Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates

When I purchased this new book by Henry Louis Gates, I assumed that it was the companion volume to his documentary “Reconstruction” recently shown on PBS. I thought that it would be the more scholarly, written version of the television program. It is not. This might disappoint some folks while it might encourage others to read it.

I usually don’t like to open a review by telling you what a book is not, but I think I have to in this case. This is not a comprehensive history of the Reconstruction Era, or of white supremacy, or of Jim Crow. It is an extended essay on topics within all three of those areas, but unlike the documentary, it is not a blow-by-blow account of any of them.

It is not an updating of Eric Foner’s Reconstruction or a substitute for his volume.

So there, we got that out of the way.

Gates says that his interest in Reconstruction goes back to a class he took during his student days at Yale. He took a course on Reconstruction with William S. McFeely. He had never studied Reconstruction in high school and he had never heard of the African Americans leaders who were so prominent during the Reconstruction years. He also learned about the failure of Reconstruction to conquer inequality and about the “Redemption” of the South by white supremacist politicians and terrorists.

The white Northern majority that favored ending slavery during the last years of the Civil War did not translate into solid national majorities for equality of the races after the war ended. White Northerners were capable of showing sympathy for freedpeople when they came under violent attack in the half decade after the war, passing Constitutional Amendments and civil rights legislation to protect African Americans. Many Southern whites worked through local legislation to restrict the rights of Black people and through terror to keep them from exercising the rights granted in Federal legislation.

Gates says that cotton production was central to slavery and it was just as central to Jim Crow. Far from being a declining commodity after the Civil War, worldwide cotton consumption doubled between 1860 and 1890. American slavery, says Gates, had been “the perfect fusion of race and class.” The agricultural workforce needed to produce it was defined by race and controlled through slavery. When slavery ended during the Civil War, “ways had to be found to reinvent and maintain the exploitation of black labor to sustain the modes of production on which the South’s profits were based.” (p. 16)

The main method to fight back against this hyperexploitation was through political organization in black communities and through a color-bling voting Amendment. Those seeking to maintain white supremacy understood that the most dangeous wedge African Americans could weild was the vote. If blacks could vote, they would force formerly all-white political parties to enter into alliances with the former slaves. Gates writes:

The power of the idea of universal suffrage to summon the forces of darkness buried deep in the white racist imaginary is a monstrous thing to behold from our vantage point today. In a masterful manifestation of both antiblack racism and antisuffrage sentiment, Colonel Pat Donan, the editor of a Lexington, Missouri, newspaper, declared, “No simian-souled, sooty skinned, kink-curled, blubber-lipped, prehensile-heeled, Ethiopian gorilla shall pollute the ballot box with his leprous vote.” (pp. 27-28)

Blacks held on to the vote as long as they could, even after all Federal troops were withdrawn from Reconstruction duties. By 1900, however, black voting was unknown in many parts of the South.

Gates does not only consider texts in his look at Reconstruction and the white supremacist resistance to it. He also incorporates many visual depictions of African Americans from various sources. Some are familiar political cartoons from Nast and other well-known artists. Some are less known today, but they display attitudes towards African Americans that many white people held, like this seemingly non-political cartoon below:

The doctrines of white supremacy were initially developed to support the economic ediface of slavery. Men who believed in human brotherhood and democracy needed a way to explain to themselves how they could be good and just and still hold others as property. The ideological framework would long outlast the institution of slavery, and it persists even today. Religious explanations were popular at first, but then race science became dominant.

The “great” scietist of the pre-Civil War period, Louis Agassiz of Harvard, would heartily endorse the idea that blacks were natually inferior to whites. Agassiz was himself a Swiss immigrant who was revolted by the very sight of African Americans. His personal disgust was translated into naturalist theory. Under Agassiz’s influence, Harvard would maintain a connection to racist scientific theories for decades.

In the 1850s, a time of expansion of slavery and of crisis in its popular support, more scietists emerged to defend the institution based of the science of race. The Richmond Examiner published an editorial explaining the science behind enslavement:

The true defence of negro slavery is to be sought in the sciences of ethnology and natural history. The last defines the negro to be the connecting link between the human and brute creation. . . . From the most powerful family of the white race, we proceed by regular steps to the lowest type of the dark race, which is the negro; and close to him we find the chimpanzee of his native country, the first step in what we call brute creation. The difference between the last of the one series and the first of the other, is not greater—hardly so great—as between the last and the first of the human family itself. (p. 64)

Science united with popular prejudice in defense of the monied interests of the South.

Frederick Douglass pushed back. Against the racism of white scientists he warned:

“When men oppress their fellow-men, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression.” (p. 63-64)

Gates quotes extensively from Frederick Douglass in his examination of the pre-war debate on white supremacy. To modern apologists who claim that “everyone” thought that slavery was morally acceptable, one only need read Douglass’s widely circulated words to know that this is a lie. For example, Gates quotes Douglass’s speech at Western Reserve:

“If the negro has the same right to his liberty and the pursuit of his own happiness that the White man has, then we commit the greatest wrong and robbery to hold him a slave—an act at which the sentiment of justice must revolt in every heart—and negro slavery is an institution which that sentiment must sooner or later blot from the face of the earth.”

Conclusion: