A major reform movement during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, abolitionism sought to end slavery and free millions of black people held as slaves. Also known as the antislavery movement, abolitionism in the United States was part of an international effort against slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic World. Its historical roots lay in black resistance to slavery, changing interpretations of Christian morality, eighteenth-century ideas concerning universal human rights, and economic change. Some of slavery’s opponents advocated gradual abolition and others immediate abolition. By the 1830s the term abolitionism applied only to the latter.
Race-based slavery, whereby people of European descent relied on the forced labor of Africans and their descendants, began on a large scale during the sixteenth century as a result of European colonization in the Americas. By the middle of the seventeenth century, slavery had reached the portion of Great Britain’s North American colonies that later became the United States. In the American form of slavery, the enslaved lost customary rights, served for life, and passed their unfree condition on to their children. From the start, those subjected to slavery sought freedom through self-purchase, court action, escape, or, more rarely, rebellion. There were major slave revolts in New York City in 1712 and Stono, South Carolina, in 1739.
The first white abolitionists in America were members of the Society of Friends (Quakers), who—like their coreligionists in Britain—held slavery to be sinful and physically dangerous to slave and master alike. During the 1740s and 1750s, Quaker abolitionists John Woolman of New Jersey and Anthony Benezet of Pennsylvania urged other American members of the society to end their involvement in the slave trade and gradually free their slaves. With the American Revolution (1775–83), abolitionism spread beyond African Americans and Quakers. Natural rights doctrines rooted in the European Enlightenment and endorsed by the Declaration of Independence, black service in Patriot armies, black petitions for emancipation, evangelical Christianity, and the activities of the earliest white abolition societies encouraged the American North to lead the world in political abolitionism. Starting with Vermont in 1777 and Massachusetts in 1783, all the states north of Delaware had by 1804 either ended slavery within their jurisdiction or provided for its gradual abolition. Meanwhile, Congress in 1787 included a clause in the Northwest Ordinance banning slavery in the Northwest Territory. During the 1780s, states in the Upper South eased restrictions on masters who wished to free individual slaves, and small, Quaker-dominated, gradual abolition societies spread into Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia.
Revolutionary-era abolitionism peaked during the 1780s. Thereafter, several developments stopped and then reversed the southward advance of antislavery sentiment. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 and resulting expansion of cotton cultivation into the Old Southwest reinvigorated slavery. The brutal Haitian slave revolt that began in 1791 and culminated in the creation of an independent black republic in 1804 led white Southerners—who feared they could not control free African Americans—to believe that slavery had to be strengthened rather than abolished. An aborted revolt conspiracy led by the slave Gabriel near Richmond, Virginia, in 1800 bolstered this belief. As a direct result of increased white defensiveness, antislavery societies in the Upper South disbanded or declined. Meanwhile, in the North, a new scientific racism encouraged white residents to interpret social status in racial terms, restrict black access to schools, churches, and jobs, and regard enslavement as suitable for black Southerners.
White gradual abolitionists came to accept a contention that emancipation must be linked with expatriation of former slaves to avoid the formation of a dangerous and uncontrollable free black class. The American Colonization Society (ACS), organized by prominent slaveholders in 1816, claimed its objective was to encourage gradual abolition by sending free African Americans to Africa. It became the leading American antislavery organization of the 1820s and established Liberia as a black colony in West Africa. For a time black leaders, facing increasing oppression in the United States, agreed with this strategy. Best represented by black sea captain Paul Cuffe, they cooperated with the ACS during the 1810s, hoping that a homeland beyond Americas borders would undermine slavery there and throughout the Atlantic World. Yet, by the 1820s, most free African Americans believed the ACS’s real goal was to strengthen slavery by removing its most dedicated opponents—themselves.
Three factors led to the emergence, during the late 1820s and early 1830s, of a more radical form of abolitionism dedicated to immediate emancipation and equal rights for African Americans in the United States. First, black abolitionists convinced a small minority of white Northerners that the ACS was a proslavery fraud. Second, signs of black unrest inspired urgency among white abolitionists who wished to avoid a race war in the South. In 1822 a free black man named Denmark Vesey organized a major slave conspiracy in Charleston, South Carolina. Seven years later in Boston, black abolitionist David Walker published his revolutionary Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. Slave preacher Nat Turner in 1831 led a slave revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, which left nearly 60 white residents dead. Third, the convergence of northern economic modernization with a massive religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening encouraged increasing numbers of white people to regard slavery as a barbaric, outmoded, and sinful practice. They believed it had to be ended if the country were to prosper and avoid God’s wrath.
All these factors influenced the extraordinary career of William Lloyd Garrison, a white New Englander who began publishing his weekly newspaper, The Liberator, in Boston in 1831. Late in 1833 Garrison brought together in Philadelphia a diverse group—including a few black men and a few white women—to form the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). Rejecting all violent means, the AASS pledged to rely on “moral suasion” to achieve immediate, uncompensated emancipation and equal rights for African Americans in the United States. White men dominated the organization’s leadership, but thousands of black men and thousands of women of both races lent active support. A few African Americans, including former slaves Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, and Sojourner Truth, emerged as leaders in this biracial abolitionist movement. As they became antislavery activists, such white women as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stan ton grew conscious of their own inequality and initiated the women’s rights movement.
Although members of the AASS comprised a tiny, despised minority, the organization spread rapidly across the North. In 1835 and 1836 its members sent thousands of antislavery petitions to Congress and stacks of abolitionist propaganda into the South. Their efforts, combined with Turner’s revolt and the 1833 initiation of gradual abolition in the British West Indies, produced another fierce proslavery reaction. Abolitionists could not safely venture into the South. In the North, mobs beat abolitionist speakers and destroyed abolitionist meeting places, schools, and printing presses. They also attacked black communities.
Antiabolitionism and the failure of peaceful agitation to weaken slavery split the immediatist movement in 1840. Garrison and his associates, centered in New England, became social perfectionists, feminists, and anarchists. They denounced violence, unrighteous government, and organized religion. They refused to vote and embraced dissolution of the Union as the only way to save the North from the sin of slavery and force the South to abolish it. Known as Garrisonians, they retained control of the AASS and, until the Civil War, concentrated on agitation in the North.
