The first May 4 Symposium on Democracy was held at Kent State University in April 2000. Carol A. Cartwright, then president of the university, established the symposium as a forum for scholarly discussion on the meaning of democracy in a pluralistic society. Through the symposium, the university emphasizes the promotion of civil discourse and the prevention of violent confrontations. Among the cornerstones of a democratic society are freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. If these are in any way circumscribed, America is diminished as a nation. By embracing the horrific events of May 4, 1970, Kent State University acknowledges in a very public way the unforgettable tragedy that occurred on its campus decades ago. The symposium also honors the memory of the four students who lost their lives on that day—Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder—and of the nine others who were wounded when Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on students protesting the war in Vietnam.
In 2011, against the backdrop of the nation’s commemoration of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, historians Leonne M. Hudson and Kevin Adams, along with Will Underwood, the director of the Kent State University Press, made a formal request to the university’s administration to plan the Thirteenth Annual Symposium on Democracy. President Lester A. Lefton gave the green light to move forward, allowing the formation of the symposium planning committee of three. Its first order of business was to select a theme for the symposium. The committee decided on “Democracy and the American Civil War” in recognition of the 150th anniversary of the most devastating war in the history of the nation. We organized three panels and invited six leading scholars of the Civil War era to present their research. The distinguished historians who appeared on the symposium program were: Mitchell Snay of Denison University; John David Smith of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte; J. Matthew Gallman of the University of Florida; Mark Grimsley of Ohio State University; Stanley Harrold of South Carolina State University; and Fay A. Yarbrough of Oklahoma University (now at Rice University). Professors Adams and Hudson of Kent State University, along with Professor Lesley J. Gordon of the University of Akron, moderated the three sessions. The three-day symposium began on April 23, 2012, with a keynote address delivered by Pulitzer Prize–winning historical novelist Jeff Shaara. His address explored the reasons the Civil War continues to fascinate Americans and what is it about the war that makes it such an enduring phenomenon. Shaara’s oration received an enthusiastic reception from the audience.
Although the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville declared, after touring the United States in the 1830s, that “America is the most democratic country in the world,” groups then living on the margins of U.S. society, such as Native Americans, women, and blacks, would not have agreed with his assessment. Racial slavery, the defining characteristic of the American South, remained firmly entrenched as the nation moved into the latter years of the antebellum period. In 1837, Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina proudly announced that slavery was “a positive good.” Another famous American had a completely different view of the peculiar institution, however: Frederick Douglass no doubt understood the contradiction between democracy and slavery as well as any of his contemporaries. Douglass, the preeminent leader of his race, reminded the nation in 1852 that the slave was “the constant victim” of American injustice. Bedeviled by political and insurrectionist attacks against their unique way of life, Southerners redoubled their efforts to preserve their labor system at all costs.
With the benefit of hindsight, it would not be an exaggeration to conclude that Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860 marked the beginning of the end for slavery. His victory triggered the disintegration of the nation, as Southern states responded to it by drafting ordinances of secession. Before the parade of secession ended, eleven states had join forces to create a new Confederate republic. Secession forced the federal government to grapple with the greatest threat to American democracy in the nation’s history; Lincoln’s administration responded by refusing to accept the disintegration of the republic. During the Civil War that resulted, courageous people on both sides waged a colossal struggle, desperately attempting to stamp the pages of history with the seal of victory. For four tumultuous years, the fate of the nation rested on the shoulders of hundreds of thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers. President Lincoln stood at the center of the conflict, and his idealism regarding democracy, combined with his brilliant leadership, helped save the Union for future generations. The essays in this volume focus on the unifying themes of democracy and race during and after the Civil War. The scholars of this collection remind us of the historical importance of democracy and the complexity of issues of race during the nineteenth century and beyond.
The first essay in this book, contributed by Stanley Harrold, places abolitionism at the forefront of the reform crusade during the antebellum years. Social history as a field of study is important for our understanding of both the antislavery impulse and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Asserting that one of the objectives of humanitarian crusades is to “expand democracy,” especially for the less fortunate and the downtrodden, Harrold points out that the reformism of the nineteenth century continued into the twentieth. Of all the social movements to arise in the United States, the drive to end slavery, which one historian called the “ultimate reform,” was the most violent and dangerous. Abolitionists, who were a diverse group, welcomed the Civil War as a necessary conflict to end slavery. Harrold maintains that “it is not difficult to establish that abolitionists (fanatics or not) had an important role in bringing on the Civil War and helped shape Union emancipatory policies during the war.” The anti-slavery crusaders enthusiastically greeted the president’s Emancipation Proclamation and the enlistment of black men into the Union army. With increasing frequency, the abolitionists called on Lincoln to place the government “on the side of freedom.” A glaring failure of the abolitionists was their inability to secure equal rights for African Americans after the war. Harrold concludes that it took a hundred years and another revolution before blacks could enjoy the full benefits of citizenship, although he notes that incidents such as the shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 raise doubts about the extent of racial progress in American society.
The essay by John David Smith follows Abraham Lincoln on his path of “emancipation and black recruitment” during the Civil War. Like many of his contemporaries, Lincoln harbored racist views, and did not favor the immediate abolition of slavery. However, he did believe slavery to be a morally offensive institution that robbed African Americans of their humanity, and had long advocated a gradual program of emancipation of slaves, with compensation for their owners. Once inaugurated as president, Lincoln’s first priority was the preservation of the Union. Although he knew that he could use the power of that office to destroy the pernicious system of slave labor, he feared that immediate and universal abolition would alienate slave owners in the border states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, which were still loyal to the Union, and continued to look into a process of gradual emancipation. By the summer of 1862, however, he had shifted his approach toward more immediate emancipation, believing that such a step would sow discord within the Confederate states and allow former slaves to fight for the North.
