Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (35 page)

Garrison’s principled courage, which had made him a legend when emancipation seemed so far away, had been replaced by practical fear in 1864 when abolition seemed so close. Garrison feared Democrats gobbling up enough war-weary and anti-emancipation voters to seize
presidential power, negotiate a war settlement, and maintain slavery. “Let
us
possess our souls in patience,” he wrote. William Lloyd Garrison—the longtime evangelist of immediate emancipation—counseled patience.
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Maryland Unionists went ahead with plans to reconstruct their state without slavery. To encourage them, Lincoln made the short trip to Baltimore and gave one of the most insightful abolitionist speeches of his career on April 18, 1864. He answered the enduring American paradox: How could the land of freedom also be the land of slavery? “With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor,” he said, “while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor.” Lincoln used an analogy for clarification. “The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one,” he said. “Hence we behold the processes by which thousands are daily passing from under the yoke of bondage, hailed by some as the advance of liberty, and bewailed by others as the destruction of all liberty.” Lincoln’s freedom analogy, vividly evocative of his self-identity as the Great Emancipator, rewrote current events. Most enslaved Africans were hardly sheep, waiting on the Union shepherds to come to their plantations and lead them to freedom. The Union lines proved, if anything in this analogy, to be the stable of freedom. While Lincoln emancipated a minority of sheep, most fought off or slipped away from the Confederate wolves on their plantations on their own, and then ran to freedom on their own, and then into the Union Army on their own to put down the Confederate wolves.
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Since issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln had begun to imagine himself (as Garrison long had) as the liberating shepherd of Black people, who were in need of civilizing direction. On November 1, 1864, Maryland’s emancipation day, the freed people paraded to the President’s House. Lincoln addressed them, urging them to “improve yourself, both morally and intellectually,” while supporting Maryland’s
new constitution, which prevented them from improving themselves socioeconomically. Maryland’s constitution barred Blacks from voting and from attending public schools. The constitution also sent thousands of Black children into long-term indentures to their former masters, against their parents’ objections. Lincoln seemed to follow in the footsteps of Thomas Jefferson. Pay lip service to the cause of Black uplift, while supporting the racist policies that ensured the downfall of Black people.
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In setting out the terms of emancipation, Maryland (and Louisiana) ignored the recommendations of the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission (AFIC), which had been authorized by the War Department at the request of Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner. In its widely publicized final report in May 1864, the commission called for equal rights, laws allowing Blacks to purchase land, and the creation of a temporary Bureau of Emancipation to shepherd freed people toward self-reliance. One commissioner, Boston abolitionist James McKaye, advocated redistributing confiscated Confederate land to landless Whites and emancipated people.