The great majority of abolitionists (black and white) insisted, however, that church and government action could end slavery. They became more willing to use violent means, rejected radical assertions of women’s rights, and formed aggressive organizations. The American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (1840–55), led by New York City businessman Lewis Tappan, concentrated on converting churches to immediatism and continued to send antislavery propaganda into the South. The Liberty Party (1840—48) employed a variety of political strategies. The more radical Liberty abolitionists, centered in upstate New York and led by Gerrit Smith, maintained that slavery was always illegal, that immediatists had an obligation to go south to help slaves escape, and that Congress could abolish slavery in the southern states. The more conservative—and by far more numerous—Liberty faction depended on two Cincinnati residents, Gamaliel Bailey and Salmon P. Chase, for intellectual and political leadership. It accepted the legality of slavery in the southern states, rejected abolitionist aid to help slaves escape in the South and sought to build a mass political party on a platform calling not for abolition but removing U.S. government support for slavery.
Meanwhile, black abolitionists led in forming local vigilance associations designed to protect fugitive slaves, and most of them supported the AFASS and the Liberty Party. In 1846 they joined church-oriented white abolitionists in the American Missionary Association, an outgrowth of the AFASS that sent antislavery missionaries into the South. Douglass, who in 1847 began publishing the North Star in Rochester, New York, remained loyal to Garrison until 1851, when he joined the radical wing of the Liberty Party.
In 1848 members of the Liberty Party’s conservative wing helped organize the Free Soil Party, dedicated to preventing the spread of slavery into American territories. By then they had essentially ceased to be immediatists. In 1854, when Congress opened Kansas Territory to slavery, they worked with antislavery Whigs and Democrats to form the Republican Party, which nominated its first presidential candidate in 1856. The Republican Party formally aimed only at ending slavery within the national domain. Many of its leaders claimed to represent the interests of white Northerners against the domination of slaveholders. But members of the party’s “Old Liberty Guard” and such former Free Soilers as Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Joshua R. Giddings of Ohio held Republicans to a higher standard. As Radical Republicans, they pressed for abolition and equal rights for African Americans.
After 1848 the more radical members of the Liberty Party—known as radical political abolitionists—maintained their tiny organization. They excelled in Underground Railroad efforts and resistance in the North to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. More than any other abolitionist faction, the radical political abolitionists supported John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry in 1859. Brown and his biracial band had hoped to spark a slave revolt but were easily captured by Virginia militia and U.S. troops. Brown’s actions, nevertheless, angered and frightened white Southerners; after his capture and prior to his execution that December, his elegant appeals for racial justice aroused sympathy among many Northerners.
Brown’s raid and the victory of Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln in the presidential election of 1860 precipitated the secession movement among white Southerners, which led to the Civil War in 1861. As the war began, Lincoln, who advocated the “ultimate extinction” of human bondage, believed former slaves should be colonized outside the United States and promised not to interfere with slavery in the South. He feared that to go further would alienate southern Unionists and weaken northern support for the war. Abolitionists, nevertheless, almost universally supported the war because they believed it would end slavery. Garrison and his associates dropped their opposition to forceful means, and church-oriented and radical political abolitionists rejoined the AASS. As the organization’s influence grew, Garrison’s friend Wendell Phillips emerged as the North’s most popular orator. Phillips, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and other prominent abolitionists joined Radical Republicans in lobbying Lincoln in favor of making emancipation and racial justice Union war aims. Abolitionists—especially black abolitionists—led in urging the president to enlist black troops.
When, in January 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring slaves in areas under Confederate control to be free, abolitionists worried that—by resting emancipation on military necessity rather than racial justice—he had laid an unsound basis for black freedom. But they recognized the proclamation’s significance, particularly its endorsement of enlisting black troops. Young white abolitionist men became officers in the otherwise segregated black regiments. Abolitionists advocated voting rights, education, and landownership for African Americans as compensation for generations of unrequited labor. These, they maintained, were essential to black economic and political advancement. In this regard abolitionists were similar to Radical Republicans, but they were much more insistent on involving African Americans in rebuilding the Union. They reacted negatively to Lincoln’s December 1863 Reconstruction plan that would leave former masters in control of the status of their former slaves. As a result, in 1864 a few abolitionists joined a small group of Radical Republicans in opposing Lincoln’s renomination for the presidency. However, Garrison, Douglass, and most leaders of the AASS believed they could influence Lincoln and continued to support him.
During the summer of 1861, abolitionist organizations had begun sending missionaries and teachers into war zones to minister to the physical, spiritual, and educational needs of the former slaves. Women predominated, in part because younger abolitionist men had enrolled in Union armies. The most ambitious effort occurred in the South Carolina Sea Islands centered on Port Royal, which Union forces captured in 1861. There, and at locations in Virginia, Kentucky, and Louisiana, abolitionists attempted to transform an oppressed people into independent proprietors and wage laborers. Their efforts encouraged the formation of black churches, schools, and other institutions but had serious shortcomings. Northerners did not understand southern black culture, tended toward unworkable bureaucratic policies, and put too much faith in wage labor as a solution to entrenched conditions. When the former slaves did not progress under these conditions, most abolitionists blamed the victims.
Nevertheless, with the end of the Civil War in May 1865 and the ratification that December of the Thirteenth Amendment, making slavery illegal throughout the United States, Garrison declared that abolitionism had succeeded. He ceased publication of the Liberator and urged the AASS to disband. He believed the Republican Party could henceforth protect black rights and interests. A majority of immediatists, including Douglass, Phillips, and Smith, were not so sure and kept the AASS in existence until 1870. Black abolitionists became especially active in lobbying on behalf of the rights of the former slaves and against the regressive policies of Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor as president. In 1866 and 1867 most abolitionists opposed ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, contending that it did not insufficiently protect the right of black men to vote. Thereafter, they supported the stronger guarantees the Fifteenth Amendment provided for adult black male suffrage, although a minority of feminist abolitionists—led by Stanton—objected that enfranchisement of white women should take precedence.
When the Fifteenth Amendment gained ratification in 1870, the AASS declared that abolitionism had achieved its ultimate objective and disbanded. The organization was too optimistic. During the 1870s and 1880s, southern states—having rejoined the Union—curtailed black rights and the white North acquiesced. The abolitionists bear some responsibility for this tragic outcome. Nevertheless, they played a crucial role in ending slavery, in creating black institutions in the postwar South, and in placing protections for minority rights in the Constitution.
See also slavery.
FURTHER READING
Essig, James D. The Bonds of Wickedness: American Evangelicals against Slavery 1770–1808. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982.
Friedman, Lawrence J. Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830–1870. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Harrold, Stanley. American Abolitionists. Harlow, UK: Longman, 2001.
____. The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004.
Horton, James Oliver, and Lois E. Horton. In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among Northern Free Blacks 1700–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Jeffrey, Julie Roy. The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Mason, Matthew. Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
McPherson, James M. The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction. 1964. Reprint Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Sewell, Richard H. Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States 1837–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.
Stewart, James Brewer. Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery. 2nd ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1997.
STANLEY HARROLD
See political advertising.
