The Montgomery Advertiser January 14, 1868 gives an insight into what White Southern conservatives were fighting for during Reconstruction. It was “A White Man’s Government.”
I find a lot of uses of the slogan “A White Man’s Government” beginning in 1867, though the phrase has earlier origins.
Right after the Confederate surrender, state legislatures were dominated by white Southerners who had served in the Confederate armies or who had supported the Confederacy as civilians. The legislatures were elected by all-white electorates and blacks were completely unefranchised. These “White” state governments passed the infamous Black Codes in the first year of Reconstruction that essentially imposed restrictions on black life that were little better than slavery. The Congressional reaction to the Black Codes and white terror directed at former slaves led to the prospect that the days of the “White Man’s Government” might be coming to an end. The threat to previously unchallenged white supremacy led Southern pundits to defend their race’s exclusive domination of government.
In reading the Weekly Advertiser’s defense of white supremacy, you will note that the author sees the most radical aspect of the Radical Republicans’ agenda as being the granting of citizenship to blacks and the elimination of the color bar on voting.
In the next section, the author, says that the Southern whites were already punished enough for rebelling against the government of United States by the “destruction of four biillions of dollars of property in a day.” What that phrase refers to is the emancipation of the slaves, said to be worth four billion dollars.
In the last paragraph, the author holds out the possibility that a white controlled legislature might someday confer voting rights on blacks who meet unspecified education and property qualifications. When blacks were stripped of voting rights during the Jim Crow Era, many Southern states claimed that they were only imposing impartial education and property qualifications. These essentailly kept black people from the polls.
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