After Emancipation, one of the continuing dreams of many white Southerners was that the “Black race” would die out or be exterminated. In this editorial, the Mobile Register fantasizes about replacing the South’s black population with white immigrants.
Was Alabama’s Black population actually dying out? The Census says otherwise. Here are the stats from 1860, the last Census in which slaves were counted, and 1870 in the middle of Reconstruction and a year after this article was published:
Black Population of Alabama
1860 437,770
1870 475,510
The Census does not show a decline in the Black population. Instead it shows a 9% increase. On the other hand, the Census shows a decline of nearly five thousand in the white population of the state:
White Population of Alabama
1860 526,271
1870 521,384
One Lost Cause myth is that Emancipation was a demographic disaster for African Americans. While thousands of escaped slaves died while suffering the dangers and deprivations of being refugees during the Civil War, there was no mass die-off. Black populations in most places in the South were larger after the Civil War than before it. On-line claims that “1 Million Blacks Died When They Were Emancipated” are simply unsupported Neo-Confederate distortions.
The Mobile Register was a conservative Democratic newspaper opposed to Reconstruction. White European immigrants did not answer the South’s call. Immigrants knew that if they moved to the South they would enjoy the same working conditions and wages as the African Americans that they were supposed to replace.
Mobile Register
Friday, Jan 29, 1869
Mobile, AL
Vol: 1
Issue: 310
Page: 1
This is a fascinating item. It was obviously pure fantasy, racist wishful-thinking based on a single identified subjective source. I suspect that this attitude was atypical. I’ve been deeply immersed in researching pro-Klan, Negrophobic thinking in the Reconstruction South, for a book about the federal war against the KKK, and have not encountered these views elsewhere. Typically, Negrophobes were terrified of being overwhelmed by black majorities. Their fears ran away with them, of course, and led to savage white “resistance” almost everywhere.