In its most common sense, African American politics refers to the active participation of African Americans in U.S. electoral and party politics and the nations domestic and foreign policy. But given America’s historical denial of basic human rights and the rights of citizenship to African Americans, any definition must also take into account the responsiveness of American political institutions to African American interests and the group’s quest for universal freedom.
This expanded definition requires one to consider the myriad ways in which African Americans have struggled to realize the nation’s founding ideals of freedom and equality. Their struggle has expanded the constitutional definition of national citizenship and transformed the nation as a whole. Yet the persistence of racial inequity at the start of the twenty-first century highlights the limitations of the formal equality achieved through civil rights legislation. In particular, despite the historic election of Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States, the ascendancy of the conservative movement after 1980 has steadily eroded political support for African American civil rights and universal freedom.
An understanding of the history of African American politics begins with the question of how to define the political behavior of a group that has traditionally been excluded from freedom, citizenship, and personhood—the basic rights that, under normal conditions, would make political participation possible.
Enslavement limited the range of political options available to people of African heritage in British-controlled America. Political action and agitation were their most important tools in pursuit of universal freedom and equality. As crown and colony institutionalized slavery into law during the seventeenth century, the responses of the enslaved ranged from individual acts of resistance and rebellion to full-blown conspiracies and violent insurrections. Colonial legislatures reacted by asserting military control over the enslaved population, particularly in colonies like South Carolina, where there were three times as many blacks as whites in 1724. During the Revolutionary War, the British offered freedom to any slaves who fought alongside them against the colonists. Many enslaved persons seized this opportunity, and joined the ranks of the British. After their emancipation, most settled in Nova Scotia.
Meanwhile, slavery remained essential to the agricultural export economy of the southeastern states. This dependence led the framers of the Constitution to enact several proslavery ordinances, even in the face of northern qualms about the institution: Congress could not ban the slave trade before 1808; slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of taxation and political representation; and the federal government would assume responsibility for the rendition of fugitive slaves and the maintenance of internal security against slave and other insurrections.
Throughout the Revolutionary era, slaves and free blacks decried the moral contradiction of upholding slavery amid Patriots’ cries for universal liberty. During the early years of the republic, free and enslaved blacks petitioned for general emancipation, sued for their own freedom, and demanded equal access to education, an end to the slave trade, and support for those seeking emigration to Africa. In 1783 an aged former slave in Boston named Belinda petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for an annual pension to be paid by her former master, a loyalist. The legislature ruled in Belinda’s favor (the former master’s executor, however, paid the pension only sporadically). Belinda was just one of dozens of ex-slaves in the early republic who sought compensation from former masters, sometimes successfully. Historians have seen these early suits as evidence that the notion of reparations for slavery long predated Reconstruction.
Slavery was largely domestic in the North, as opposed to the plantation system of the South. But like its southern counterpart, it was hereditary and permanent. Post-revolutionary idealism, which inspired a transatlantic evangelical movement for the abolition of the slave trade, contributed to the gradual demise of slavery in the northern states. Connecticut and Rhode Island passed laws in 1784 that freed the children of slaves born after that date. But northern antislavery sentiment—even when it took the form of law—did not temper the racism directed against free blacks. Out of necessity, and as a buffer against this stark prejudice and discrimination, free blacks in the North and many areas of the South developed vibrant communities of their own, replete with churches, schools, and mutual aid institutions. By 1830, America’s free black population had grown to almost a quarter of a million. An outspoken leadership emerged from these communities that condemned slavery and the exclusion of blacks from northern white churches, schools, and civic organizations, laying the foundation for the abolitionist and civil rights movements of later years.
These “black founders” of the early republic aired their demands for equality through petitions, pamphlets, legal challenges, literary societies, and public orations, claiming American citizenship as the birthright of African Americans. The black founders and abolitionists of the antebellum era insisted that America was their homeland, built and enriched by their toil, tears, and blood. They equated literacy with the pursuit of freedom and cultivated a “dreaded eloquence” that enabled them to oppose slavery and contest antiblack stereotypes.
Black religious leaders became forceful exponents of abolition, reform, and racial uplift. These ministers, abolitionists, writers, and orators fused elements of Judeo-Christian liberation theology, drawn from the biblical story of Exodus, with natural rights ideas from the Declaration of Independence. In 1797 the Masonic leader Prince Hall cited the Haitian revolution and the abolition of slavery in the French colonies when he condemned the public harassment of blacks in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He disputed the pessimistic and disparaging views of racial difference and black citizenship offered by such authorities as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Like Hall, the African Methodist minister Richard Allen, the writer Lemuel Haynes, the scientist Benjamin Banneker, and others considered slavery an affront to republican ideals of freedom and liberty and called for the redemption of the American nation. Some, including the shipping magnates Paul Cuffee and James Forten, supported emigration to Africa in protest against slavery and discrimination.
Though largely excluded from electoral politics—free blacks could vote in only five northern states before 1860—African Americans established abolitionist strongholds in several northern cities, including Boston, Newport, Philadelphia, and New York. Their efforts attained national prominence with the founding of Freedom’s Journal, the first African American—owned newspaper, in New York in 1827. Freedom’s Journal established the African American press as the voice of group aspirations—a role that it continued to play through the modern civil rights movement. The paper exposed the abuses of chattel slavery and discrimination against free blacks in the North. Like many antebellum black newspapers, it also exhorted free blacks to redouble their commitment to self-help, education, moral reform, and group advancement.
In 1829, David Walker, a Boston-based clothing merchant, journalist, and abolitionist born free in North Carolina, published his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, an incendiary call for armed resistance by slaves. Walker denounced slavery as a threat to the republic, attacked religious proslavery arguments as avaricious propaganda, and derided the colonization movement, which encouraged emancipated blacks to emigrate to Africa, as a proslavery plot to rid America of abolitionist free blacks. Walker’s seafaring customers covertly distributed his pamphlet up and down the Atlantic seaboard. But southern states put a price on his head and made possession of his book a capital offense. The author died under mysterious circumstances in his shop in 1830.
Walker’s incitement heightened the southern authorities’ fears of slave uprisings and insurrections. They responded to news of the conspiracies led by the slave Gabriel in Virginia in 1800 and the free black Denmark Vesey in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822 by restricting the rights of free blacks to assemble, worship, and own guns. Southern states also outlawed public debate of antislavery ideas and prohibited the circulation of abolitionist literature. After scores of whites were slain in a revolt led by Nat Turner in Southampton, Virginia, in 1831, the white population organized itself into informal patrols, creating a formidable deterrent for large-scale revolts.
