(Cont. from Part 8) It's not hard to see the continuity between participation by nonslaveowning whites in such activities before the Civil War to participating in a war that was openly declared to be in the defense of slavery to postwar participation in violent vigilante and terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
This background of the role of nonslaveholding whites in the South prior to the Civil War is not only important for understanding the Civil War itself. It's vital for understanding the failure of post-war Reconstruction. Many whites actively tried to work with the freedman during Reconstruction. It was a promising, hopeful experiment in democracy.
But the combination of Northern indifference, the hostility of the old planter class in the South, and the white supremacist notions - and the willingness to use criminal violence to enforce it - that had become widespread among Southern whites during slavery eventually destroyed the experiment.
As the "White Southerners" segment at the Reconstruction: The Second Civil War site puts it:
NARRATOR: Even as they struggled to define their role in this new world, poor white Southerners felt they had lost their skin privilege -- and now had to compete with African-Americans for jobs, social position, and political power.
[CLARENCE] WALKER [ HISTORIAN]: In this context, race did trump class. For the most part, poor whites did not reach out readily to their black peers. And the reason for that, there had grown up a culture in which any association with blackness was deemed to be socially unacceptable in Southern society ...
The civil rights movement of the 20th century was very much a continuation of the unfinished business of Reconstruction.
6 comments:
You make some good points in this essay and do much to discredit the notion that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery -- an ill-informed idea at best. But you overlook the racism of the Northern states...Lincoln fought for quite a while to keep the Civil War a war for the Union because he knew he would not have the support of the people for a war against slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation came about only after almost two years of war.
You can see Northern racism in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which contained some very nasty race-baiting. In the debates, Lincoln defended slavery where it was. He was only against the expansion of slavery into the Territories. For this he was accused of things that would be perfectly reasonable today, but which we scandelous for the time: esp. the perfect equality of blacks and whites.
Lincoln responded by saying that "anything that argues me into his idea of perfect social and political equality with the negro, is but a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse-chestnut to be a chestnut horse." Lincoln also spoke in defense of the fugitive-slave act.
Northern racism after the war also helped bring the grand experiment of Reconstruction to an early end.
Northern racism was certainly very real. But it also requires some effort to see its context, as well, from today's viewpoint. But as in the South, opposition to slavery often co-existed with ideas that even by the standards of that time were white supremacist. Hinton Helper, author of *The Impending Crisis of the South* and a Southerner himself, was one of the most perceptive critics of slavery - and a lifelong believer in the inferiority of blacks. - Bruce
It's also important that those whites who *did* advocate racial equality were in the North. Or, at least, only in the free states could they openly advocate such a thing. Ideas of racial superiority in the North could and often did go together with political opposition to slavery. In the South, white-supremacist ideas were not only the required belief, but they went together with support for slavery and the kind of active participation I focused on in these posts. - Bruce
In the North, white opinion on *slavery* by 1860 was mostly divided between those who opposed slavery and those who didn't much care. In the South, it was between those who supported slavery more than Union and those who supported Union more than slavery. Racism was intimately related to slavery in both North and South. But the social structure of slavery gave racism a different social form in the South, and effectively closed off debate there over either racism or slavery. - Bruce
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