THE LAWRENCE F. BREWSTER

Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis,
and America's Racial Future

Presented by Paul D. Escott

November 2001

EAST CAROLINA UNIVERSITY

GREENVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA 27858-4353

Foreword

Each year the Department of History of East Carolina University sponsors the Lawrence F. Brewster Lecture in History. The Department sponsored the first Brewster Lecture in 1982 as part of the University’s seventy-fifth anniversary celebration and has published the lectures since 1984. The series bears the name of the late Professor Emeritus of History whose generosity supports the series, the Department, and the discipline at large.

The lecture series seeks to achieve four essential goals: to provide students, faculty, and members of the community with the opportunity to hear distinguished historians share their knowledge and mastery of the discipline; to stimulate an exchange of idea and a continuing dialogue about issues of fundamental importance; to illuminate the present through the reflective prism of the past; and to support a critical requirement of modern times—the continuing process of education.

Professor Paul D. Escott delivered the twentieth Brewster Lecture on November 8, 2001. Escott is the Reynolds Professor of History and the Dean of Wake Forest College at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He is a specialist in the history of the American South, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Professor Escott received his Ph.D. from Duke University and taught at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte before going to Wake Forest in 1988. His numerous publications include After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978); Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1979); Many Excellent People: Power and Privilege in North Carolina, 1850-1900 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985); and with Jeffrey J. Crow and Flora J. Hatley, A History of African Americans in North Carolina (Raleigh: Division of Archives and History, 1992). He is also one of the authors of the American History textbook, A People and a Nation, currently in its fifth edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). Professor Escott has twice (1979 and 1985) won the Mayflower Cup, awarded for the best non-fiction book written in North Carolina.

Michael A. Palmer, Chair
Department of History

What was at stake in the Civil War? The answer, of course, is fundamental matters: the unity and survival of the nation; slavery and its role in our nation’s law, economy, and society; and the future of race relations in this country.

These facts – and slavery’s intimate connection to all of them – were clear to the leaders of both sections at the time. They frankly acknowledged the nexus of crucial issues that surrounded slavery. On the Confederate side Alexander H. Stephens proudly declared that the Confederacy’s “foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man,” and Jefferson Davis, as he left the United States Senate, explained that Mississippi “has heard proclaimed the theory that all men are created free and equal, and this made the basis of an attack upon her social institutions.” In the North, Abraham Lincoln observed in his Second Inaugural Address that “All knew that this interest [the slavery interest] was somehow the cause of the war.” The U.S. Supreme Court, glancing back in 1873 to the recent conflict, affirmed that “African slavery” was the “overshadowing and efficient cause” of the war. Later many southerners would dispute (and continue to dispute) this assertion, but to the modern historian, the centrality of slavery to the issues of the Civil War is not in doubt.¹

What would come after slavery? This lecture will focus not on slavery, nor on wartime debates about its future and the preservation of the Union, but on that other fundamental issue posed by the war: the future of race relations in the United States. I propose to address that question by analyzing the statements of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. How did the leaders of the two governments lead in regard to the future of race relations? Months and years before the Civil War came to an end, both governments confronted the likelihood that slavery would not be part of America’s postwar future. How did the two American presidents conceive of this future? What did Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis do to influence public opinion on this issue?

Let me offer one disclaimer. It is not my purpose to criticize nineteenth century leaders by applying twenty-first century standards to their thoughts. It is all too easy to fault those who lived 150 years ago if we attempt to judge them in a manner we would not like to see applied to ourselves. But the actions of individual leaders can reveal a larger pattern, and it is the job of historians to offer a perspective on the past. I think it is worthwhile to ask these questions in order to understand our nation’s history and character, to appreciate more fully where we have been and how the past has shaped the present.

Let us begin with Abraham Lincoln. Any analysis of Lincoln’s acts and words as president leads to an unavoidable conclusion: whatever his contributions were in regard to slavery and the survival of the nation, President Lincoln said very little about the future of race relations in America. Before 1863 he repeatedly urged the colonization of black people elsewhere, which would remove the issue, and he clung to this hope well into 1864. Even after he acknowledged that black and white Americans would be living together in freedom, he did little to lead public opinion on that relationship. Search his collected writings and speeches, and you will find next to nothing about the nation’s racial future. As President, Lincoln spoke often about slavery and the preservation of the Union. The great majority of historians who have written about him have focused on those words, praising Lincoln as the Great Emancipator, though others have pointed out that his record, even on slavery, was sometimes equivocal. But in regard to race relations and the future of black Americans after emancipation, President Lincoln was nearly silent. As I will show, it is almost impossible to escape the conclusion that he avoided talking about the future of race relations or chose not to place this issue on the national agenda.

