristocracy.” He had once argued that prohibiting slavery in the territories permitted the poor white to leave his dependent condition in the slaveholding states and finally build a free middle-class existence.94 However, Johnson later vetoed the Reconstruction enactments that confirmed the equality of freedmen, showing that he was not particularly interested in helping the freedman leave his dependent condition and finally build a free middle-class existence. When Frederick Douglass visited the White House, President Johnson explained his positions against slavery and against equal citizenship for black Americans. He said that he opposed slavery on principle and also because it enabled “those who controlled it and owned it to constitute an aristocracy, enabling the few to derive great profits and rule the many with an iron rod.” The example of his home state of Tennessee showed that there were “twenty-seven non-slaveholders to one slaveholder, and yet the slave power controlled the State.” Smarting under this oppression, “the poor white man” in the South opposed both “the slave and his master” because they, “combined, kept him in slavery.” The oligarchy, supported by the slaves, had cheated the non-slaveholder of his rights. But “government was derived from him,” the white non-slaveholder. Repeatedly, Johnson expressed the feelings of poor whites from their perspective. The slaves had been obsequious and respectful toward their oligarchic masters and had looked down on the poor whites; hence the “enmity” and “hate” by the poor whites towards the emancipated slave. From the point of view of poor whites, the class of slaves was an element foreign to American republicanism that had participated in the destruction of poor whites’ liberty. Professing to be “a friend of the colored man,” he warned that the investiture of the emancipated slave with equal citizenship meant bloodshed, and he suggested emigration to another land where the former slaves could better secure their liberty. To Johnson, the best outcome of the Civil War was to destroy slavery and the oligarchy and to restore white popular sovereignty.95
In The Impending Crisis in the South, Hinton Helper railed against the “villainous oligarchy,” the “treacherous, slave-driving legislators,” on behalf of the oppressed multitudes of the South. Slavery was the means of establishing an oligarchy of slaveholders that controlled the slave-state governments and kept down the poor whites. He urged slavery’s complete abolition on that account. He contended that “the free States are the only members of this confederacy that have established republican forms of government based upon the theories of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Henry, and other eminent statesmen of Virginia.” However, he hated blacks as much as he hated slavery.
One scholar labored to make sense of Helper’s antislavery position and his racism, which seemed oddly paired, and claimed that it was not easy to understand “the nature of the intelligence” of the man.96 On the contrary, the logical coherence of Helper’s racism and antislavery positions is easily understood if we see the South and the enslaved from the point of view of ruled whites. Slaves and masters had caused the poor whites’ oppression. His book expressed the furious, wounded pride of a ruled class yearning to be an enfranchised, self-governing republican people. As a self-appointed representative of the entire rank of poor whites, Helper, like Johnson, hated both slavishness and domination, but misattributed slavishness to biology, not condition; hence, his mind was closed to the alternative path leading to an alliance and a common citizenship with former slaves.
The animosity of the white majority in the South toward slavery and blacks went hand in hand with their hatred of the ruling minority. When poor Southern whites fled the South and settled in the old Northwest, their influence ensured that the laws were simultaneously antislavery and antiblack.97 Many of these settlers understandably decamped and escaped the domain of slavery and oligarchy to secure liberty, self-government, and prosperity, concomitants of the republican way of life.98 Unless the Southern emigrant believed that he might acquire the means to develop slave and landownership himself, he was only serving his interest in opposing slavery in his new home. To be slaveless and landless in close proximity with slaveholders meant he would be poor and ruled. Southern emigrants, therefore, prevented the potent elements of oligarchic society from following them into their new life, promised to them by the American founding but denied to them by the oligarchy. Perceiving blacks as natural inferiors due to seeing them as social and political inferiors in the oligarchic system, emigrant Southern whites left their antiblack stamp on the laws of these territories and states to keep blacks out or to restrict them from becoming full members of political society.
These causes propelled poor Southern whites to join in the spontaneous grassroots explosions of violence all over the South against blacks as soon as the Reconstruction enactments required that the insurrectionary states respect black equality. The perceived inferiority of blacks meant that their lives were cheap.
The old oligarchy had primed Southern society for the postbellum violence. Although the white majority was excluded from the ruling class, they were still all oligarchic men, imbued with the first principle of that political society. Personal liberty was an uncertain and alienable possession and was won and lost through individual struggle, sometimes violent struggle. Their regime taught loyalty to rank and to distrust outsiders. The white majority deemed slaves marked by color to be outside their rank and made by nature to be unworthy of their rank. These structural conditions explain why individual violence quickly transmuted into group violence perpetrated by the white majority against emancipated and newly enfranchised slaves when the results of the war disrupted the order of oligarchic society.