In promoting equal rights, McKaye and the other two commissioners, Indiana reformer Robert Dale Owen and New England abolitionist Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, never entertained the idea that Blacks and Whites were truly equal. They had been charged with answering questions regarding the “condition and capacity” of Blacks for freedom and free labor, a task whose real aim was assuaging Whites who feared the effects of emancipation. Are Blacks naturally lazy? Would Blacks invade and ruin the North? Could Black labor be more profitable in freedom than in slavery? In his AFIC report on runaways in Canada, Howe forecasted that Blacks “will co-operate powerfully with whites from the North in re-organizing the industry of the South.” However, “they will dwindle,” this Social Darwinist made sure to note, “and gradually disappear from the peoples of this continent.” Commissioner Owen eased fearful northerners’ anxieties by speaking more to the potential contributions of African Americans in AFIC’s final report. Their “softening influence,” drawn from their “womanly” disposition, would one day improve the hardened “national character.” The
Anglo-Saxon “head predominates over the heart,” he wrote. “The African race is in many respects the reverse of this.” A decade after Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, abolitionists still viewed Black people through its racist lens.
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The AFIC reports were the most popular works to appear amid the sudden rush of emancipation literature about the future of Black people. Observations noting that slavery had not turned Blacks into brutes had a home in the post-emancipation reports, for anyone willing to wade through all of the racist testimonies to reach them. Before supervising the contrabands of Virginia, one Union Army captain, C. B. Wilder, admitted, “I did not think [Black people] had so much brain.” His experiences had taught him that “they have got as many brains as you or I have, though they have an odd way of showing it.” At the end of 1864, 78 percent of the contrabands under Wilder’s supervision were “independent of assistance.” A superintendent of contrabands in the Mississippi Valley described Black intelligence to be “as good as that of men, women & children anywhere, of any color, who cannot read.”
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William Lloyd Garrison was
not
among those who questioned the brutishness of former slaves. For thirty years, Garrison had moved northerners toward abolitionism by sensationalizing the idea that slavery made people into brutes. Like any racist, he dismissed the evidence that undermined his theory, and hardened his theory with evidence that supported it. In July 1864, Garrison defended Lincoln’s support of laws that restricted the citizenship rights of Blacks. “According to the laws of development and progress, it is not practicable,” Garrison said, to give undeveloped Black men the vote.
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GARRISON HAD A
difficult time defending Lincoln in the summer of 1864. Democratic editors and politicians were blitzing voters on the dangers of continued war, emancipated Black people invading the North, and Republican-supported miscegenation. War morale had dropped to its lowest level. A Confederate regiment neared Washington, DC, and Union armies were hardly winning battles. The war news got so bad
that on August 22, 1864, the Republican National Committee determined that Lincoln could not be reelected. No one had to tell that to Lincoln.

“I am a beaten man, unless we can have some great victory,” Lincoln reportedly said on August 31. Two days later, General William T. Sherman sacked Atlanta. Subsequent victories boosted voter support for the Republicans, and they consolidated their support by matching the Democrats’ anti-Black ire. Repulsed, Black Americans came together for their first national convention in a decade. They blasted Republicans for remaining “largely under the influence of the prevailing contempt for the character and rights of the colored man.” In spite of—or maybe because of—Black Americans’ rebuke of Republicans, roughly 55 percent of Unionist Americans voted for Lincoln, and his party claimed three-quarters of the Congress. Forty-five percent of Unionist Americans voted for the Democrats to restore a union with slaveholders.
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A week after Lincoln’s reelection, General Sherman departed captured Atlanta and steered 60,000 Union soldiers in the fabled March to the Sea. Sherman put his total war policies into full effect. The soldiers scorched the Confederate earth—the military installments, communications networks, plantations—everything in their path. Twenty thousand runaways joined the March to the Sea. Reporters telegraphed news of his successful victories to thoroughly pleased Unionist northerners. By Christmas, Sherman and his tens of thousands of soldiers and runaways had entered Savannah—and the hearts of millions.

Secretary of War Edwin McMasters Stanton arrived in Savannah after the New Year and urged General Sherman to meet with local Blacks over their future. Meeting with twenty leaders, mostly Baptist and Methodist ministers, on January 12, 1865, General Sherman received a crash course on their definitions of slavery and freedom. Slavery meant “receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent,” said the group’s spokesman, Garrison Frazier (
The Liberator
editor’s name was everywhere). Freedom was “placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor.” To
accomplish this—
to be truly free
—we must “have land.” When asked whether they desired interracial communities, Frazier shared their preference “to live by ourselves.” There was “a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over.”