Yet Lincoln’s prewar statements were rich in ideas with far-reaching implications for race relations, and this fact makes his wartime reticence even more significant. As an architect of the Republican Party and as a candidate for President, Lincoln articulated values that had great significance for race relations. Repeatedly his words and speeches linked the future status of African-Americans to potent concepts of social mobility and to core values in the Declaration of Independence. Although it is well known that Lincoln refused to advocate social and political equality for black people before the war, he raised questions that pointed in that direction and caught the attention of abolitionists and reformers. Let’s examine his prewar positions.

The power of Lincoln’s ideas and their potent implications for race relations were apparent in his Peoria speech of 1854. In this speech the former one-term congressman from Illinois first stepped onto the national stage to oppose the Kansas-Nebraska bill and question the direction of government policy. While Lincoln absolved southerners from responsibility “for the origin of slavery” and said of the slaves, “We can not then, make them equals,” he also called slavery a “monstrous injustice” and spoke of freedom as the central value of the American nation. He charged that the “covert real zeal for the spread of slavery . . . deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world . . . causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and . . . forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty – criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.”² He also argued that

The doctrine of self-government is right absolutely and eternally right – but it has no just application, as here attempted. Or perhaps I should rather say that whether it has such just application depends upon whether a negro is not or is a man. If he is not a man, why in that case, he who is a man may, as a matter of self-government, do just as he pleases with him. But if the negro is a man, is it not to that extent, a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself? When the white man governs himself that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self- government – that is despotism. If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that “all men are created equal;” and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.³

In speeches in 1860 he was still insisting that the Declaration of Independence has “application to the negro” and criticizing the Democrats for “taking man from his kind and placing him among the brutes.” To northerners, he declared, “it appears natural to think that slaves are human beings; men, not property; that some of the things, at least, stated about men in the Declaration of Independence apply to them as well as to us.” He even argued that the idea of a struggle between whites and Negroes was a falsehood designed “to degrade and brutalize the negro.” “There is no struggle between them.”⁵

Another key element of Lincoln’s prewar rhetoric was an ideal of social mobility that had far-reaching implications for race relations. Almost as much as the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln emphasized opportunity and the need for government to promote and safeguard individual opportunity. On many occasions he limited this opportunity to white people, especially those who wanted to move into the territories, but not always. One of his great themes was that “There is no permanent class of hired laborers amongst us. . . . The hired laborer of yesterday, labors on his own account to-day; and will hire others to labor for him tomorrow.” In New Haven, Connecticut, in 1860, he declared, “We do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else. . . . I want every man to have the chance – and I believe a black man is entitled to it – in which he can better his condition.”⁶

Only a few months later, when he made his famous statement that the war was “a People’s contest,” Lincoln identified his cause with a form of government “whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men – to lift artificial weights from all shoulders – to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all – to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”⁷ This ideal not only resonated with the thinking of voters throughout the expanding, free-labor economy of the North but also offered a basis for visualizing race relations after slavery. At a minimum, Lincoln’s rhetoric had clearly suggested that African Americans, as human beings, could enjoy basic rights and have an opportunity to raise themselves as much as their abilities and efforts would allow.

These ideas did not totally disappear from Lincoln’s wartime speeches and writings, but when President Lincoln returned to them, he limited their application to the themes of ending slavery and preserving the Union. As the postwar world drew closer, he said less about America’s racial future. In four years of presidential leadership, Lincoln made only three direct and explicit comments favorable to the postwar status of African Americans, and only two of these were public statements.

