Forging an Early Black Politics
New York Public Library
Engraving of freedmen voting in New Orleans, 1867
At the core of the latest national reckoning over race is an incontrovertible fact: the Civil War killed slavery, but it did not kill entrenched racism and Black subjugation. One historical interpretation, lavishly publicized and increasingly in vogue, blames this not only on the tenacity of the defeated slaveholding South but also on the racism of the victorious North, and on the white supremacy upon which the nation was supposedly founded. Some white northerners may have claimed a commitment to political and civil equality for African-Americans, the argument allows, but they were a small minority and their commitment was wispy. Soon enough, after the war, that commitment vanished and, as is well known, the nation abandoned the formerly enslaved and their children to the violent overthrow of Reconstruction, the brutal imposition of Jim Crow in the South, and the continued subordination of Blacks everywhere else. Black Americans, so the argument goes, were left to fight on their own to salvage America’s false promises of freedom and democracy.
Northern white liberals might have fancied themselves ennobled by slavery’s demise, accruing overdrafts on what Robert Penn Warren called, in his brief, anguished book The Legacy of the Civil War(1961), a smugly hypocritical “Treasury of Virtue.” But today’s revisionists assert that the Civil War might better be described as a war between northern white racists and southern white racists over the expansion of slavery, which many northerners opposed in order to preserve a white man’s republic—a gruesome episode in a virtually seamless history of American white supremacy.
After Appomattox, they claim, northern whites and southern whites reconciled and joined in building an industrial and later a postindustrial America predicated on Black subjection (and, not coincidentally, based also on the imperial subjugation of people of color from Cuba to the Philippines and beyond, not to mention the American West). White Americans then constructed and celebrated a national mythos that enshrined slaveholders and racists and imperialists as heroic shapers of America’s destiny—a mythos being toppled only now.This interpretation, positing racial oppression as the nation’s core principle, might sound new, and it has clearly become more influential in reaction to Donald J. Trump’s election in 2016, It exploits, however, arguments that historians from varied perspectives have been developing for decades, especially the central claim that the pre–Civil War North was a racist bastion. In 1961, the same year that Warren’s book appeared, Leon F. Litwack’s North of Slavery offered a relentless account of white northern Negrophobia and Black persecution—of a racial order virtually unchallenged by whites and only rarely challenged by Blacks, in which, by the end of the 1850s, “change did not seem imminent.”
A few years later, in a prominent essay that relied heavily on Litwack’s book, Warren’s friend and fellow southern liberal C. Vann Woodward laid out the case that northerners’ loyalty to white supremacy doomed Reconstruction. A string of similar studies on the antebellum period fol-lowed, attributing white antislavery opinion, especially in the Midwest, to the desires of racists to prevent slavery’s expansion and keep their own parts of the country lily-white. More recent scholarship has described New England as so disfigured by racism that by the 1850s, local Blacks lived as “permanent strangers whose presence was unaccountable and whose claims to citizenship were absurd.” Although the term “whiteness” only came into usage decades later, everywhere in the country, it seemed, across the political spectrum and on both sides of the slavery issue, whiteness and its elevation animated American life.That view, however, has always had its critics, and recently a growing current of historical scholarship has, from diverse viewpoints, described northern racial politics very differently, calling the larger, now fashionable racialist interpretation into serious question. These writings do not deny the harsh racist realities that Litwack and others forced historians to confront. If anything, continuing research into, among other topics, the racist mob violence unleashed on northern Blacks has made them appear all the more oppressive. But building on older studies of northern free Black communities and Black abolitionists, some historians have recovered a rich history of pre-war Black resistance to northern racism absent in earlier, bleaker accounts. Others have disputed what James Oakes has described as a presumed “racial consensus,” in which northern racism was as uniform as it was intense. In fact, long before the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison established his landmark newspaper, The Liberator, in 1831, and then long after, white self-styled abolitionists organized not simply to hasten slavery’s eradication but to battle formidable racist legislation with significant success. They did so explicitly in the name of securing civil and political equality.
The pre–Civil War North, it seems, was a landscape not of unremitting white supremacy but of persistent struggles over racial justice, inspired largely by the egalitarian ideas of the American Revolution, that were led by antiracist whites as well as Blacks and that actually overthrew anti-Black laws. These struggles helped in important ways to precipitate the war and culminated in the ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, described by Eric Foner, among others, as a “second founding” that revolutionized, Foner writes, “the status of blacks and the rights of all Americans.”
The crucial history of these antiracist politics, their connections to the triumph of American antislavery, and their influence on the rewriting of the Constitution after Emancipation are an enormous and, until now, largely untold story. Kate Masur’s Until Justice Be Done and Van Gosse’s The First Reconstruction go a long way toward telling it.
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