In any political regime that is not governed by the recognition of natural equality and its first law, the Lex majoris partis, superiority or sovereignty can only be a right justified and sustained by the zealous and successful exercise of might. Instability in those regimes weakens the cords that hold back the bellum omnium contra omnes and tempts extreme violence in anyone who might gain by it. The struggle of the white majority was for the ultimate prize, sovereignty, which had been denied to them but at that moment was up for grabs. Their desperate violence aimed at sustaining their claim to sovereignty and shares the same character as the extraordinary violence seen in many political regimes shaped by inequality, when sovereignty is in question. The vicious punishments reserved for the crime of treason under monarchies were theatrical precisely because they demonstrate might to justify the right to superiority and sovereignty.99 From the point of view of poor whites, the prospect of being forced to share their sovereignty with a mass of people whom they perceived to be born to serve was a new form of an old denial of their American birthright, as seen through their oligarchic lenses. The same causes impelled the white majority to turn against their competitors in the same unnatural and cruel fashion that impelled an aspirant to the Ottoman sultanate to turn against his brothers.
The memory of ruling white domination and poor white vassalage died more easily than the memory of slavery, since ruled and ruling whites could not be physically distinguished. Similar skin color concealed the former ruling class and their hereditary line from easy identification. As a result, the parts of the old oligarchy that were more susceptible to a transformation were the ruled and ruling white ranks.
Blending together, the white majority and the former ruling class turned their attentions to preventing the class of persons perceived to be naturally inferior from realizing political or social equality. Retribution for the crimes of the oligarchy was visited upon these innocents, who were easily identified as once having been part of the old oligarchy’s machinery of oppression. From an antebellum oligarchy of few whites over many whites and blacks, the South first moved toward establishing white equality and black subordination after the war. Despite the effort to change the political regime from oligarchic to republican in the South, oligarchic supremacy survived in a reconstituted form. The supremacy of the slaveholders was gradually transformed into white supremacy, or white democracy, which is not democracy at all, according to the standard of the American founders or the Republicans. Last would come the flattening of all former oligarchic ranks into full political and social equality, incorporating black Americans. The civil rights movement of the twentieth century continued that process of flattening oligarchic ranks, which was subsumed by the great task of Reconstruction as the Republicans conceived it. Racial equality was not the sole aim of that task, but rather was one important aim as well as a means to a broader end, which was to establish the republicanism of the American founding in the South and to remove its moral flaws in the whole.
The Exhumation and Resurrection
The South’s deviation from the path established by the American founders required that task. The Constitution had failed to restrain the South from pursuing its deviant course, despite the precautions of its framers. They created a constitutional structure to preserve republicanism based on human rights, but it was a very novel structure; hence, it was untested, and its theory was not and is not easy to understand. In hindsight, the framers might have prevented the progress of the revolution in the South had they more clearly defined the sovereignty of the states and nation in the Constitution. They might have drawn the line separating the authority of the general and state governments more clearly, leaving its interpretation beyond a doubt. This would have precluded future enemies of republicanism in either the states or the national government from conjuring self-serving misinterpretations of the Constitution, justifying their encroachment of that line from either direction, and enabling the quiet overthrow of republicanism. They might also have defined a republican form of government with greater specificity, as Adams wished they had done, restraining the enemies of republicanism from reinterpreting its meaning and inserting the aberrant political regimes that they might patronize in its new definition. These omissions were exploited by Southern oligarchs as their antebellum revolution spread from one state to the next, unimpeded by, but in violation of, the republican Constitution.
We are justified in insisting that the American founders should have corrected these flaws if we are justified in expecting men to be gods. Flaws in law are inevitable because flawless law depends on the flawless foresight of the lawgiver, and only divinity can foresee every future exigency. Madison himself lamented this human disability. When combating Calhoun’s new constitutional doctrines, he wished he had left behind “a few words with a prophetic gift” that “might have prevented much error in the glosses.” For this reason, Aristotle explained that the rule of law, which is essential to republicanism and requires both foresight and virtue, is sometimes inferior to the rule of good men, which requires only virtue.100 But good men die and good laws are immortal.
The strength of the Constitution was and is its model of republican government. The test of time satisfied Madison that the system worked, as long as its provisions were faithfully observed. The weakness of the Constitution that the oligarchic revolution exposed was its inability to require the enemies of republicanism to observe its provisions and submit to its republican system. It failed to stop them from breaking constitutional restraints. Plausible but false readings of the Constitution, backed by political pressure and force, created space within the Union for the oligarchic revolution to consolidate. Nevertheless, the revolution failed because events revealed that the Constitution had created a means to defend itself that the oligarchy did not foresee.
One of the key premises of the Constitution was that might would follow the protection of natural right. After the ratification of the Constitution, James Wilson predicted that the protection of the natural right to liberty in our highest law would generate unparalleled, broadly diffused prosperity and a new, stronger form of patriotism that would bind the citizen to government.101 In the parts of the Union that followed the Constitution and faithfully protected personal liberty, these elements of power quietly grew, but because the slave South flouted the Constitution and the oligarchy was an affront to personal liberty, the growth of Southern power, on balance, could not keep pace with the North. Moreover, new immigrants to the United States mostly avoided the slave South and settled in the parts of the Union where the protection of their liberty was ensured. All of these elements of power—prosperity, patriotism, and population—favored the North because they faithfully observed the Constitution.