First, in his annual message to Congress on December 1, 1862, Lincoln argued briefly against economic fear of free black workers. His message emphasized the advantages of a long delay in making voluntary, gradual, compensated emancipation final, and then Lincoln affirmed “that I strongly favor colonization.” At that point, however, he called the popular objection to black people remaining in the United States “largely imaginary, if not sometimes malicious.” This was so, Lincoln argued, because the freeing of African Americans would not take away the jobs of white people. The total number of jobs in the country would remain the same, and if black people chose to do less labor in freedom than under coercion, wages for white workers would increase. Moreover, he predicted that black workers would remain in the South “till new homes can be found for them, in congenial climes, and with people of their own blood and race,” and, he asked, “in any event, cannot the north decide for itself, whether to receive them?”⁸ These statements were hardly a prescription for freedom with equality or even economic opportunity.

Second, in a private and confidential letter to Michael Hahn, the governor of Lincoln’s wartime Unionist regime in Louisiana, the president wrote,

I barely suggest for your private consideration, whether some of the colored people may not be let in [to the franchise] – as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks.⁹

Aside from these three statements, the record shows that President Lincoln purposely declined many opportunities to speak to the future of race relations in the United States. Like Theodore Roosevelt, who rejoiced that his high office gave him a “bully pulpit,” Abraham Lincoln recognized the power of the presidency for communication. It gave him daily opportunities to speak to the public and thus to influence and shape public opinion. But for Lincoln, unlike Roosevelt, this fact induced caution. “Every word is so closely noted,” he remarked as early as 1862, that “it is hardly proper for me to make speeches.” “It will not do,” he said, to make poorly prepared or “trivial” speeches. In 1864 and 1865, as the end of the war approached, groups often wrote to or called on the president, and many opportunities arose to speak to serenaders, delegations, or organizations. Repeatedly and consistently, Lincoln turned down those opportunities, explaining that “necessarily, in consequence of his position, everything went into print.” Thus he chose not to enlarge his message or communicate more thoroughly with the public.¹¹

Why did he pass up these opportunities? The political price of taking a bold stand would have been high. The Democratic Party used racial prejudice as one of its main weapons against President Lincoln, and opposition to emancipation (even as a necessary means to win the war) was strong. The legislature of Lincoln’s own state, Illinois, had greeted his Emancipation Proclamation with a resolution denouncing his action as

a gigantic usurpation, at once converting the war, professedly commenced by the administration for the vindication of the authority of the constitution, into the crusade for the sudden,unconditional and violent liberation of 3,000,000 negro slaves; a result which would not only be a total subversion of the Federal Union but a revolution in the social organization of the Southern States, the . . . consequences of which to both races cannot be contemplated without the most dismal foreboding of horror and dismay.¹²

But the record also shows that Lincoln’s concern for this profoundly important subject simply was not acute. In contrast to his near silence on the future of race relations, Lincoln spoke often about the ending of slavery, and his commitment to colonization and gradualism stands out. Clearly he hoped that problems of race relations might be avoided by creating an all-white America. Beginning in 1861, he argued to Congress that purchasing new territory in order to colonize southern freedmen and northern free blacks “in a climate congenial to them” could be justified constitutionally as an “absolute necessity.”¹⁴ In the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation he promised that, “the effort to colonize persons of African descent, with their consent, upon this continent or elsewhere . . . will be continued.” He pursued this idea actively through 1864, long after its impracticality and its unpopularity with black people became clear. So sure was he of the desirability of separating the races that when he spoke to a group of black leaders about separation he criticized any African American who might prefer to stay in the United States as taking “an extremely selfish view of the case.”¹⁵

By 1865 Lincoln seemed less focused on colonization and was ready to advocate that at least a few African Americans should be able to enjoy the rights of citizens. But even then it seems that he anticipated a long period of social adjustment and slow progress in race relations. His thoughts on postwar race relations retained the stamp of his plans for gradual emancipation. In his first draft of such a plan, presented to members of the legislature of Delaware, President Lincoln stated his preference for a schedule that would not eliminate slavery until 1893. Consistently and repeatedly he recommended a gradual process, praising an even longer delay of thirty-seven years – until 1900 – in his annual message to Congress of December 1, 1862. Delay, he argued, would avoid, “the evils of sudden derangement” and “the vagrant destitution which must largely attend immediate emancipation . . . .” At the Hampton Roads conference, with victory only weeks away, Lincoln suggested to Alexander Stephens that Georgia ratify the Thirteenth Amendment “prospectively, so as to take effect – say in five years.” This suggestion revealed, again, that although Lincoln was determined that slavery must come to an end, he did not anticipate a rapid improvement in the social condition of African Americans.¹⁶

