Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (36 page)

ON APRIL
3, 1865, Robert E. Lee’s army stopped defending Richmond. The next day, President Lincoln walked those same streets. Black people who had freed themselves ran up to him, fell on their knees, kissed his hands, and lifted Lincoln up as their “Messiah.” Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner hoped their outpouring of praise would finally convince Lincoln to support Black suffrage. Black people had loftier goals: “All was equal,” someone said. “All the land belongs to the Yankees now and they gwine divide it out among de colored people.”
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On April 9, Lee’s army surrendered, ending the Civil War. “Slavery is dead,” announced the
Cincinnati Enquirer
. “The negro is not, there is our misfortune.” On April 11, Lincoln delivered his reconstruction plans before a sizable crowd in front of the President’s House. In defending the readmission of Louisiana, the president recognized that it “was unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored men.” He expressed his preference for bestowing voting rights on “the very intelligent” Blacks and Black “soldiers.”
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Never before had an American president expressed his preference for even limited Black suffrage. “That means nigger citizenship,” murmured a twenty-six-year-old actor, from a family of famous thespians in Maryland. John Wilkes Booth and his Confederate conspirators had planned to kidnap Lincoln and demand the release of Confederate troops. “Now, by God,” Booth reportedly said, staring savagely at Lincoln, “I’ll put him through.” On April 14, Mary and Abraham Lincoln took in a play,
Our American Cousin
, from his presidential booth at Ford’s Theatre. When Lincoln’s bodyguard stepped away sometime after 10 p.m., Booth crept up behind Lincoln and shot a bullet into Lincoln’s skull.
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It was Good Friday, 1865, and Lincoln passed the next morning as the crucified Great Emancipator. “Lincoln died for us,” remarked a Black South Carolinian. “Christ died for we, and me believe him de same mans.”
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With emancipation assured, William Lloyd Garrison retired three weeks after Lincoln’s death. “My vocation, as an Abolitionist, thank God, is ended,” he said. Other abolitionists refused to retire with him. American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) members refused Garrison’s request to dissolve, gave his presidential chair to Wendell Phillips, and remade their new slogan: “No Reconstruction without Negro Suffrage.” AASS members had high expectations for Lincoln’s replacement: a Tennessee Democrat born into poverty, who had once signaled to Blacks, “I will indeed be your Moses,” and who had once stammered to planters, “Tall poppies must be struck down.”
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CHAPTER 19

Reconstructing Slavery

PRESIDENT ANDREW JOHNSON
issued his Reconstruction proclamations on May 29, 1865, deflating the high hopes of civil rights activists. He offered amnesty, property rights, and voting rights to all but the highest Confederate officials (most of whom he pardoned a year later). Feeling empowered by President Johnson, Confederates barred Blacks from voting, elected Confederates as politicians, and instituted a series of discriminatory Black codes at their constitutional conventions to reformulate their state in the summer and fall of 1865. With the Thirteenth Amendment barring slavery “except as a punishment for crime,” the law replaced the master. The postwar South became the spitting image of the prewar South in everything but name.

Of course, lawmakers justified these new racist policies with racist ideas. They proclaimed that the Black codes—which forced Blacks into labor contracts, barred their movement, and regulated their family lives—were meant to restrain them because they were naturally lazy, lawless, and oversexed. “If you call this Freedom,” a Black veteran asked, “what do you call Slavery?”