The oligarchic revolution succeeded as far as it went but eventually called the friends of republicanism to action, and they answered the call, conscious of the historic importance of their mission. Commemorating the Union dead at Arlington National Cemetery in 1868, James Garfield recalled that before the Civil War, they had been “the most unwarlike nation of the earth.” They enjoyed “peace, liberty and personal security,” and those blessings derived from one source: “the old American principle that all owe due submission and obedience to the lawfully expressed will of the majority.” This principle, he said, was not merely a doctrine to them; “it is the system itself. It is our political firmament, in which all other truths are set, as stars in heaven.” These were the people whom the proud oligarchy underestimated. “Against this principle the whole weight of the rebellion was thrown,” and then “In a moment the fire was lighted in twenty million hearts. In a moment we were the most warlike nation on the earth. In a moment we were not merely a people with an army—we were a people in arms.”102 Garfield’s testimony and the progress and outcome of our war vindicated Wilson’s theory.
The American citizenry is fortunate that their first statesmen left behind laws founded in magnanimity, informed by broad learning and careful study, and animated by intellectual, moral, and physical courage. Thanks to this achievement, the duty of “the philosopher and historian” in our nation and in free nations today is an easier one than in earlier ages but serves a vital need, nonetheless. Their duty need not be to imagine new models of government in light of failed models in the past, but to understand and explain an unusually good model of government already imagined, devised, and framed in our highest laws. A strong and just republicanism or its overthrow in the modern age hinges on the discharge of or dereliction in the performance of this serious and perennially needed duty.
An event during the war illustrated just how important popular knowledge of free government is to the perpetuity of free government. Mere intellectual ignorance of constitutionalism among our friends abroad who professed our principles cost us and perhaps almost doomed American republicanism and the cause of republican liberty in general. Despite the passage of almost one hundred years since the creation of the United States, influential European liberals who were sympathetic to the North and still struggling for stable republican government themselves could not fathom why the survival of American republicanism depended not only upon winning the war, but also upon the survival of the Union. Writing from Spain, Carl Schurz informed Secretary of State Seward that it was “exceedingly difficult to make Europeans understand” why the North needed to wage war to keep the “imperious and troublesome slave states” in the Union and why the South did not have an indefeasible right to establish their own independent nation. The philosophically gifted Schurz admitted that “all my Constitutional arguments failed to convince them.” The enemies of republicanism then could, and now can, advance antirepublican projects disguised as republican ones by exploiting the lack of education in republican constitutionalism. Schurz explained that “agents of the South” were present in Europe and were confounding European liberals “with great adroitness.” The Southerners directly appealed to liberal sentiment in Europe, claiming that the Confederacy stood for “free-trade” and “the right of self-government.” They pointed to the American government’s “suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, arbitrary imprisonment, the confiscation of newspapers [and] the use of armed force” to impute an illiberal character to the republican North. Schurz lamented that “opinions like these could gain ground among our natural friends,” whose assistance the American government badly needed to prevent European aid from flowing to the Confederacy. Taking things as they were, Schurz recommended tailoring the Union’s argument to accommodate simpler minds in order to win over European liberals. He urged that American statesmen submerge the Union’s constitutional case to which their case against oligarchy and slavery was connected and that they present the war simply as an antislavery war.103 However true, however correct in moral intention, and however necessary to win the war, this justification of the Union cause should not have been forced from us by the ignorance of the friends of free government. The whole of the Union cause always included the antislavery element but much more.
Every generation in the free world needs an education in the history and principles of free government. A better-educated public then and now would appreciate and defend republican institutions, union, and federalism, properly understood, and would easily repel the kinds of sophistries that Southern agents were propounding in Europe in 1861. They would be inoculated from error and deception. The stability of our institutions and the transformation of the merely legal union of citizens into an affectionate union are the natural fruits of instruction in the first principles of our government. Those principles teach us that none may be exalted above another or debased beneath another with justice, and they prepare us to fly to the defense of each other’s rights when any of us are threatened. They teach us also that mankind ought to enjoy the rights that we enjoy and that we ought to do what we can, when we can, to help them secure their rights.
The American people deserve to know that their government was handed down to them by predecessors who were true to those principles when only courage could save them. When our forebears passed that government to us, still resting upon the claim of natural equality, they annihilated descent by blood and bone as a condition for membership in our common family of citizens, and they annihilated descent by blood and bone as a condition for claiming them as our common fathers. The American people deserve to know these facts in their history, which tell them who they really are. With this knowledge they will be able to see each other in a more proper light and tigten their bonds of affection with each other, and thus united, reinstate their government’s obedience to their republican Declaration and Constitution, regain their moral confidence in themselves and in their nation, and reclaim their rightful mission in the world. Real national power, as Wilson explained, is derived from moral causes. Recovery of our history and republican mission will annex a new and greater power to our existing stores of power, which can serve the good of humanity, reaping new garlands for our people.
To achieve these ends, we must know our history and the principles of our government better. The duty of “the philosopher and historian” is to rise to this challenge and meet this need. They can and should complete the great task begun by the fathers of the Republic and continued by the Republicans of Reconstruction by teaching our people their good works, which aimed, above all, to dedicate and rededicate the American nation to the cause of liberty.