Adam Serwer at The Atlantic Magazine has an interesting article this week on the persistent American idea that only white people are capable of governing themselves. The article was inspired by the racist conversation made public last month between Ronald Reagan and Dick Nixon in which they denigrate African diplomats but it focuses on the same attitudes in the Reconstruction Era.
Serwer writes:
When the former abolitionist Horace Greeley turned against Reconstruction, he nearly took the whole country with him.
The powerful owner of the New-York Tribune was once a reliable Republican partisan. But in the May 1871 issue of the Tribune, an anonymous correspondent attacked the Reconstruction government in South Carolina as emblematic of other Republican-controlled state legislatures throughout the South, a place where black Americans, “a class just released from slavery, and incompetent, without guidance, to exercise the simplest duties of citizenship,” had become “the governing class in South Carolina, and a class more totally unfit to govern does not exist upon the face of the earth.”
Those words reflected Greeley’s own views, according to the historian Eric Foner, who writes in Reconstruction that Greeley saw black people as an “easy, worthless race, taking no thought for the morrow.”
Although he expressed them as an attack on the governing abilities of the freedmen, Greeley’s true objections were ideological, as the historian Heather Cox Richardson writes in Death of Reconstruction. After the Civil War and emancipation, black Americans sought to enjoy their newfound liberty. They wanted to run their own businesses, they wanted to establish schools for their children, and they wanted to tend their own land and manage their own fates.
But white elites still held economic power in Southern states, even if their political power had been diminished by the enfranchisement of the freedmen. For the masses of the freedmen to become more than a captive—if nominally free—labor force for white employers would require government intervention. And for wealthy, conservative Republicans like Greeley, and the white-supremacist Democrats who had lost power in the South, that kind of state intervention on behalf of workers and the poor was antithetical to the American system of government.
Conservative Republicans began to echo some of the earlier Democratic warnings about Reconstruction, in less flagrantly racist terms. Whereas Democratic newspapers once warned that the “poor whites of the country are to be taxed—bled of all their little earnings—in order to fatten the vagabondish negroes,” Richardson writes that “some Northern Republicans were willing to accept Southern Democrats’ opposition to African-American rights so long as their complaints were framed in terms of a conflict over political economy rather than race.”
But there could be no freedom for the freedmen without state intervention. White bankers withheld credit from black entrepreneurs, white landowners refused to sell or rent land to black farmers, and white labor organizations largely excluded black workers. It was not, as their Northern and Southern critics charged, that black people did not want to work, earn, and build their own lives. It was that they were not allowed to.
And so the emancipated turned to the government for the resources and freedom the market denied them, although the extent to which they did so was greatly exaggerated by their critics. As Richardson writes, a disproportionate number of black legislators in Reconstruction governments were drawn from the nation’s small black elite, not from among former field hands. The intervention they proposed was most often correspondingly moderate, if radical to the old planter class and its acolytes.
Nevertheless, in response, white men who had long benefited from a government that defended their freedom to prosper flew into rage over the belief that, as the Tribune correspondent wrote, “they were robbed to support the extravagance of the ‘Nigger Government.’” Incapable of seeing the freedmen as full human beings with their own aspirations, their own beliefs, and their own idea of freedom, men like Greeley concluded that because they were black, they were simply too dumb to know better than to seek to rise above their station.
Greeley would lead an unsuccessful revolt against President Ulysses S. Grant, on the Liberal Republican ticket. Although Greeley’s run for president, in which he was also the Democratic Party’s nominee, ended in failure, the critique of the freedmen’s ability to govern that he embraced would outlast him, as Richardson writes. It would provide the North with a rationale for retreating from Reconstruction that was not a betrayal of the Civil War, it would justify the violent disenfranchisement and dispossession of black Americans in the aftermath of Reconstruction, and it would allow for reconciliation between the white North and white South on the basis of a bipartisan, white-supremacist consensus.
The ideological belief that black people were simply unfit for self-government, and therefore justifiably excluded from politics, would linger much longer.
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