With the armed revolt option foreclosed, slave resistance took other forms, including spontaneous flights north into free territory, the more concerted efforts of the Underground Railroad to assist fugitive slaves, and the reinterpretation of Christianity as a liberation theology. While many slaveholders used religious indoctrination to enforce the tenets of slavery, the slaves themselves insisted that all persons were equal in the sight of God. African American Christians identified with the Israelites, to whom God sent Moses to deliver them from bondage. They came to see the God of the Old Testament and a fighting “King Jesus” as sympathetic to their aspirations for freedom. Such beliefs and practices sustained African Americans throughout slavery, the Civil War, and the segregation of the Jim Crow era. Religious leaders continued to provide political, as well as moral, leadership for many African Americans throughout the twentieth century and to this day. Their churches, independent institutions not entirely beholden to white power, became a cradle of political socialization and a source of mass support for the modern civil rights movement.
The era of Jacksonian democracy was, from the standpoint of free blacks, a democracy for whites only. Free blacks were routinely met with intolerance and even violence, as when white mobs attacked them and their abolitionist supporters in Philadelphia in 1838. Such antiabolitionist violence was commonplace in the North.
As the conflict between the North and South over the expansion of slavery intensified, free blacks came under renewed assault. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act empowered federal marshals to summon ordinary citizens, regular troops, and militias to capture escaped slaves, and subjected those who aided fugitives to fines and imprisonment. Slave hunters cited the need to capture alleged fugitives as a pretense to invade abolitionist offices in Massachusetts and New York. The Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandiford (1857) further jeopardized black freedom by affirming the legitimacy of slave property in all territories and declaring that African Americans could not be citizens of the United States. The Court’s decision left many blacks feeling that they had no future in America, and African American leaders such as abolitionist Martin Delany began to argue for emigration to Africa.
Support for emigration among disaffected blacks differed from the colonization movement, which remained one of the most popular solutions for whites who believed racial equality was impossible, including Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe and President Abraham Lincoln. As president, Lincoln supported the removal of emancipated blacks to Haiti and Liberia. Blacks who espoused emigration did so from a pragmatic conception of self-determination, which was quite different from whites’ dismal estimate of the capacity of black people to be free and equal citizens. Emigration’s appeal waned for many blacks, however, once Lincoln responded to the pressures of the Civil War by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and opening Union Army recruitment to African American soldiers. Delany himself soon became a commissioned officer.
The Civil War and Reconstruction revolutionized both the status of African Americans and the nation’s politics. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution outlawed slavery, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments affirmed African Americans as citizens of the United States, ending their exclusion from the body politic. Black men voted and ran for and won office in substantial numbers, serving in Congress as well as state legislatures and municipal governments throughout the South. Because the Democratic Party remained hostile to their interests, African American voters generally heeded the counsel attributed to Frederick Douglass: “The Republican Party is the deck, all else the sea.” African American political representation in this period was indeed almost exclusively the result of pro—civil rights laws and Constitutional amendments passed by “radical” Republicans.
In the face of white attempts to reassert economic and political dominance, former slaves struggled to define freedom on their own terms. Yet, for all their efforts, the period of black office holding and political participation proved brief in most of the South. It ended by the 1890s with the rise of segregationist Jim Crow laws and customs, the amendment of state constitutions to deny the vote to African Americans, and the rampant use of violence to oust blacks from politics.
Still, black Americans maintained their commitment to the electoral system, despite being rejected by one or the other political party throughout most of the nation’s history. Between 1865 and the 1930s, the Republicans were the only party somewhat responsive to black interests and rhetorically committed to equal rights. Choices did open up once other parties started to vie for black support in the 1930s, but the change proved fleeting. Since 1964, when the conservatism associated with Arizona senator and Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater first gained influence, large majorities of African Americans have voted Democratic, at least in national elections.
However fleeting, the Reconstruction period was a time in which African Americans forged an abiding sense of collective interests and linked fate. The aspirations for economic independence and redistributive justice sparked by Reconstruction still loom large in cultural memory a century and a half later. But the readiness of so many whites to engage in lynching and other forms of violence against blacks has also indelibly stamped the political imagination of African Americans. Although post—civil rights class differences may be eroding the idea of a cohesive black identity, many African Americans still view politics through the prism of their history of oppression and the continuing use of antiblack racial imagery in the nation’s electoral politics—and vote accordingly.
Reconstruction also profoundly affected the southern political landscape. As former slaves and others of humble station replaced elite slaveholders in political office, the new leadership class redefined the scope and responsibilities of government for the South and the entire nation. After all, the federal government had intervened against southern claims of states’ rights in order to affirm the national citizenship of African Americans. Federal power had also established the Freedman’s Bureau to provide relief for ex-slaves and destitute whites, and to create schools for freed people. (African Americans also committed their own resources in order to build schools and hire teachers.) Reconstruction state governments supported free universal public education and generally broke with the laissez-faire politics propagated by the masters of the antebellum slave economy.
With the end of Reconstruction, political violence waged by forces sympathetic to the Democratic Party drove the majority of the regions black officials from electoral office. Meanwhile, the national Republican Party retreated from its support for equal rights to become an advocate for business interests. Many of the same U.S. Army troops that had recently defended Reconstruction governments were now redeployed to suppress a nationwide railroad workers’ strike. Well into the twentieth century, historians of Reconstruction echoed the white supremacist portrayal of the immediate postwar period as an era of “Negro domination” and condoned the rampant use of violence by such vigilante groups as the Ku Klux Klan. When the Supreme Court upheld a Louisiana law segregating railroad travel in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), its assertion of the “separate but equal” principle decisively restored the concept of states’ rights federalism to its pre-Reconstruction dominance.
Denied the rights and protections of federal citizenship, African Americans were once again left to their own devices. Besieged by debt peonage, lynching, concubinage, and wholesale violations of human rights hardly distinguishable from slavery, they came to see internal migration as one of the only remaining paths to freedom. The “exodus” of some 5,000 African Americans from Louisiana and Mississippi to Kansas is one such case, and it exemplifies how black political behavior found expression outside of mainstream white channels.
The exodus began with desperate calls among rural black masses for migration to Liberia, a West African nation established by former slaves in 1847 with the aid of the U.S. government and the American Colonization Society. Although mass emigration to Liberia ultimately proved impractical, many African Americans considered it a viable option up through the 1890s as they struggled to cope with impoverishment and the brutality of southern racism. The former Georgia Reconstruction politician Henry McNeal Turner was moved by the pervasive violence against blacks to join those advocating this solution.
