The Reckoning

by Mary L. Trump;

  In order to sustain this extreme situation, which was implemented and maintained with the utmost brutality by slavers, plantation owners, and overseers, it needed to be justified.

  It was necessary to the project of slavery that whites dehumanize Blacks in any way they could—a process that created extreme levels of cognitive dissonance because those who participated in the slave trade knew that those they enslaved were human beings; their knowledge of this, however, meant that creating rationales for their inhumane behavior was necessary; and at the same time they at least claimed to believe in a democratic government and considered themselves “good Christians.”

  Their rationales included the religious (the brutish nature of the enslaved Africans made them a danger to themselves and others; the structure of slavery would ennoble them and reward them in the afterlife), the paternalistic (Blacks were lazy, childish, and unintelligent and needed the benevolent supervision of their “masters”), and the pseudoscientific (Blacks’ allegedly small skulls denoted limited intellectual capacity, so they needed to be protected, while their allegedly large sex organs meant they were promiscuous, and white women needed to be protected from them). In short, they argued, slavery benefited the enslaved, and their white owners were making sacrifices in order to make the enslaved people’s lives better.

  The idea that Black people had no need for human attachment excused the practice of separating parents from their children. The belief that they had an abnormally high threshold for pain justified the most gruesome punishments, including whipping and other forms of physical torture. James Sims, the so-called father of gynecology, also espoused this belief and performed surgery—without anesthesia, despite its being widely available—on enslaved women who had been loaned to him by their enslavers. Sims also operated on Black infants who suffered from a condition known as “trismus nascentium,” or neonatal tetanus, that was caused by living in unsanitary conditions (which was almost always the case in slave quarters on plantations). The “cure” required separating their as-yet-unfused skull bones with an awl. This, too, was done without anesthesia, and all of these babies died during or shortly after the surgery. But the supply of victims for Sims to experiment on was virtually endless.

  * * *

  That anyone believed the divisions could be healed or a free-labor society and a biracial democracy—or even a country in which the races tolerated each other—could be achieved, seems, in retrospect, breathtakingly naïve. The work that was done toward any of those ends was incomplete and unsustained. The Freedmen’s Bureau, perhaps the best hope for creating the conditions in which lasting change could take place, was underfunded and short-lived.

  Slavery had lasted for centuries. The Americans alive during Reconstruction had been preceded by generations of Black people who had been enslaved or white people poisoned by the beliefs required to justify slavery.

  Slaveholders in the South seceded from the Union and incited a civil war in order to retain their right to own other human beings. When the war was over, they gave up slavery unwillingly. The crime of slavery was never acknowledged. No Truth and Reconciliation Commission was formed to render a verdict or hold the perpetrators accountable. Instead, former enslavers remained free to amass power and rebuild the South in the image of the antebellum plantation, with all the crimes against humanity that had entailed.

  No, the project to validate the dehumanization and subjugation of Black men, women, and children had been going on for too long. It reached the height of hypocrisy during Reconstruction, when the overarching belief began to take hold that it was Black Americans who were the obstacle to national unity.

  * * *

  The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments accomplished the astonishing feat of freeing four million people, making all of them U.S. citizens, and extending the franchise to all freedmen. Taken together, they opened the possibility of turning the United States into a truly biracial democracy. But because of the way the amendments were written, in conjunction with increasing indifference and hostility in the North, a desperate opportunism in the South, and a president determined to harm Blacks’ chances at every turn, the road was paved for future abuses and backsliding.

  In none of these amendments was there language forbidding limits on voting rights, like poll taxes or literacy requirements. The Thirteenth Amendment said nothing specifically about racial equality. The Fifteenth Amendment, which gave freedmen the vote, did not specifically grant Black people the right to hold office because including such a provision would have endangered the support of certain whites in Congress.

  It was a phrase in the Thirteenth Amendment, however, that would prove the most damaging to the prospect of Black sovereignty in the South and in a very short period of time erase all of the freedmen’s electoral and legislative gains. While it is true that with the ratification of this amendment four million people were freed from bondage, the text of Section 1 reads, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The clause “except as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” would be a fatal blow to the prospect of racial equality and democracy.

