America Aflame (89 page)

For some blacks, that “moment” lasted longer. By 1870, blacks in the South owned $68,528,200 worth of property, an average estate of only $408 per owner, but an increase of 240 percent over 1860. By 1880, one in five black farmers in the South owned his farm; in the Upper South, it was one out of three. In Virginia, 43 percent of black farmers owned their farms—more than twice as many African American farm owners than there were in the entire South in 1860. It is true that many of these farms were small, less than half the average acreage of white farms; and it was also true that black farms were worth less per acre than white-owned acreage. It was an impressive showing, however, for a people recently out of bondage.
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More significant gains occurred in education. In 1865, less than 10 percent of southern blacks were literate. Five years later, that figure had climbed to 18.6 percent, but by 1890, 55 percent of southern blacks were literate. American blacks ranked far ahead of former slaves in other post-emancipation societies such as Trinidad, Haiti, and British Guiana. Black literacy rates compared favorably with some European countries as well. In 1900, Spain had a literacy rate of 37 percent, and Italy, 52 percent. When northern missionaries left due to fear or lack of funds, black teachers took over and schools persisted. By the early 1890s, there were 150 black newspapers in the South.
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These figures indicated that freedom itself was enough to hope; that adversity discouraged but did not paralyze the freedmen. Some considered emigration—to Liberia, Central America, or the Caribbean. Roughly twenty-five thousand blacks, “Exodusters,” they were called, emigrated to Kansas. These were small movements, however, born of great frustration. Most blacks stayed in the South, at least until race relations worsened in the 1890s and more opportunities opened in the North after the turn of the twentieth century.
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For all the advances, however, the sense of betrayal prevailed, not only for the lost promise of equal citizenship but also for the memory of Reconstruction. It was not enough that whites succeeded in subjugating blacks in politics and on the job; the prevailing memory of Reconstruction justified those positions. “Yankee oppression and black misrule” summarized the white memory of the era. The constitutional amendments, the presence of federal troops, and the disfranchisement of some whites provided the evidence for oppression. The courts, however, severely restricted the application of the amendments to black civil and voting rights; most federal troops were on the Plains, not in the South—at the time of the Hamburg massacre, Governor Chamberlain could call upon ten federal soldiers in the vicinity; and only a small proportion of the white electorate was affected by suffrage restrictions, which, in any case, were lifted in 1872. Black misrule is even a weaker argument, as African Americans formed a majority in only one state legislature. What whites objected to was black freedom, the right to vote, the right to hold office, to serve on juries, in short, to exercise their rights as citizens. Remembering Reconstruction as a “Tragic Era” had significant policy and social consequences. It froze white thinking on the subject and justified continued restrictions on black suffrage and civil rights. Dissent from the prevailing view was an attack on redemption, and an attack on redemption was an attack against faith and heritage.
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On February 16, 1916, a group of white leaders gathered for a ceremony in North Augusta, South Carolina, formerly known as Hamburg, the site of a deadly confrontation forty years earlier. They had come to dedicate a monument to Thomas McKie Merriweather, the only white man killed during that event. Daniel S. Henderson, a state legislator from the district, addressed the crowd: “We are to Unveil today a Monument, erected by the General Assembly of the State and admiring friends to the memory of one who shed the first blood that started that revolution of 1876, which redeemed the Palmetto State from the yoke of the African and the stranger, and which established beyond a question that this is a white man's country, to be ruled by white men forever.” By 1916, stone and bronze tributes to the Confederacy and the Redemption covered the southern landscape. Blacks were as absent in these representations as they were in the meaningful participation in southern life.
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There were opposing views. Blacks, Frederick Douglass understood, fought a losing battle of memory, but he urged them to fight with words for what they could not win with arms. “Well the nation may forget,” he noted in 1888, “it may shut its eyes to the past, and frown upon any who may do otherwise, but the colored people of this country are bound to keep the past in lively memory till justice shall be done them.” The compulsion for national reconciliation created a moral equivalency that buried the injustices of Reconstruction and the causes of the war. On Memorial Day 1893, a black newspaper in Kansas asked its readers:

Why should we praise the gray, and blue,

And honor them alike?

The one was false, the other true—

One wrong, the other right.
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John R. Lynch, a black former Mississippi congressman, wrote
The Facts of Reconstruction
(1913) to counter the prevailing white interpretations. He was, after all, an eyewitness to the era's events. Congressional Reconstruction, he wrote, was not a crime but a plan that “could have saved to the country the fruits of the victory that had been won on the battlefield.” That it did not succeed was less the fault of the freedmen than of the violent resistance of the South's white population. Two decades later, W. E. B. DuBois published his extensive study of the period,
Black Reconstruction
(1935), taking issue especially with the characterization of southern Republican governments as corrupt and incompetent. These works of careful scholarship did not change national public opinion, or the views of white professional historians. Two years after Lynch's book appeared, D. W. Griffith's film
The Birth of a Nation
thrilled audiences across the country with its story of redemption and reconciliation. One year after the publication of DuBois's study, Margaret Mitchell's
Gone with the Wind
became an instant bestseller, and three years later, one of the most popular motion pictures of all time. In Mitchell's defense, she had read thoroughly the works of leading historians of the era, and the book reflected the latest white scholarship on the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Harper's
recognized, as early as 1873, what would become a chronic frustration for blacks and the interpretation of Reconstruction: “The colored race has never yet been permitted to tell its wrongs.” That was true well into the next century.
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Though most northerners willingly adopted and even enhanced the southern memory of the war and the Reconstruction era, some refused to acquiesce in this alchemy. Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, who had grown to adulthood during the Reconstruction era, recalled the great optimism in the North in the decade after the war. He decried, however, the tendency of northerners to accept uncritically the southern perspective on the war and Reconstruction. “We should think ill of the Southern people if they did not” cherish their own institutions and patriots, but “that which is most praiseworthy in Southerners is discreditable in a Northerner.”
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Most northerners cherished the manufactured South precisely because it was not the North: a genteel, rural, homogeneous, and harmonious region of languid days and starry nights where people moved as softly as the breeze on a summer evening and where paternalism counted more than profit. It was a docile South, uncompetitive economically and unthreatening politically. If the North represented Reason, the South was Romance. Northerners shared, however, the racial beliefs of southern whites. The immigrants, outspoken women, and discontented workers in their midst provided the flash of recognition of how it was to live among an inferior population.