The calls for migration also exposed internal group conflicts in the black leadership of the time. On one side were leaders who doubted that the movement would lead to freedom; on the other were those who felt that “voting with one’s feet” was the only way to better African Americans’ situation. Having rejected Liberia as a haven, a number of enterprising grassroots black leaders from the promigration group, including Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, organized transportion to land they had purchased in Kansas. These migrants to Kansas became known as the “Exodusters.”
Journalist Ida B. Wells became another prominent advocate of migration, although with her own characteristic take on the issue. Thrust into leadership by her eloquent account of the lynching of three black businessmen in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1892, Wells advocated the mass migration of African Americans as retaliation against the city’s white elite for their condoning of extralegal violence. Wells also promoted armed self-defense, declaring that a Winchester rifle should have a sacred place in every black home. Reviving an antebellum tradition of transatlantic speaking tours by black abolitionists, Wells brought her antilynching campaign to audiences in England, marshaling international condemnation of mob rule. Like other outspoken southern black leaders, she was eventually forced into exile in the North, where she became a leading agitator for equal rights.
The twentieth annual session of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took place June 6, 1929, in Cleveland, Ohio. (Library of Congress)
Wells eventually joined the National Afro-American Council, which, along with the Niagara Movement, was formed almost exclusively by northern African American male professionals who opposed the relatively conservative leadership of Booker T. Washington. She was also a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an interracial group that lobbied Congress, the president, and persons of influence to support the cause of civil rights and oppose lynching. As a highly visible and effective black woman activist, Wells combated not only the racist practices of whites but also, on occasion, the sexism of male “race” leaders.
Military service has provided African Americans with many of their most important opportunities for material and political gain. The need to respond quickly and decisively to foreign wars has encouraged and sometimes forced the federal government to recognize African American demands for freedom and equal rights, in exchange for their support as citizens and soldiers.
Foreign wars have heightened the stakes for African Americans in their quest for freedom and equal citizenship. Blacks who served in wars of imperial expansion waged against racialized enemies, such as the Spanish-American War and the U.S. war in the Philippines, were reminded of their own inferior status as African American troops bearing arms alongside many white racists on behalf of a nation hostile to their own rights and well-being. The question of black participation in World War I was hotly contested within African American leadership, coming as the war did in the wake of the administration of Woodrow Wilsons segregation of the federal bureaucracy.
In retrospect, the “Great War” also catalyzed African Americans’ admission into the industrial working class. The labor shortage created by the war’s disruption of European immigration led northern defense industries to actively recruit African American workers from the South. The black-owned Chicago Defender, which was covertly distributed below the Mason-Dixon Line by African American Pullman porters, encouraged southern blacks to abandon dehumanizing conditions in the South for opportunity and a better life in the North.
The wartime migration of almost a million African Americans to northern cities transformed black politics. African American migrants entered electoral politics, voting first for Republican and then Democratic urban machines. Oscar De Priest of Chicago was elected to Congress in 1928, the first black representative since 1901. The postwar emergence of vibrant urban black communities fostered a newly militant and ideologically diverse black leadership, as well as a new group assertiveness that was celebrated in the person of the “New Negro.” The New Negro made his (or her) presence felt by organizing self-defense and retaliation efforts in response to the urban race riots of the Red Summer of 1919; by joining the NAACP in record numbers in response to the organization’s antilynching campaign; and by supporting Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican immigrant whose formidable but short-lived Universal Negro Improvement Association inspired West Indian immigrants and native-born southern blacks alike with its message of self-reliance and black pride.
The ideological diversification of black politics continued throughout this period, fueled by interactions with other radical movements, including the Communist and Socialist parties. In 1926 black socialist and labor leader A. Philip Randolph broke the Pullman Company’s alliance with probusiness African American ministers by organizing the Pullman porters (an occupation restricted to black and Filipino men) and winning American Federation of Labor support for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
Until the 1940s, no U.S. president since Ulysses S. Grant had actively supported the cause of civil rights (with the partial exception of Benjamin Harrison, who did support legislation to reverse the Supreme Court’s 1883 ruling outlawing the Civil Rights Act of 1866). This neglect of civil rights was even true of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic president who broke the Republican Party’s traditional monopoly over the African American vote. Despite the entreaties of civil rights advocates—including his wife Eleanor—Roosevelt refused to jeopardize the support of southern Democrats by endorsing efforts to make lynching a federal crime. He was convinced that he needed the support of the white supremacist southern wing of the Democratic Party in order for his New Deal economic reform programs to succeed.
The New Deal did, however, lend indirect support to civil rights efforts. Federal relief programs challenged the states’ rights ideology of the South, energizing civil rights challenges to the disenfranchisement of black voters. Blacks benefited from the New Deal’s public works and relief programs, as well, even though these were administered in a discriminatory manner. Cognizant of his party’s need for black votes, Roosevelt set aside his concerns about white southern voters long enough to appoint African Americans to the federal bureaucracy, and to name William Hastie the first black judge to serve on a federal court.
In 1941, with war looming, the threat of labor unrest eventually forced Roosevelt to make a more significant concession to civil rights demands. As America prepared to enter World War II, A. Philip Randolph threatened to bring 150,000 people to march on Washington against racial discrimination in the defense industries. Hastening to avoid this spectacle, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, banning employment discrimination in defense jobs. Such reforms boosted Roosevelt’s popularity with African American voters and led to increased Democratic support from northern blacks.
Because FDR’s support for civil rights was tempered by his continued reliance on segregationist Democrats, freedom advocates turned to the courts. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund was founded in 1939; under the guidance of Thurgood Marshall, it developed a winning strategy of well-researched challenges against educational discrimination, with the goal of invalidating the Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of “separate but equal.” Marshall’s strategy culminated in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, which found segregation in all forms to be inherently unequal and thus a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause.
Brown was a triumph for Marshall and all those associated with it. Indeed, women’s rights and other interest groups would adopt a similar strategy with great success in subsequent decades. But the Court’s decision in Brown included no provisions for enforcing desegregation, essentially leaving it up to the states to desegregate themselves. It became apparent to blacks that mass activism would be necessary to effect real change.
Civil rights leaders embraced the cold war struggle against communism as an opportunity in this regard, arguing that desegregation was vital for national security. The tactic proved effective in influential circles. After Roosevelt’s death, his successor, Harry S. Truman, supported civil rights out of a concern for national security and America’s continued influence in global affairs. With an eye toward gaining crucial African American support for his 1948 reelection campaign, Truman also became the first president in the twentieth century to publicly endorse civil rights and to submit reform legislation to Congress, although none of his proposed laws passed. That same year, Truman issued Executive Order 9981, banning discrimination in the armed forces.