During the Hampton Roads conference Lincoln also offered his support for an indemnity of $400,000,000 “for the loss to owners.” Back in Washington he actually proposed the indemnity to his Cabinet. The idea of an indemnity was part of a larger plan that the Cabinet “unanamously [sic] disapproved.” Lincoln had drafted a Joint Resolution that he might propose to the Congress. Under this resolution the President would be empowered to pay to the slaveholding states (those claimed by the Confederacy plus Delaware, Maryland, and West Virginia) $400,000,000 in two installments: one-half if “all resistance to national authority” ceased by April 1, 1865; and the second half on the condition that the recently proposed Thirteenth Amendment would become “valid law” by July 1, 1865.¹⁷

What does this proposal reveal about Lincoln’s thought? Clearly he hoped that financial payments to slaveholders would help to end the war and encourage acceptance of the Thirteenth Amendment. But he was not going to insist on that acceptance from all the Confederate states. Under his plan northern states could have provided nearly all of the twenty-seven votes necessary for ratification of a constitutional amendment. If the North gave its support, as many as nine states of the Confederacy could have refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment. Lincoln would have allowed those nine states to enter the post-slavery era while ignoring or rejecting a constitutional proposal of profound importance. In these circumstances, given the hostility of white Confederates to the idea of emancipation, one would have little reason to expect rapid improvement in the social status of African Americans in the South.¹⁸ Probably Lincoln, as he considered the future of race relations in America, did not expect dramatic progress. The record is clear: he did not argue that it was important. He avoided both advocacy and specifics.

Jefferson Davis’s approach to the fundamental issues of the war was different in almost every respect. The Confederacy’s President dedicated himself to establishing the South’s independence, whereas Lincoln placed the restoration of the Union above all other goals and even denied that a southern nation existed. For much of the war Jefferson Davis said very little about slavery, whereas Lincoln repeatedly advocated some plan of gradual, compensated emancipation by the states. And in regard to the future of race relations, there emerged at the end of the war a stark difference between the two leaders. Davis was definite and explicit where Lincoln was silent or tentative. Taken together, their positions tell us much about the racial landscape of America in 1865.

No issue separated these two leaders more completely than the question of one nation or two. When Jefferson Davis arrived in Montgomery, Alabama, as president-elect of the Confederate States, his first public act was to reject any thought of reunion. “The time for compromise [has] passed,” he declared. “Our separation from the old Union is complete. NO COMPROMISE: NO RECONSTRUCTION CAN NOW BE ENTERTAINED.”¹⁹ Davis argued that the differences between the sections were too great to allow reunion, and thereafter he steadfastly argued that the Confederacy must gain its independence. Even at the end of the war, when defeat was imminent and compromise proved enticing to many southerners, Davis blocked discussions that might lead to some settlement short of independence.²⁰

On slavery, Jefferson Davis consciously chose to say almost nothing during his first year as President. Because he was aware that slavery was unpopular abroad and could be divisive at home along lines separating the classes, Davis avoided that subject and stressed unifying themes instead. Initially, the heart of his message was that the Confederacy had become the true embodiment of American constitutional principles, which the United States had abandoned. All southerners, even those who had loved the Union, could unite in upholding the principles of the Revolutionary fathers. These constitutional principles applied to white men only, for as Davis had said in the Senate, “the theory that all men were created free and equal” could not threaten the South’s “social institutions.” Later, as the fortunes of the Confederacy darkened, Davis spoke of slavery in a different context. He warned southerners that they must fight harder in order to avoid becoming “the slaves of the most depraved and intolerant and tyrannical and hated people upon earth.”²¹ Then, in the last months of the war, Davis had startlingly new things to say about slavery.