Southern Blacks defended themselves in the war of re-enslavement, lifted up demands for rights and land, and issued brilliant antiracist retorts to the prevailing racist ideas. If any group should be characterized as “lazy,” it was the planters, who had “lived in idleness all their lives on stolen labor,” resolved a Petersburg, Virginia, mass meeting. It had always been amazing to enslaved people how someone could lounge back, drink lemonade, and look out over their fields, and call
the bent-over pickers lazy. To the racist forecasts that Blacks would not be able to take care of themselves, one emancipated person replied, “We used to support ourselves and our masters too when we were slaves and I reckon we can take care of ourselves now.” When President Johnson evicted Blacks from their forty-acre plots in the summer and fall of 1865, Black people protested. “We has a right to the land we are located,” Virginia’s Bayley Wyatt griped. “Our wives, our children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates upon.”
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In September 1865, Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens, arguably the most antiracist of the “Radical Republicans” favoring civil rights, proposed (and did not get approval for) the redistribution of the 400 million acres held by the wealthiest 10 percent of southerners. Every adult freedman would be granted forty acres, and the remaining
90
percent of the total would be sold in plots to the “highest bidder” to pay for the war and retire the national debt. Congress forced only one group of slaveholders to provide land to their former captives—the Confederacy’s Native American allies.

The most popular defense against land redistribution was that it would “ruin the freedmen” by leading them to believe they could acquire land without “working for it,” as the antislavery cotton manufacturer Edward Atkinson suggested. Did Atkinson really believe his own argument? This rich entrepreneur knew more than anyone that many rich men had not been ruined when they had inherited land without “working for it.” Most Republicans wanted the government to create equality before the law, with all men having the same constitutional and voting rights. After that, they believed the government was finished. “The removal of white prejudice against the negro, depends almost entirely on the negro himself,” declared
The Nation
, a periodical devoted to equal rights founded in July 1865, with Garrison’s third-oldest son, Wendell, as assistant editor.
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William Lloyd Garrison and so many of the abolitionists he inspired chose not to engage in the political struggle against racial discrimination. Garrison failed to realize that it was his genius that had transformed abolitionism from a complex, multi-issue political project
with unclear battle lines and objectives into a simple, single-issue moral project: slavery was evil, and those racists justifying or ignoring slavery were evil, and it was the moral duty of the United States to eliminate the evil of slavery. Garrison did not use his genius again for antiracism, in declaring that racial disparities were evil, and that those racists justifying or ignoring disparities were evil, and that it was the moral duty of the United States to eliminate the evil of racial disparities. He was too bogged down by the assimilationist idea that Black people needed to be developed by northerners. In the final months of
The Liberator
, Garrison allocated substantial space and praise to the northern missionaries’ project of building southern schools for emancipated people. Never mind that the northern missionaries were not just handling the building and fund-raising but also planning to control and staff the schools and “civilize” the students.