Truman’s successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had opposed the Brown decision but nonetheless felt bound to respond to international pressures by ordering the National Guard to enforce the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. For presidents Truman, Eisenhower and, later, John F. Kennedy—who, like Roosevelt, was reluctant to antagonize segregationists by supporting civil rights—the imperatives of the cold war were paramount. Indeed, Kennedy had once regarded civil rights demonstrations as injurious to America’s image overseas. But after the brutal repression of nonviolent demonstrators led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, Kennedy proposed a civil rights bill and began describing racial equality as a moral issue. After Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon Johnson fulfilled Kennedy’s vision by securing the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. But as presidents from Roosevelt to Kennedy had foreseen, Johnson’s decision came at a political cost. Upon signing the Civil Rights Act, Johnson is reported to have said, “We [the Democratic Party] have just lost the South for a generation.”
The ideological diversity of African American politics was a significant factor during the turbulent years of the civil rights movement. While Martin Luther King Jr. led nonviolent direct-action campaigns in the South from the mid-1950s until 1965, northern African American spokespersons, including Nation of Islam minister Malcolm X and African American writer James Baldwin, aggressively challenged the nation’s conscience over institutionalized racism. Malcolm X and Baldwin expressed a growing impatience with the Kennedy administration’s cautious approach to civil rights, and gave voice to African Americans’ fury and helplessness as bombings, shootings, and assaults claimed the lives of black activists. For many, the goodwill of the massive August 1963 March on Washington was shattered just a month later, when the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham claimed the lives of four young girls. Meanwhile, seeing that civil rights reforms had failed to address the socioeconomic roots of discontent among urban blacks, Dr. King shifted his movement northward to a campaign for economic and racial justice in 1966; the following year he added his voice to the growing opposition to the Vietnam War. These stands made him a pariah in the eyes of a once admiring U.S. mass media. But for a younger generation of black activists, nonviolence had ceased to be a viable strategy well before King’s murder in April of 1968.
During the late 1960s and 1970s, African Americans celebrated the election of black mayors in major American cities. But the timing of these gains—and indeed, of desegregation overall—coincided with the collapse of the industrial economy that had underwritten much black social mobility. Black urban populations struggled against the loss of capital and jobs, “white flight” to the suburbs, and a shrinking tax base. The declining fortunes of central cities, combined with the enormous cost of the Vietnam War, undermined efforts to expand on the reforms of President Johnsons War on Poverty.
Ironically, given his pursuit of southern white racist voters in the election of 1968, President Richard Nixon’s Republican administration arguably achieved a stronger record on civil rights than the two Democratic administrations that followed his. Nixon presided over the desegregation of southern public schools, the 1970 renewal of the Voting Rights Act, and the implementation of Executive Order 11246, which established affirmative action. Nixon also appointed blacks to a number of high-level government posts. Even more intriguing was his proposal for the Family Assistance Plan, which, if approved, would have guaranteed an income to all families with children and would have substantially raised the income of poor households of all races.
Democratic president Jimmy Carter supported affirmative action but opposed an antipoverty program proposed by his African American housing secretary Patricia Roberts Harris. Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, a complex figure widely perceived to be free of racial prejudice, nevertheless distanced himself from African Americans during his presidential campaign in pursuit of right-leaning Democratic voters. After winning the White House, Clinton defended affirmative action against right-wing opposition but also capitulated to conservatives by withdrawing his nomination of Lani Guinier, a strong advocate of civil rights, as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights.
Clinton also proposed a comprehensive plan that would have guaranteed health care to all Americans—a plan that, if passed by Congress, would have benefited African Americans. But the bill failed. And in July 1996, during his reelection campaign, Clinton signed a welfare bill that included a GOP-authored provision abolishing the New Deal guarantee of welfare as a universal, federally mandated right.
Clinton had appointed more black officials than any previous president, but also left intact executive orders by Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush that undercut federal antidiscrimination provisions. Many of his own regulatory reforms ignored civil rights as well.
The nation’s judiciary described a similar arc of hope and disappointment. From roughly 1940 until the 1970s, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren staunchly defended civil rights reforms and civil liberties. But in its more recent iterations the Court has tended to reject calls to remedy discrimination. Indeed, the Court’s 2007 ruling under Chief Justice John G. Roberts against race-conscious admissions policies in public schools in Seattle, Washington, and Louisville, Kentucky, construed remediation itself as discriminatory. Since the late 1980s, the Court has eroded affirmative action in contracting for minority-owned businesses, school desegregation, voting rights and redistricting, often with the support of conservative black justice Clarence Thomas.
One notable exception to this trend was the Court’s decision in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), which reaffirmed the 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision upholding the use of race-conscious admissions policies in higher education. The hope inspired by the Grutter decision was short-lived, however: opponents of affirmative action, led by African American businessman Ward Connerly, launched a campaign to overturn the policy through a series of state ballot initiatives. To date, such initiatives have succeeded in outlawing affirmative action in public institutions in California, Washington, Florida, and Michigan. This post-civil rights trend, in which African Americans lend legitimacy to an anti—civil rights agenda, recalls Thurgood Marshall’s statement upon his resignation from the Court in 1991 when asked if he believed an African American should be appointed to replace him. No, Marshall replied with his characteristically earthy wit: “There’s no difference between a black snake and a white snake—they’ll both bite.”
Back in 1962, Attorney General Robert Kennedy had speculated that the United States would elect a black president in 40 years, infuriating James Baldwin, who felt that Kennedy was not doing enough to secure equal rights for his own time. The next four decades did see a significant number of successful black candidacies at the state and national levels. Traditionally, black elected officials have been “race men” whose electoral constituencies are predominantly African American and who have an image as staunch, if not defiant, champions of black interests. Representative Adam Clayton Powell, elected to Congress in 1944 from his position as pastor of Harlem’s largest church, was a well-known example, as were black mayors Coleman Young (Detroit, 1974–93) and Harold Washington (Chicago, 1983–87), although both Young and Washington also depended on the votes of white liberals.
In recent years, scholars have debated whether black politicians for statewide and national office can forge winning coalitions by moving beyond their (presumed) African American base to attract white voters. Only a few have done so in significant numbers. On the state level, Douglas Wilder, a grandson of slaves, was elected governor of Virginia in 1990 and served until 1994. In national politics, Edward Brooke, a Republican from Massachusetts, served in the Senate from 1966 to 1979. Brooke, who did not fit the “race man” mold, was the first black elected to that house since Reconstruction—and the last until Carol Moseley Braun, a Democrat from Illinois, followed him in 1992. And the civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, in some respects a “race man” par excellence, attracted enough white support with his message of economic populism to win several primaries and caucuses during his 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns.