Black people all over the South were saying this to Union officials: Do not abolish slavery and leave us landless. Do not force us to work for our former masters and call that freedom. They distinguished between
abolishing slavery
and
freeing people
. You can only set us free by providing us with land to “till . . . by our own labor,” they declared. In offering postwar policy, Black people were rewriting what it meant to be free.
And
, in antiracist fashion, they were rejecting integration as a race relations strategy that involved Blacks showing Whites their equal humanity. They were rejecting uplift suasion—rejecting the job of working to undo the racist ideas of Whites by not performing stereotypes. Racist ideas, they were saying, were only in the eyes of the beholder, and only the beholders of racist ideas were responsible for their release.
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Savannah Blacks did not mention this, but millions of White settlers who had acquired western land, confiscated from rebel native communities over the years, had been freed. These Savannah Blacks—their peers across the South—were only asking for the same from rebel Confederate communities. But racist ideas rationalized the racist policy. White settlers on government-provided land were deemed receivers of American freedom; Black people, receivers of American handouts. Whenever talks earlier in the war touched on distributing land to Black people, Americans showed a respect for the landed rights of warring Confederates that they rarely showed for the landed rights of peaceful Native Americans. Since the federal government had started selling confiscated and abandoned southern land to private owners in 1863, more than 90 percent had gone to northern Whites over the widespread protests of local Blacks.
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Four days after he met with Savannah Blacks, General Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15 to rid his camps of runaways and punish Confederates. He opened settlements for Black families on forty-acre plots of land on the Sea Islands and a large slice of the
coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia. By June 1865, 40,000 people had been settled on the plots and had been given old army mules. Sherman’s field order was not the first of its kind. Black squatters on the Mississippi land of Jefferson Davis’s family had formed their own government and swung a cotton profit of $160,000. “Davis Bend” became a testament of what Savannah Blacks were saying in those days: all Black people needed was to be left alone, secure on their own lands and guaranteed their own rights.

And yet, for so many racist Americans, it was inconceivable that Black people had not been damaged by slavery: that Black people could dance into freedom without skipping a beat. General John C. Robinson worried about landowning “sluggish” Blacks preventing “the energy and industry of the North” from utilizing the valuable acreage. Assimilationists Frederick Douglass and Horace Greeley rebuked Sherman’s order, calling for interracial communities and ignoring the desires of local Blacks. Greeley wrote in his
New York Tribune
on January 30, 1865, that southern Blacks, “like their fellows at the North,” must be “aided by contact with white civilization to become good citizens and enlightened men.”
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President Lincoln did not overturn Sherman’s field order; nor did he offer his public support or disapproval. At the time, Lincoln was busy expending his political energy on the House of Representatives. It paid off. On January 31, 1865, House members passed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. The eruption of Republicans on the House floor—all the hugging, and dancing, and crying, and smiling, and shouting—foreshadowed emancipation parties and meetings across the United States that night and for nights to come.

The Thirteenth Amendment brought comfort to a weary emancipation-centered activist who was bickering with abolitionists pressing for Black civil rights. Days before the amendment’s passage, Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips had passionately objected to readmitting Louisiana at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society meeting. To deny Blacks in Louisiana voting rights was “to brand us with the stigma of inferiority,” Douglass intoned. Defending Louisiana’s readmission and Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison argued back
that suffrage was a “conventional right . . . not to be confused with the natural right” to liberty. Political equality was bound to come someday, he explained, but only after Black “industrial and educational development.”
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On March 3, 1865, Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, or the Freedmen’s Bureau, heeding the principal recommendation of the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission. Quite possibly the most difficult duty the bureau had been given was to establish racial equality before the law in places where “to kill a negro they do not deem murder; to debauch a negro woman they do not think fornication; to take the property away from a Negro, they do not consider robbery,” as one Union colonel observed. Another Union general, Oliver Otis Howard, was given charge of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The New England native believed that emancipated Blacks wished to be dependent on government because they were used to being dependent on their masters. When the bureau was dissolved in 1869, General Howard bragged that his agency had not been a “pauperizing agency,” since so “few” had been assisted. Officials of an assisting agency bragging about not assisting people? It only made sense in the context of racist ideas. But the fact that the bureau did help some people, and created some semblance of equal opportunity, was too much for segregationists like Dr. Josiah C. Nott. In an 1866 open letter to Howard, Nott stammered, “All the power of the Freedmen’s Bureau or ‘gates of hell’ cannot prevail” against the permanent natural laws that kept Black people from creating civilization.
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