Demoralization on the homefront and defeat on the battlefield fed each other alarmingly. The strength of Confederate arms dwindled, and it became obvious that the Confederacy had to find more soldiers. Faced with the prospect of defeat, Jefferson Davis believed there was no choice. Defeat meant subjugation and the emancipation of slaves by the United States. If the Confederacy armed and emancipated its own slaves, however, it might yet achieve its goal of independence. As Davis told the Confederate Congress, “Should the alternative ever be presented of subjugation or of the employment of the slave as a soldier, there seems no reason to doubt what should then be our decision.”²² Therefore, he proposed, initially, that the Confederacy purchase 40,000 slaves and use them as military laborers. Davis argued that “emancipation [should] be held out” to these slaves “as a reward for faithful service” along with “permission” from their home states to reside there “after the close of [their] public service.” Soon he urged that the government accept for service as soldiers slave volunteers who would be freed by their masters and allowed to return to their homes after the war.²³

This proposal was remarkable in slaveholding Confederate society, and it proved incredible to many individual Confederates. Davis was absolutely clear, however, as were his allies in this initiative. General Robert E. Lee minced no words. On February 18, 1865, he went on the public record declaring that the use of slaves as soldiers was “not only expedient but necessary” and that freedom must be the reward for military service. “It would be neither just nor wise,” Lee stated, “to require them to serve as slaves,” and he advocated calling for volunteers “with the condition of emancipation to all enrolled.” Almost a month earlier, in a letter to a Virginia legislator, he argued for “giving immediate freedom to all who enlist, and freedom at the end of the war to the families of those who discharge their duties faithfully (whether they survive or not), together with the privilege of residing at the South. To this might be added a bounty for faithful service.” In fact, Lee favored “securing the efficiency and fidelity” of black soldiers by implementing “a well-digested plan of gradual and general emancipation.” Governor William Smith of Virginia assured Jefferson Davis that he would ask the state legislature to provide “for manumission of the slaves put into the army by purchase or otherwise, and . . . a distinct pledge that the Slave, upon his honorable discharge, shall be permitted to live at home.” Davis then informed Lee that he had “prepared a circular letter to the governors of the States invoking their aid, as well by appeals to the owners as by recommendations to the legislatures, to make the most liberal provisions for those who volunteer to fight for the safety and independence of the State.”²⁴

By advocating freedom for the families of black soldiers and mentioning a general emancipation, the Davis administration raised the question of post-war race relations. On this subject the Confederate leader had a plan, one that was quite specific and explicit. Judah Benjamin, Davis’s closest Cabinet adviser, revealed the administration’s position in a letter late in December 1864 to an ally in South Carolina. After obtaining the services of slaves and emancipating them,

The next step will then be that the States, each for itself, shall act upon the question of the proper status of the families of the men so manumitted. Cautious legislation providing for their ultimate emancipation after an intermediate stage of serfage or peonage would soon find advocates in different States. We might then be able, while vindicating our faith in the doctrine that the negro is an inferior race and unfitted for social or political equality with the white man, yet so modify and ameliorate the existing condition of that inferior race by providing for it certain rights of property, a certain degree of personal liberty, and legal protection for the marital and parental relations, as to relieve our institutions from much that is not only unjust and impolitic in itself, but calculated to draw down on us the odium and reprobation of civilized man.²⁵

Yet the Confederacy’s bitter debate revealed that Jefferson Davis and his opponents shared certain assumptions, and this commonality among foes points to one of the deepest values in white southern society. The contest over Davis’s proposals was rather limited in scope. It dealt with little beyond the pros and cons of arming the slaves, and many elements of the administration’s thinking attracted little public discussion. There were some Confederates, on the one hand, who concluded that desperate times required desperate measures, indeed; they tended to support the arming and emancipation of slaves with little comment on what would come afterward. Others rejected all of Davis’s ideas because the use of slaves as soldiers was unthinkable.

One of the most succinct opponents was Georgia’s Howell Cobb. He called the proposal to arm slaves “the most pernicious idea that has been suggested since the war began” and said he was mortified to learn that General Lee supported the plan. “You cannot make soldiers of slaves,” Cobb wrote. Moreover, “If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” Here Cobb identified the crux of many objections. The Richmond Examiner agreed that

The existence of a negro soldier is totally inconsistent with our political aim and with our social as well as political system. We surrender our position whenever we introduce the Negro to arms. If a negro is fit to be a soldier, he is not fit to be a slave, and if any large portion of the race is fit for free labour – fit to live and to be useful under the competitive system of labour – then the whole race is fit for it.