Racial antagonisms are still used to attempt to derail black candidates. As recently as 2006, a political advertisement evoking the South’s miscegenation taboo may have helped defeat the Senate run in Tennessee of U.S. representative Harold Ford Jr. At the same time, the Republican Party’s reputation for racial scapegoating has drastically limited the prospects for a dwindling number of black GOP candidates overall. Republican racial policies also helped the Democratic Party gain some 90 percent of the African American vote in national elections during the 1980s and 1990s.
Barack Obama, an Illinois Democrat elected to the Senate in 2004, represented a younger generation of black politicians—including Newark Mayor Cory Booker; Deval Patrick, the first African American governor of Massachusetts; Harold Ford Jr.; and Governor David Paterson of New York—whose perceived cross-racial appeal seemed to offer an alternative to the “race man.” In 2008 Obama became the first person of African heritage to win a major party’s presidential nomination, besting Hillary Clinton in a hard-fought primary campaign. In defeating the Republican Party nominee, Arizona senator John McCain, Obama defied the doubts of many in the United States and abroad, to become the first African American elected to the presidency.
Obama did so by consistently downplaying the issue of race. In their apparent disavowal of the “race man” model, Obama and his peers may be younger and more liberal analogues to Colin Powell, the African American former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state in the administration of George W. Bush. Like Powell, who rose through the military (and who broke from the Republican fold to endorse Obama), Obama and his counterparts (all Democrats) claimed to represent an alternative to black leaders shaped by the civil rights movement, even as they have undoubtedly benefited from that movement and absorbed its influences and legacy (Obama had been a community organizer and his campaign prevailed in large part on the strength of a massive 50-state voter registration effort).
But the real story is more complex. Obama’s 2008 campaign brought attention to the so-called Bradley effect, named for African American Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, who was defeated in the 1982 California gubernatorial election despite a strong lead in preelection polls. In the Bradley effect, significant numbers of whites claim in polls to support a black candidate, only to later cast their votes for the white opponent. While scholars will continue to debate the validity of the Bradley effect, Obama’s campaign highlighted African American candidates’ continuing need to overcome the fears of a substantial segment of the white electorate.
See also abolitionism; civil rights; race and politics; Reconstruction era, 1865–77; segregation and Jim Crow; slavery; voting.
FURTHER READING
Berry, Mary Frances. Black Resistance, White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in America. New York: Penguin, 1994.
Dawson, Michael. Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African American Political Ideologies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Foner, Eric. Freedoms Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996.
Newman, Richard S., and Roy E. Finkenbine. “Black Founders in the New Republic: Introduction.” William and Mary Quarterly 64, no. 1 (January 2007), 83—94.
Painter, Nell. Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction. New York: Knopf, 1977.
Walton, Hanes, Jr., and Robert C. Smith. American Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom. New York: Pearson Longman, 2008.
KEVIN GAINES
Agrarian politics describes the strategies, tactics, and values of the farmer-based political movements that played a prominent reform role in American political history. Its purest manifestation came in the Populist movement of the 1880s and 1890s, but its language, goals, and methods persisted, in a more subdued way, in the New Deal Era and beyond.
Agrarian politics played an important role in the evolution of American democracy and the construction of public institutions to regulate business without diminishing its productive energies. Indeed, the regulatory goal of agrarian politics after the Civil War provided the confidence that consumers, service users, and investors needed to buy, sell, and ship in a market economy. Agrarian politics—egalitarian, rights-based, inclusive, electoral, and targeted at the legislature where the most numerous classes presumably have their best shot—produced important structural reforms of national institutions, at least those not won by war: the Bill of Rights, direct election of senators, antimonopoly laws, an income tax, regulation of big business (starting with railroads), a monetary system controlled by public officials and not based on gold, the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively (and of agricultural cooperatives to similarly operate without being charged as “conspiracies in restraint of trade” under the Sherman Act), and the lowering of tariffs (the most prevalent and burdensome taxes) on goods consumed and used by ordinary people, to name just a few.
The term agrarian is virtually synonymous with republican, denoting a mode of politics and political thought nurtured by British and French Enlightenment philosophy that flowered in eighteenth-century North America. It was no doubt encouraged by the immigration of dissenters and the mode of settlement in what became (in 1789) the United States—a nation of independent landowners who belonged to diverse religious communities, themselves permeated by democratic demand, in contrast to the hierarchical denominations prevalent in the Old World.
Agrarianism’s central tenets were galvanized by the struggle for independence from Great Britain. Its foremost philosopher was Thomas Jefferson, the apostle of sturdy yeoman farmer democracy (or, more accurately, self-government), whose creed came together in the cauldron of revolution and who provided the revolutionary language of that struggle. Agrarianism’s principal antagonist was Alexander Hamilton, the foremost intellectual advocate of economic industrialism, commercialism, and political elitism.
In Jefferson’s philosophy, the hand of government should be as light as possible, keeping opportunities open without favoritism, exploitation, or needless constraints on human affairs; and that hand’s guidance should be in the legislature, the popular branch of the people’s elected representatives. If its public officials became unresponsive to the sufferings of their constituents, the spectacle of a passionate people rising up in arms against its government (as in Shays’s Rebellion in 1787) was not for Jefferson the nightmare it was for Hamilton.
Popular mobilization against bad, and for better, government, with wide participation by citizens and guaranteed commitment not to infringe on the personal rights on which good government depended—these were the tenets of Jeffersonian republicanism that shaped the rhetoric and action of agrarian politics. Individual rights, but a strong role for collective action; decentralized power, but enough governmental authority to protect the people from private exploitation—these became the central tensions of agrarian republicanism. This may sound like the rosiest statement of an American creed. But while an American creed without Alexander Hamilton, business politics, and a powerful presidency is possible to imagine, an American political history without Jeffersonian republicanism is not.
Yet agrarian reformers had to struggle for decades to achieve their political goals; their successes were episodic, concentrated in reform periods like the Populist and Progressive eras, and the New Deal. Their opponents had far greater material resources and the deference of many elected officials (as well as the federal courts, historically skeptical of regulation and redistribution).
The first national manifestation of agrarian politics came in the battle over the Constitution itself. Given the elite composition and Hamiltonian persuasion of many delegates at Philadelphia, the small farmers of the interior and less-developed regions who had constituted the left flank of the Revolution would not accept this ominous concentration of power in a national government without the guarantees of the Bill of Rights, and only its promise got the new Constitution ratified.