  The door was left wide open for the implementation of new laws in the South, known as the Black Codes, that would ultimately serve the purpose of regaining control over Black labor. Although the Codes granted some rights to freedmen and freedwomen—the right to testify in court (against other Blacks), to marry, and to own property—they eventually reversed many of the gains made during Reconstruction and paved the way for ever more stringent and punitive restrictions on the freed people’s ability to vote, work independently, amass wealth, and, in the end, live freely.

  The rationale presented for the necessity of coercive control of Black men, in particular, was their supposed sexual aggressiveness and the danger it posed to white women, which white Southerners believed would lead to “rampant race-mixing and a collapse of civilization.” The apocalyptic language underscored both the absurdity and danger of these charges.

  The real reason for the Codes was economic, of course. Unable or unwilling to come up with a new system of labor, Southern planters remained convinced that their businesses’ financial viability depended on coerced labor. Despite having been treated with astonishing leniency and never having been sufficiently sanctioned for instigating and then losing the Civil War, Southerners felt entitled to reclaim what they believed to be rightly theirs—the four million human beings who represented a monetary value upward of four billion dollars that had been wiped out when the Confederacy surrendered.

  The loophole within the Thirteenth Amendment led to the expansion of convict leasing in the South, a system by which prisoners were leased by the state to turpentine farms or plantations for a fee. The convicts were not paid at all, and control of their credit and property was assigned by law to the planters. In order to expand the practice, which proved lucrative (in some states fees from convict leasing were as much as 10 percent of the state’s revenue), laws were invented to expand the labor pool. “Vagrancy” and “loitering” were criminalized and carried considerable fines and sentences of up to a year of hard labor. The laws were both discriminatory and vague—vagrancy could mean anything from spending your money the wrong way to being idle, and the “intent to steal” was made a crime in North Carolina—and therefore easy to enforce, and the vast majority of prisoners were Black. As historian Leon F. Litwack writes, “The laws discriminated against them, the courts upheld a double standard of justice, and the police acted as the enforcers.” Every person involved in the accusation, the arrest, the indictment, the conviction, and the sentencing, and everyone who enforced the contracts, was white. And many of them still wore their Confederate uniforms.

  Leased convicts and debtors were forced to work in conditions that in some cases were worse than those on the plantations where t
hey had previously been enslaved. Working in the sugarcane fields was so dangerous that most laborers died after seven years. The turpentine camps were described by one prison inspector as “a human slaughter pen.”

  The system of sharecropping, which had sprung up in the place of granting freedmen homesteads, came to resemble a form of indentured servitude itself. Initially, sharecroppers were meant to be seen as partners in or renters of the land they worked, but after a number of court decisions, the sharecropper came to be seen as a wage laborer who remained at the mercy of the planters’ accounting of wages at the end of the harvest, which we know was rarely honest. In fact, the sharecropper’s debt to the planter seemed only to increase, and he or she was almost never able to get out from under it.

  While state governments in the South expanded the circumstances under which Blacks could be subject to convict leasing and peonage, Blacks’ options to find other avenues of employment dwindled. Blacks were forbidden from leasing land. In South Carolina, if a Black worker wished to work in a profession other than agriculture or domestic service, an exorbitant annual tax was required. Without any realistic means of support, most Blacks were forced to sign yearly contracts with employers.

  Lumbermen and sawmill and turpentine camp operators believed they should be “permitted to control their labor as they saw fit, without any interference from the federal authorities,” said U.S. attorney Alexander Akerman, their argument being that without forced labor (basically enslaving people), they wouldn’t be able to turn a profit.

  While coercion of Black labor was on the rise, the violence against Southern Blacks also escalated at alarming rates, increasing in both intensity and viciousness.

  As the Reconstruction years wore on, the Freedmen’s Bureau was in effect the only entity that stood between Southern Blacks and the violence being inflicted on them by Southern whites. But there was little the Bureau could do to protect Black communities from white violence, and the Bureau’s urgent requests for federal troops were ignored.