Smith claims that Lincoln, the consummate politician, approached military emancipation in a calculating and methodical manner. The liberation of the bondsmen culminated in the Emancipation Proclamation, which, among other things, provided for the enlistment of black men into the United States Army. Not surprising, Lincoln’s decision to allow black enlistment produced consternation and controversy in several quarters. Many Northerners responded to the mustering of blacks into the Union army with a disapproval tinged with racism. Smith reminds us that Lincoln’s decision to free and arm the slaves represented a new political reality: that “the door for future racial equality and citizenship” for African Americans had been opened. The colored troops endured discrimination and poor treatment, which “largely mirrored their status in American society at large.” Once in the war, they “served well—in combat,” confirming that they were worthy of Lincoln’s investment in them as soldiers. Smith concludes that Abraham Lincoln and the United States Colored Troops were inextricably bound together and that both have earned their place in the history of the Civil War and the history of America.
Race, identity, and power all converge in the essay by Fay A. Yarbrough. She discusses the place of men and women of African descent in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma after the Civil War. The Cherokees had a history of slave ownership dating back to the early years of the nineteenth century; by the eve of the Civil War, as Yarbrough notes, black slaves constituted nearly twenty percent of the population of the Cherokee Nation. After the war, these freed people faced a daunting challenge to affirm their rights as full citizens in the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokees believed that there was a connection between their own survival and the adoption of white culture. In the duplication of Southern white culture, therefore, they codified the social and political inferiority of blacks into Cherokee law, relegating them to second-class status. Yarbrough states that the Cherokees “identified more closely with whites, not just because of physical appearance but also in their perception of the linkage between race and power and success.” While intermarriage between whites and Cherokees was an accepted practice in the Cherokee Nation, intermarriage between blacks and Cherokees was prohibited, and the enforcement of this prohibition in the Cherokee Nation underscores Cherokee attitudes about race. “By freeing their slaves and including them in the nation’s citizenry,” Yarbrough contends, “Cherokees had to rethink definitions of citizenship and Cherokee identity.” She concludes that the relationship between African Americans and Cherokees remains tenuous to this day.
Kevin Adams begins his essay with an explanation of the historical origin of posse comitatus and goes on to explore its use during Reconstruction and after. One of the historic roles of the United States Army has been that of protecting the democratic values of Americans. Most Americans of the nineteenth century were unaware of the army’s service as a posse comitatus, or institution of domestic law enforcement. After the Civil War, the U.S. Army went south as an “army of democracy.” Dormant for many years, posse comitatus became a topic of conversation in 1867, when Congress took control of reconstructing the nation. Adams notes that posse comitatus was much more than an esoteric term during the postwar years, instead becoming a concept “absolutely central to the success of Reconstruction on the ground” in the South. Noting that many scholars, including military historians, have neglected to fully explore the connection between posse comitatus and Reconstruction, he asserts that by placing posse comitatus in its proper “legal and constitutional context,” a better understanding of the intervention of the United States Army in the South during the Reconstruction era will emerge.
The first use of posse comitatus after the Compromise of 1877 was the deployment of troops on behalf of black students in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. Adams maintains that a close examination of Section 15 of the Army Appropriations Act reveals that it allowed for the “use of the army as domestic law enforcement,” most notably in the field of civil rights. He contends that despite congressional limitations on posse comitatus, the president had and has the authority to protect the civil rights of the nation’s citizens through military intervention. By using posse comitatus during the civil rights movement, the federal government sought to fulfill the promise of democracy in places that had a long history of circumventing equality and justice for African Americans.
Mitchell Snay examines race and class in his piece on the White Leagues of Louisiana during the postwar years. The Leagues, which started in 1874, aimed their venom at Republicans and African Americans of the Bayou state. The Civil War and Reconstruction were the catalysts for the expansion of democratic rights for African Americans in Louisiana. In an effort to halt this change and deprive African Americans of their citizenship rights, the White Leaguers carried out a campaign of violence and intimidation against them. This repression of black Louisianans did not subside with the collapse of Reconstruction in 1877. Snay sees the wave of violence perpetrated against African Americans partially as a continuation of the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, but he also points out the tension between rural Leaguers and their brethren in the city of New Orleans. Class differences among white Louisianans manifested themselves in the formation of political and agrarian organizations before the turn of the century. The entrenchment of racism in Louisiana signaled difficult days ahead for African Americans of that state as they continued their push for equal civil and political rights. According to Snay, “the racism so deeply embodied in the White Leagues survived into the agrarian crusades of the late nineteenth century.”
The origin of democracy in the United States can be traced to the revolutionary era of the 1770s. Under the banner of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the young nation struggled to affirm the freedom of its citizens. More than eighty years later, the Civil War severely tested America’s democratic institutions and its constitutional system of government. The triumph of the Union confirmed that the nation was indivisible and that it would remain an organic whole. According to the historian Benjamin Quarles, the Civil War successfully enlarged “the compass of American democracy.” Therefore, our democracy must be defended and protected for the benefit of all Americans and for future generations.