On the idea of racial inferiority, Jefferson Davis and his opponents, unfortunately, agreed. The Confederate President and his administration rejected any thought of social or political equality. Its plans for the future were based, as Judah Benjamin had put it, on “our faith in the doctrine that the negro is an inferior race and unfitted for . . . equality with the white man,” and had the Confederacy prevailed, the “intermediate stage of serfage or peonage” before eventual emancipation might have been very long lasting. Davis’s opponents differed only in that they held so strongly to their racism that anything less than slavery was abhorrent to them. Thus, while a battle raged over whether slaves should be armed and emancipated after serving as soldiers, the Confederate administration could speak in definite terms about the future of race relations. On the central idea – white dominance – both Jefferson Davis and his opponents could agree.

How then do we compare the leaders of the two governments in their approach to the future of race relations? How did they lead, what did they envision, and how did they deal with public opinion? Jefferson Davis could be explicit and clear because he shared his region’s virulent racism. He led with great boldness, he described a future of gradual change and harsh discrimination, and he worked quite openly to challenge slavery but confirm racist public opinion. Abraham Lincoln, in contrast, provided little or no leadership, described a future of gradual change and substantial discrimination, and avoided the challenge of influencing public opinion. Where Davis was clear, Lincoln was ambiguous or evasive. Why? The answer is inescapable: because he shared his region’s only slightly less virulent racism, or, if he did not share it, because he was saw no compelling reason to run the risks of confronting it.

The nation’s political leaders reflected the state of dominant white opinion in their regions. Thus, their actions can and do reveal a larger pattern, one that is largely ignored in our civic culture but highly relevant to our present and future. Our culture celebrates the Civil War and tends to emphasize the great things it accomplished. In many ways the war did bring immense change; it resolved some great and difficult questions. It preserved the nation’s unity and brought about the end of legally sanctioned slavery. But it scarcely addressed the third great issue of the era: the future of race relations. American society and its leaders failed to grapple with the challenges of equality. Our country’s leaders failed to lead in race relations because they were participants in a larger underlying pattern.

The sickness of racism was deeply entrenched in America as the Civil War came to an end. It blighted the thought and crippled the assumptions of that entire generation, and its influence was profound in both North and South. In the defeated South, Confederates remained adamant in support of doctrines of racial inferiority. Those who had opposed any tampering with slavery were bitter over emancipation, and even the supporters of Jefferson Davis’s proposals entered the postwar world determined to maintain the subordination of black people. White southerners had many different interests, but they were united in their racism and unapologetic about their views. As a region the South had few advocates for change – and no groups among whites who would fight for black equality and enlarge the public dialogue with dissenting views.

White northerners were not so monolithic, but racist attitudes dominated. As a group, northerners could not answer Lincoln’s question – Is the Negro a man? – in the affirmative. Most whites viewed the achievement of emancipation as enough, or more than enough, to discharge their responsibilities toward black Americans. Advocates of greater racial progress were few, and the North proved glad, as Lincoln had foreseen, not to receive an influx of freedmen. Northern churches, it is true, provided educational and social aid to former slaves in the South, and for a time the political desire to punish southern intransigence mobilized support for black suffrage. But these forces faded. The North lacked a vibrant source of support for improvement in race relations.

In this setting a grim future was predictable. The African American minority had to fend for itself against the enormous weight and inertia of centuries of racist thought and racist social and economic arrangements. The result was a sad legacy of discrimination and oppression.

One generation after Appomattox, the fruits of failure were evident in two events, separated by many miles but equally rich in symbolism. In 1884 there appeared in the South an eloquent white advocate for African-Americans. George Washington Cable, writer and Confederate veteran, spoke out against the racial attitudes of the dominant white majority. The greatest barrier to fair treatment of blacks, he noted, was the idea that the freedman “is of necessity an alien . . . that the man of color must always remain an alien.” Against this idea reality had made little progress. “Generations of American nativity made no difference”; development and progress in the social and economic arenas gained no recognition. The reason, Cable concluded, was that American government rested on the idea of equal rights, whereas the southern social system rested on discrimination and inequality. Therefore, to preserve the “Southern social fabric” white southerners had to insist that the slave and the freedmen were “by nature and unalterably” inferior. Cable’s arguments were acute and compelling, and they won some praise from outside the region, but within the South they made his life difficult. Within a year this Louisianan had moved permanently to Massachusetts. Inveterate racism had made it too uncomfortable for him to remain.²⁸

