The year was 1865. The Civil War had just ended at Appomattox. Slavery was officially dead in the U.S. Finally!
Now, came the hard work of Reconstruction. The South was completely destroyed during the war. Not only was it physically bruised and burned, but all of the institutions that had grounded the entire culture had been crushed.
As I look back on that time I can’t help but wonder, how did things after the war turn out like they did? How is it that African Americans are, in so many ways, still in bondage?
The official Reconstruction period lasted a mere 12 years. During that time from 1865 to 1877 Blacks were elected to public office. Ex-slaves became bankers and lawyers and farmers. The future really was beginning to look up.
Then, form 1878 until, well, it’s not really over yet, Jim Crow was born and has lived as a shadow on the land blotting out the sunlight and bring death and hatred in its wake.
What happened that caused the nation to turn its back on those whose backs the country had been built upon?
Last week I mentioned an essay written by Matthew Karp and published in Catalyst. (Except where indicated, all quotes are from Karp’s essay.) In it he provided some insights into how the anti-slavery movement in the North became a political movement that enabled it to gain the power of State that ultimately led to the War.
In order to do that a political party was formed in the middle of the 19th century: The Republican Party. The party was formed in order to end slavery in the U.S. be wresting Washington from the rich landowners from the South. Those landed few were painted as oligarchs who wanted to expand their holdings across the country.
And, in many ways, it appears that they weren’t far from the mark. Frederick Douglass wrote in a memoir about the place where he was held in servitude. It was a large plantation in eastern Maryland. The owner, Col. Edward Lloyd, sat as the royal head of his domain. His holdings included at least 20 outlying farms with all of the necessary masters and overseers for his, according to Douglass, 1,000 slaves. By all accounts, Col. Lloyd was extremely wealthy. There was no law other than that uttered by Lloyd. He was a member of that undisputed aristocracy that ruled over what amounted to a feudal system in America.
These landed few desired nothing more than to retain all that they had and to expand it.
In the North, however, the Industrial Revolution was at full steam. Capitalists were flexing their muscles and gazing about looking for their own ways to expand. In order to do this, though, they needed labor. And, in the North, that was a substantial expense. Workers needed to paid for their efforts. While, south of the Mason-Dixon Live, labor was free.
As I wrote earlier, it seems that aside from a vocal minority, anti-slavery sentiment in the North was not wide spread. Most people simply weren’t affected by it. So, they paid little attention to what happened ‘away down South.’
The Republicans needed a way to get the majority population in the North on board a political program that could sweep away the powerful minority of the South who controlled the government. So, they developed a strategy that would pit Freedom against Slavery.
Karp wrote,
“Above all, Republicans depicted the battle against slavery as a species of class struggle — a social war not simply between slaves and masters, but between the overwhelming majority of Americans and a tiny aristocracy of slave lords who controlled the federal government.”
William Seward described the battle lines succinctly. He “lambasted slaveholders as a ‘privileged class,’ which he later refined into a ‘property class,’ akin to the patricians of Rome and the landlords of Europe.”
By framing the issue this way, the Republicans were able to turn the apathy of many in the North into a political advantage to unite Northern voters behind their party.
Seward stated that the divide was not between North and South, but
“between ‘labor states,’ subject to democratic self-government, and ‘capital states,’ where master-class barons monopolized political and economic power, quashed free speech, and organized all society around ‘the system of capital in slaves.’”
I considered all of these statements and began to see that, while there were many in the North who considered slavery a moral stain of evil on the whole country, many more were simply concerned with the economy and their own well-being. Concern for the welfare of the Black slave was secondary to the security of white labor.
Newspapers at the time captured the prevailing sentiment of many Northerners.
“Southern masters, declared a Cleveland newspaper, ‘enslave the blacks, not because they are black, but because they are laborers — and they contend that the highest civilization demands that the laboring class should be subjected and owned by the ‘higher class.’”
“The election of 1856, argued a Republican editor in Pittsburgh, was ‘not a contest of races, but a contest of institutions.’ It was a fight ‘between the Slave-holding Oligarchy, on one hand, who desire to introduce slave labor and slave institutions into Kansas, and the laboring white people of the country opposed to slavery … who wish to introduce Free Labor.’”
These are things that we were never taught in school. We were told that the North went to war to free the slaves. We heard about abolitionists who risked their lives to rescue enslaved Blacks and conduct them safely into the Promised Land where the Freedom Bell Rang.
No, not really. As with so much in our lives, it all came down to the almighty dollar.
All of this revealed to me the reasons that Reconstruction failed and Jim Crow was allowed to live and breathe in BOTH the South and the North. It explained this quote that is on the wall beneath the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. written by the Great Emancipator himself. In response to an 1862 op-ed written by Horace Greeley, Lincoln wrote,
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”
Charles, Mark and Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths:The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery, IVP, 2019, p.144
Africans stolen from their homeland and dragged across the Middle Passage where they were sold as if they were cattle or hogs; who were bred and traded as chattel; who were beaten and abused; who were broken and despised. They were eventually freed, not for the sake of their personhood nor their standing before God. But, because it appeared to be for Lincoln, a necessary concession and politically expedient.
Is it any wonder that African Americans are still treated as secondary? Greater still, is it any wonder that the African American community is, to this day, a place where hope is dimmed by the lived reality of human beings who live in fear and want? I am beginning to see why these communities erupt in violence. Places where not even their own community members are secure against the frustrations that a life of hopelessness can create. When your people have lived for over 400 years under the yokes of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination, and derision how are you supposed to live?
Yet, these people, people who bear the Light and Likeness of God within them, continue to love God and, like Jesus before them, love those who persecute them and treat them like second class citizens.
These questions I’ve held in my heart and mind since I was young. The history that we were taught didn’t add up to the reality that I saw outside of my front door. Matthew Karp’s piece helped to illuminate the dark corners where those questions have laid all these years.
It’s not too late for the U.S. to do the right thing and finally free those who have had a white boot on their necks for far, far too long.