Travel guides prepared by northerners depicted the South as a stage set, a foreign land with hospitable people and quaint customs. Take a train journey south and see “the negro huts along the way, with a grinning turbaned colored woman standing in each doorway.” Such a scene “apprises the Northerner that he is certainly ‘right smart down South.'” Southern women were more beautiful and comely than their northern counterparts.
Cosmopolitan
writer Marion Baker criticized “the masculinity and independence of too many Northern women,” finding them “less charming, less womanly” than their southern sisters. Another editor rhapsodized, “The young ladies of the South are, with very few exceptions, beautiful, and we see no sickly, ugly or consumptive-looking females, such as are to be found in all similar gatherings in the North.” Only when tens of thousands of northerners came south during World War II and when African Americans began to protest for their rights as Americans did America scrape away the fairy-tale veneer to expose an ugly, festering secret of racial bigotry, economic stagnation, political repression, and religious self-righteousness.
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Robert Penn Warren called the memory of the South's victimization in the war and Reconstruction “the Great Alibi,” an excuse white southerners offered for their poverty, ignorance, and peculiar race relations. The war and the Reconstruction provided the white South with the cover to restore a facsimile of the Old South, and the North obliged. Even New South promoters such as D. A. Tompkins and Richard H. Edmonds acknowledged the seamlessness between Old and New Souths. Edmonds chided those who wondered if “the New South is a new creation altogether different from the Old South.” Such views, Edmonds argued, were completely false. Using the Darwinian rhetoric familiar to his time, he asserted, “The South of today is no novel creation. It is an evolution.” Edmonds's preferred phrase for the South after the war was the “revived South.”
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Not all white southerners adhered to the redemption myth, though they dissented at their peril. Ellen Glasgow, the noted novelist from Richmond, came of age in the late nineteenth century when the myth attained full bloom. She knew it was a lie. “I hated—I had always hated—the inherent falseness in much Southern tradition.” The South was a society of appearances. If the North represented itself as the paragon of reality, the South was a dream province. No less a southern heroine than Varina Howell Davis, the wife of the former Confederate president, recognized the skewed memories of the war and its aftermath. “Between us,” she confided to Mary Chesnut, “no one is so tired of Confederate history as the Confederates—they do not want to tell the truth or to hear it.”
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By the time of Hayes's inauguration in March 1877, the nation was moving out of the economic depression. A bitter and violent railroad strike throughout the Northeast and Midwest later that year highlighted the persistent discontent as well as the solid anti-labor stance of the urban middle classes, the press, and the pulpit. America, to borrow a Carnegie metaphor, was thundering forward to the future, and those who would not or could not come aboard could only blame themselves.

Walt Whitman composed “Song of the Exposition” in 1871. The managers of the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia appropriated parts of it for the printed program, as it exemplified the fair's buoyant optimism, its nationalistic tenor, and its emphasis on the great abundance of the land and the inventiveness of its people.

And thou America,

Thy offspring towering e'er so high, yet higher Thee above all towering,

With Victory on thy left, and at thy right hand Law;

Thou Union holding all, fusing, absorbing, tolerating all,

Thee, ever thee, I sing.…

Mark, thy interminable farms, North, South,

Thy wealthy daughter-states, Eastern and Western,

The varied products of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Georgia, Texas, and the rest,

Thy limitless crops, grass, wheat, sugar, oil, corn, rice, hemp, hops,

Thy barns all fill'd, the endless freight-train and the bulging store-house,

The grapes that ripen on thy vines, the apples in thy orchards,

Thy incalculable lumber, beef, pork, potatoes, thy coal, thy gold and silver,

The inexhaustible iron in thy mines.

All thine O sacred Union!

Ships, farms, shops, barns, factories, mines,

City and State, North, South, item and aggregate …
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The managers invited Whitman to the fair, and he came. He visited all of the major buildings and enjoyed himself immensely. Machinery Hall fascinated him the most, and, after he had toured the grounds, Whitman returned to gaze once again on the massive Corliss steam engine. It was a revelation. A visitor, just like Whitman, had stood before it and expressed his faith that here were embodied America's ideals, a fitting centennial symbol. “Yes, it is still in these things of iron and steel that the national genius most freely speaks.” And again: “Surely here … is true evidence of man's creative power; here is Prometheus unbound.”
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Whitman walked up to the engine and climbed onto the platform. Borrowing a chair from the mechanic, he sat in front of the meshing gears and thrusting pistons and worshiped. For thirty minutes, he did not move but sat agape in front of this metal god atop its altar. Whitman marveled at the repetitive, efficient movements dispensing power as a god would do. The poet saw America's future. The new nation as a mighty machine powering prosperity and generating opportunity for anyone who could harness its energy. America, realizing the promise of its creation, heralding a century of untrammeled progress.
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