Antiracist southern Blacks were not waiting on northern assimilationists. “Throughout the entire South an effort is being made by the colored people to educate themselves,” reported the Freedmen’s Bureau’s superintendent of schools, John W. Alvord, in early 1866, after touring the South. These emancipated people were neither looking at the White missionaries as superior nor considering them their saviors. Black Georgia educators, for instance, said in February 1866 that they hoped White teachers were not in the South “in any vain reliance on their superior gifts . . . or in any foolish self-confidence that they have a special call to this office, or special endowments to meet its demands.”
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On December 18, 1865, the United States officially added the Thirteenth Amendment to its Constitution. “At last, the old ‘covenant with death’ is annulled,” Garrison wrote in the second-to-last issue of the voice of abolitionism.
The Liberator
had been established to destroy chattel slavery, he said in the final issue, on December 29, 1865. Now that slavery was dead and buried, it seemed only fitting to let
The Liberator
’s “existence cover the historic period of the great struggle.”
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Without
The Liberator
, Garrison soon felt “like a hen plucked of its feathers.” After two bad falls in early 1866 took him out of commission, he largely watched Reconstruction from the sidelines. He watched
Frederick Douglass head a delegation of Black male suffragists into the President’s House on February 7, 1866. The meeting quickly turned combative when President Andrew Johnson said state majorities should decide voting rights. When someone retorted that Blacks were a majority in South Carolina, a miffed Johnson elaborated on his true fear: that Black voters looked down on poor Whites and would forge a political alliance with planters to rule them. When Douglass proposed “a party . . . among the poor,” Johnson was disinterested.
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Whether Douglass admitted it or not, some—perhaps most—Blacks
did
look down on poor Whites. They denigrated the Whites who did
not
enslave them as “White trash.” Actually, some uncorroborated reports suggest that enslaved Blacks created that term. Blacks had seen poor Whites doing the master’s dirty work, as overseers, or on slave patrols, while clinging to the stinking fallacy that the lowest of them was still better than the highest Black person. And if poor Whites were “White trash,” then what were elite Whites? Black consumers of racist ideas had come to associate Whiteness with wealth and power, and education and slaveholding. Only through the “White trash” construction could ideas of superior Whiteness be maintained, as it made invisible the majority of White people, the millions in poverty, by saying they were not ordinary Whites: they were “White trash.” Similarly, the upwardly mobile Blacks were not really Black: they were extraordinary. At some point, racist and classist White elites started embracing the appellation to demean low-income Whites. “White trash” conveyed that White elites were the ordinary representatives of Whiteness.
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AS IT WAS
, Black people no longer needed Andrew Johnson to secure some of their postwar rights. Republican senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois stayed true to his 1862 Free Soil word: “Our people want nothing to do with the negroes.” He felt the fervid panic that Blacks would flood the North in reaction to the violence, the Black codes, and the reelection of Confederates in 1865. To secure Black people in the South, Senator Trumbull and his anti-Black Republican comrades
allied with the Radical Republicans in February 1866 to extend the Freedmen’s Bureau. The “immense patronage” would hinder the “character” and “prospects” of emancipated Blacks who caused the South’s problems by desiring to lead a “life of indolence,” President Johnson argued in his stunning veto of the Freedmen’s Bureau bill on February 19, 1866 (Congress overrode the veto in the summer).
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Senator Trumbull and company moved on to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1866 in March. The bill bestowed citizenship rights on all born in the United States and barred the “deprivation” of “any right secured or protected by this act” on the account of one’s “color or race.” Congress did not consider voting to be an essential right of US citizenship. Though aimed at southern Black codes, the act also invalidated northern Black codes that had discriminated against Blacks for decades. But the bill was limited in that it did not target private, local, or race-veiled laws of racial discrimination. Discriminatory racial language (not racial inequities) became the proof of racism for the federal courts—the apparatus charged with the huge burden of enforcing equal treatment. It was like writing laws for premeditated murders and not writing manslaughter laws for murders that the state could not prove were premeditated. The shrewdest discriminators switched tactics, and simply avoided using racial language to veil their discriminatory intent, to get away with racial murder.

President Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 even in its limited, moderate form. Only from the perspective of someone who refused to acknowledge discrimination in racial disparities, who wanted to maintain White privileges and the power to discriminate, could this bill be seen as “in favor of the colored and against the white race,” to use Johnson’s words. Johnson came from a Democratic Party busily shouting that to give Blacks voting rights would result in “nigger domination.” If there was any semblance of equal opportunity, these racists argued, then Blacks would become dominators and Whites would suffer. This was—and still is—the racist folklore of reverse discrimination. Andrew Johnson crafted this form of racism. And long after Congress impeached him, he still topped lists of the worst US presidents.
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In early April 1866, Congress overrode the presidential veto, turned its back on the president, and strode toward the Radical Reconstruction of the South. Southern violence against Blacks made congressmen move more quickly and forcefully to stop Blacks from coming north. In early May 1866, White mobs in Memphis killed at least forty-eight Black people, gang-raped at least five Black women, and looted or destroyed $100,000 worth of Black-owned property. Federal authorities slyly blamed nearby Black troops for provoking the violence, and they used their lies to substantiate redeploying them as “Buffalo Soldiers” out West. As southern Black citizens were killed over the next few decades to make way for Jim Crow, Buffalo Soldiers killed indigenous communities in the West to make way for White settlers.
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