In Massachusetts at that time a group of powerful men was working to memorialize racial progress and the quest for justice, yet the slow pace of their project aptly suggested the reluctance, evasion, and opposition that still characterized the North’s approach to equality. In 1863 a privileged young man named Robert Gould Shaw had taken command of the United States’ first black volunteer regiment, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. Some proper Bostonians pulled down their window shades in protest as this black regiment marched off to war. Less than two months later, Shaw and almost half of his men fell in battle at Fort Wagner, South Carolina. Efforts to memorialize Shaw’s death and the sacrifices of the regiment began immediately, and by 1865 supporters decided to commission a statue. Prominent men like John Murray Forbes and Edward Atkinson led the effort, but delay followed delay. Seventeen years passed without tangible result. Then, in 1882 the committee offered the assignment to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whose statue of Admiral David Farragut had established him as America’s premier sculptor. Yet, two more years elapsed before a contract was signed, and thirteen more years passed until the magnificent memorial – in high relief depicting Shaw on horseback beside the ranks of his marching men – was finished. Unveiled in 1897, the dedication of the statue followed by one year the nation’s momentous legal turn away from equality in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision.²⁹ As measured by the statue, progress was slow in the North, and then it went backward.

Looking at mid-twentieth-century Boston, the poet Robert Lowell saw a city preoccupied with less than noble endeavors. Lowell observed “yellow dinosaur steamshovels” gouging out an “underworld garage” almost beneath Saint Gauden’s statue and the nearby Statehouse.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,
shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s
earthquake.. . .
Their monument sticks like a fishbone
In the city’s throat.³⁰

Notes

1.    Alexander H. Stephens quoted in Robert F. Durden, The Gray and the Black: The Confederate Debate on Emancipation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), 7; Dunbar Rowland, ed., Jefferson Davis: Constitutionalist; His Letters, Papers, and Speeches, 10 vols. (Jackson, Miss.: Little & Ives Co., 1923), 5:43; James D. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 10 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1903), 6:276; Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873) at 68.

2.    Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 2:255-56, 266-67, and passim.

3.    Ibid., 265-66.

4.    Ibid., 501.

5.    Ibid., 4:4-5, 16, 20.

6.    Ibid., 3:462; 4:24. Lincoln repeated the theme of the first citation on various other occasions. For example, see ibid., 5:52.

7.    Ibid., 4:438.

8.    Ibid., 5:534-36.

9.    Ibid., 7:243.

10.    Ibid., 8:403.

11.    Ibid., 5:450; 7:388-89, 1-2, 197-98.

12.    Forrest G. Wood, Black Scare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); Henry Steele Commager, ed., Documents of American History, 7th ed., 2 vols. (New York: Appleton-Century Crotfts, 1963), 1:422.

13.    Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, 2:256. Lincoln also said at that time “My feelings will not admit of this [political and social equality].”

14.    Ibid., 5:48.

15.    Ibid., 5:434, 372.

16.    Ibid., 5:31, 144-46, 169, 317-19, 530-31; 6:291; Alexander Stephens, A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: National Publishing Company, 1870), 2:614-17.

17.    Ibid.; Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, 8:260-61.

18.    Ibid.

19.    Rowland, Jefferson Davis: Constitutionalist, 5:48.

20.    Edward Younger, ed., Inside the Confederate Government: The Diary of R. G. H. Kean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), 202; James D. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Confederacy, Including the Diplomatic Correspondence, 1861-1865, 2 vols. (Nashville: United States Publishing Company, 1906), 1:519.

21.    Paul D. Escott, After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978),36-40, 186; Rowland, Jefferson Davis: Constitutionalist, 5:43.

22.    Davis quoted in Durden, The Gray and the Black, 105.

23.    Ibid., 102-105 and passim.

24.    Ibid., 206-07, 208-09, 279, 281.

25.    Ibid., 182-183.

26.    Ibid., ch. 9.

27.    Ibid., 184, 108, 110, 112.

28.    George Washington Cable, The Negro Question: A Selection of Writings on Civil Rights in the South, ed. by Arlin Turner (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958), 60-61.

29.    Burke Wilkinson, Uncommon Clay: The Life and Works of Augustus Saint Gaudens (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1985), 279-87; Kathryn Greenthal, Augustus Saint-Gaudens: Master Sculptor (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985), 141-51.

30.    Robert Lowell, “For the Union Dead,” in Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964), 71.