In the next decades came the spread of yeoman settlement at the expense of the native population, to whom few of the agrarian democrats would grant equal citizenship rights. For white Americans, the Jacksonian era brought a broadening of suffrage to all adult white males, the moving of presidential nominations to a large meeting of partisan delegates from local jurisdictions (the party-nominating convention), the war with a national bank seen as serving only elite interests, and the democratizing of government service in the partisan spoils system later reviled by the well educated (who saw their own placement in those jobs as a matter of natural right and governmental efficiency). Though the new national government had been conceived without partisanship (and in fear of it), it was the fundamental agrarian republican vehicle of popular government.
Bureaucracy would inevitably expand, but the notion of autonomous and expert bureaucratic governance never achieved legitimacy in an agrarian republic where universal suffrage preceded any significant growth of executive power. Nor has it today, despite the dramatic expansion of the executive branch in the New Deal, cold war, and Great Society eras. Agrarian politics cherishes collective action at the grass roots, and hails laws that tax the rich and restrain the powerful, but prefers to accomplish those goals with minimal bureaucratic discretion. Agrarian movements press for clear and specific laws, powerful in their precision and automatic sanctions, leaving little to presidential or bureaucratic imagination. “Thou shalt not, on penalty of a hefty fine and jail term, do the following” is the favored preamble of an agrarian statute.
The practice of slavery was the shame of one region in the agrarian heartland, and of elites elsewhere who tolerated it—including Jefferson himself. Racism was a system of elite social control in the South, and was not implicit in agrarian republicanism. To the contrary, the disfranchising and segregation laws developed in the South at the end of the nineteenth century were a response to the threat that agrarian populism would succeed and confront the Democratic Party elite with a biracial, class-based reform coalition.
Beginning in the late 1860s, a sequence of agrarian movements—the Grange, antimonopoly and greenback movements; the Farmers’ Alliance; the Agricultural Wheel, an important farm organization that began in Arkansas and ultimately merged with the Farmers’ Alliance; the Populist Party; and the Farmers’ Union—had put democratic demands on the agenda of national politics. In demanding expansion of government powers, they abandoned the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian antipathy to big government and affirmed the faith that an aroused populace with universal (male) suffrage could seize and purify the state, turning it away from elite privilege and toward the common good. Agrarian radicals won few legislative victories in the Gilded Age—the Sherman Act, the Interstate Commerce Act, and the first postwar attempt at an income tax were greatly weakened or, in the latter case, struck down by the Supreme Court—though the agrarians did accomplish a considerable radicalization of the Democratic Party in 1896.
The defeat of the Populist Party in the South, and the contraction of the electorate that followed it, sapped the promise of agrarian reform, however. Thereafter, agrarians relied on an alliance of white farmers and workers within a Democratic Party tainted with racism and less committed to reform than their forebears in the Populist and Greenback-Labor parties had been.
While the agrarians could not elect their most popular leader, William Jennings Bryan, to the presidency, the Democratic Party he presided over lost most of its elite wing and strengthened its farmer and labor base after 1896. Dissident agrarian Republicans in the Midwest and the mountain states joined the mostly southern Democratic agrarians to accomplish the key economic and political reforms of the Progressive Era, and to oppose President Woodrow Wilson’s war preparedness program in 1915–16.
Critically expanded with the influx of millions of urban lower-middle-class voters, the agrarian-labor coalition put through many reforms of the New Deal: the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Tennessee Valley Act, the Silver Purchase Act, the Glass Steagall (banking regulation) Act, the Securities Act, the National Labor Relations Act, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, the Farm Security Act, and the Huey Long—inspired Income Tax Act of 1935.
After World War II, agrarianism waned with the industrialization of the South and the West, and the rise of the civil rights struggle. In the southern heartland of agrarian politics, race had always been an enormous hurdle to class politics. It was, nevertheless, still possible to identify the occasional agrarian political style among southern Democrats. Texas representative Wright Pat-man fought the banks and the Federal Reserve over credit, interest rates, and the supply of money until he lost his House Banking Committee chair to a more urbane and conservative Democrat in the 1970s. In the early 1980s and as late as the early 1990s, congressional representatives of farm states and districts battled those same antagonists in one of the most serious threats to Federal Reserve Board autonomy that the agency had ever experienced. Former Texas commissioner of agriculture Jim Hightower was a radical agrarian critic of the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush.
Yet agrarian politics was born in a yeoman agricultural society and the thick web of community self-help activities and movement-readiness of that past America. Whether it could continue in a thoroughly urban era was always open to question. The city, for Jefferson and his followers, was a place where citizens lost their independence, dignity, and virtue, in a polity dominated by the wealthy and a politics naturally inclined toward Hamiltonianism. Early agrarians saw the city as a place of weaker cultural strictures that people confused with freedom.
The greenback-populist transformation of the Jeffersonian creed in the late 1870s and 1880s acknowledged that most Americans had lost their independence to the powerful forces of the emerging industrial and commercial marketplace. It would take a much more powerful government to level the playing field, and so the Jeffersonian animus against government was abandoned as a matter of practical necessity. Vulnerable workers (who had lost their artisanal autonomy decades before the farmers had to confront the railroad and the commodity market) could sometimes be recruited to farmer-labor politics, as demonstrated fitfully in the greenback and populist movements and the Progressive Era, and more successfully in the New Deal.
The Republican Party’s “Reagan Revolution” of 1980 revived the Gilded Age assault on government, using populist language without the populist class base or policy impetus. But the Democratic Party also did its part to bury agrarianism by adopting a new form of cultural liberalism. Agrarians were radical on economics and conservative on morals, which President Franklin Roosevelt had recognized when he led the repeal of Prohibition and pushed that hotly contested social issue back to the states and localities. Supreme Court decisions in the 1960s and 1970s that outlawed prayer in public schools and public functions and nationalized abortion rights took away that structural dodge, and thus contributed to the defeat of the agrarian impulse in American politics. The agrarians who remained would have to choose between their moral and religious passions and their agrarian economics. Each of the two major political parties offered half, but only half, and the agrarian soul was clearly torn.
Of course, fewer and fewer rural and small town people existed in the early twenty-first century. Despite some protection in the Senate, the steady dwindling of farm and ranch populations and the towns and businesses they once supported had weakened rural political clout. The results of earlier political successes and the rise of agribusiness also made farmers much more conservative than they once were.
Nevertheless, cultural norms were imbedded and perpetuated in memory and in institutions, and the legacy of agrarian politics may be, to some extent, self-perpetuating. However, one imagines that it would take a serious economic downturn, and perhaps a revolt against a Hamiltonian presidency, to induce a genuine revival of agrarian republican politics.
See also populism.
FURTHER READING
Appleby, Joyce, and Terrence Ball, eds. Thomas Jefferson: Political Writings. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Goodwyn, Lawrence. Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.
Graham, Otis L., Jr. An Encore for Reform: The Old Progressives and the New Deal. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.