Douglass on Reconstruction

I've been poking around in our newly liberated archives for interesting things to link to, and it's just such an incredibly rich source. The December 1866 issue had, for example, a Frederick Douglass essay setting forth his view of what was needed to make Reconstruction successful:

The plain, common-sense way of doing this work is simply to establish in the South one law, one government, one administration of justice, one condition to the exercise of the elective franchise, for men of all races and colors alike. This great measure is sought as earnestly by loyal white men as by loyal blacks, and is needed alike by both. Let sound political prescience but take the place of an unreasoning prejudice, and this will be done.

Needless to say, it didn't happen.

Comments

Well, actually it did happen. Across the South by 1868 you had governments elected by universal suffrage, masses of new black officeholders, and governments sympathetic to their interests. What people didn't expect was that white violence would over the next eight years systematically gut the authority of these multiracial governments. Douglass, and the Republican leaders who eventually came to his view, never really considered that large sections of the Southern populace would just refuse to accept the results of fair elections.

Posted by rd | January 23, 2008 9:12 AM

What rd said . . . Douglass's use of "loyal white men" -- which means, er, I have no idea what it means in terms of Southern whites of the Reconstruction period (and indeed until the civil rights era), maybe "white men of good will"? -- only shows how even Douglass was naive about the true motivations and intent of these people.

Posted by BryklynLibrul | January 23, 2008 9:47 AM

"loyal white men as by loyal blacks"

I guess blacks aren't men, in the traditional sense of the word??? But loyal to...whom? Whatever.

Posted by Adrock | January 23, 2008 9:52 AM

Douglass, and the Republican leaders who eventually came to his view, never really considered that large sections of the Southern populace would just refuse to accept the results of fair elections.

I don't think that's accurate. I think they expected resistance. What they didn't expect was that the same federal government that had just fought an incredibly bloody civil war in order to establish the principle that states couldn't just disregard laws they didn't like would within a decade or two back down and let them disregard laws they didn't like.

But it turns out states' rights and federal power were, as always, red herrings. For everybody.

It's not surprising when you think about the times. Over those 20 years the anti-slavery movement, which was the root source of all these laws, weakened. Its public power came from the fact that slavery was seen as a moral abomination. This mass outrage gave outsized power to leaders like Douglass and others who had developed very complex and powerful ideas about the political, economic, and social value of equality & mobility as a result of looking at slavery. While others had held these positions before (especially among the founders--for instance, John Adams & wife were shocked at the poverty of the South compared to the North, and had an economic and not just moral opposition to slavery--though they didn't do anything about it), it wasn't until the antislavery movement that these uncommon ideas achieved political strength. The abolitionists didn't just have a moral argument against slavery, they also had an instrumental economic and political argument against it. They inveighed the moral one because it was the most potent, but the other was definitely part of the movement.

But while the sharecropping and other forms of exploitation that replaced slavery were not much of an improvement in the lives of black people, they managed to not stoke public outrage the way that slavery did. And so the instrumental political & economic argument about equality fell by the wayside, because of prevailing conditions. The same public that tolerated rampant religious and ethnic discrimination, that tolerated wage slavery, that tolerated discrimination against women, that tolerated the incredible violence of the Pinkertons, unsurprisingly also tolerated unbelievable levels of systemic state-sanctioned (and enforced) discrimination and violence against black people.

I also think it's been really understated how many people in the 1860's supported enfranchisement laws not because they were Douglass-style patriots who wanted to build a better America, but because they were petty jerks who wanted to punish the South. For them, it was spite politics, and it only lasted a short while because that's how long they could put their own racism aside in their desire to punish the South.

That's another thing that makes MLK such an incredible hero. He took what had been a minority position for 200 years--that systematic discrimination against groups of Americans was bad for America. He took hold of the zeitgeist and created a lasting, sustaining change in the way our nation thinks. He built on those laws, written with a mix of high hopes and bitter spite, and effectively wrote out the spite part, saying the point of America was that we're all Americans. He finished Frederick Douglass' work, and got damn near every American to agree with him, at least in principle. Still a long way to go, but it was an absolute sea change, which benefited not only African Americans but--much, much more--all Americans.

Posted by anonymous | January 23, 2008 9:57 AM

"That's another thing that makes MLK such an incredible hero. "

Do you think that if MLK had been there in 1866 then Jim Crow never would have happened?

Posted by wellbasically | January 23, 2008 11:31 AM

The Atlantic archive is peanuts compared to that of Harper's--full-text search all the way back, fully indexed. Just took a lot of elbow grease.

Posted by Other Ezra | January 23, 2008 12:11 PM

Do you think that if MLK had been there in 1866 then Jim Crow never would have happened?

He would have been lynched, not shot. MLK was a hero, but he was also a hero for his times. I don't think his message would have been persuasive in 1866.

Posted by mpowell | January 23, 2008 12:32 PM

The problem is sort of analogous to the Iraqi Occupation, where immediately after the end of the war, US troops didn't show a strong hand and take charge of the occupied territories before resistance could develop. The Iraqi occupation was probably a lost cause the moment looters realized they could clean out museums, government offices and army weapons depots without any US interference.

Likewise after the Civil War, Lincoln's unity ticket VP, former Tennessee Senator Andrew Johnson (who had remained loyal to the Union), succeeded the slain Lincoln and was far too soft on the South in the critical early months. To be fair, Lincoln probably would have been lenient on the South too. However Lincoln's assassination hardened Northern attitudes, so Johnson made friends in the South with his policies, but not in Congress.

It was only after the 1866 midterms that the "radical Republicans"-- as they were called at the time, by 21th Century moral standards, they were the voice of reason-- insisted on tougher Reconstruction policies that did more to protect blacks. But Uncle Sam got moving on Reconstruction two years too late.

In retrospect, Uncle Sam should have landed like a ton of bricks on the South in 1865 and immediately separate whites by class, putting the hammer on the plantation class and buying the loyalty of poor whites. That means court martialing for treason (or exiling) officers but giving a mass pardon to Confederate enlisted men. Then, as MacArthur would do 80 years later in Japan, confiscate plantations and giving small plots to the poor (black and white).

Bear in mind, this was at the same time the Homestead Act was giving 160 acre farms to anyone who'd work the land and railroads (suddenly land-rich as payment for their building of the transcontinental railroad) were sending agents to Europe to recruit farmers to immigrate and buy plots from them. The railroad would finance ship passage, land costs and farm start up costs with low interest loans. So clearly Uncle Sam had the resources to buy a lot of "loyal white men".

Uncle Sam could have created a middle class of yeoman farmers that would, like the Japanese rice farmers who loved General MacArthur for providing them with land, feel loyalty to the government that provided them with wealth. But, all this should have been done in 1865 and when Johnson didn't act, the moment passed.

Posted by beowulf | January 23, 2008 9:22 PM