  Whites claimed they were acting preemptively against Black criminality, which they said would run rampant now that Blacks were free. The paradigm shifted not so subtly from “Blacks as property” to “Blacks as criminals.” The real goal of the violence, of course, was to destroy the Republican Party in the South and to disrupt, impede, and finally end the ability of Blacks to exercise their rights as citizens, to maintain independence, or to participate in government at any level.

  Despite the steady stream of assaults, injustices, lynchings, mass murders, and terror campaigns against Black individuals, Black families, and Black communities, some prominent Democrats claimed there was no sustained pattern of racially motivated violence aimed at the subjugation of Blacks, while others did nothing to contradict this lie. But almost all of these actions were coordinated by Redeemers (as Democrats in the South were known), former Confederates, enslavers, businessmen, and planters whose goal it was to return the South to its antebellum glory.

  The number of Black men, women, and children lost during this period to mass murder, terror attacks, and lynchings is incalculable. As Litwack writes, no “statistical breakdown [could] reveal the barbarity and depravity that so frequently characterized the assaults made on freedmen in the [purported] name of restraining their savagery and depravity.” The words “savagery” and “depravity” begin to lose meaning, especially when you consider those words were deployed by whites with the express purpose of demonstrating the savagery and depravity of Black people. The extreme violence served two purposes—to terrify freedmen into compliance and to justify the terrorism. The false rationale held that nobody would ever treat another human being the way white Southerners treated Black men, women, and children—therefore, they couldn’t possibly be human. The alternative, that the perpetrators of the violence were as vicious and irredeemable as they claimed their victims to be, was unthinkable.

  Charles Sumner, the Republican senator from Massachusetts, believed that the Freedmen’s Bureau should be permanent and its commissioner a cabinet-level position. Other Republican senators, however, continued to fear that the freedmen and freedwomen would become dependent on Northern help. Despite the massive breadth of the Bureau’s portfolio, it was underfunded, understaffed, and from the outset meant to be temporary. An agency tasked with undoing over 250 years of deeply embedded racial hostility, and reforming a culture completely dependent on free labor and white supremacy, was doomed by lack of political will.

  * * *

  By 1873 the end of Reconstruction was practically guaranteed when the postwar economic expansion ended abruptly, thanks in part to over-leveraged financial practices—particularly in the railroad industry—and inflation.

  The New York Herald, referring to white Southerners as “our brothers and sisters,” claimed they were once again “our fellow citizens.” In another New York publication, Blacks were blamed for not making the most of their opportunity to become full participants in American democracy.

  After a contentious election in 1876, a bipartisan electoral commission voted to give the presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes. In order to seal the deal, Hayes agreed to withdraw all federal troops from the South. Reconstruction was effectively over. Although some of its accomplishments would be enduring (if stalled), its failures kept in place a powerful and still-wealthy planter class that espoused white supremacist ideals and was determined to fully return to an economic system that depended on coerced and uncompensated labor.

  None of the reversals, as Eric Foner has made clear, “would have proved decisive without the campaign of violence that turned the electoral tide in many parts of the South and the weakening of Northern resolve.”

  Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, said in a Vox interview with Ezra Klein in May 2017, “I actually think the great evil of American slavery wasn’t involuntary servitude and forced labor. The true evil of American slavery was the narrative we created to justify it. They made up this ideology of white supremacy that cannot be reconciled with our Constitution, that cannot be reconciled with a commitment to fair and just treatment of all people. They made it up so they could feel comfortable.”

  What freedmen and freedwomen accomplished between 1865 and 1877 was nothing short of astonishing, especially considering the extent and seriousness of the impediments put in their way, from uninterrupted racism and white supremacy to inadequate assistance from the North and campaigns of terrorist violence. Given the climate, it shouldn’t be surprising that the gains made at the beginning of Reconstruction, as impressive as they were, proved to be fleeting.

  The North won the armed conflict after an extraordinary loss of blood and treasure, but it was at the point of surrender that the South, symbolically and rhetorically, won the war itself.

  * * *

  Two separate events—one in 1896 and the other in 1898—demonstrated how completely Reconstruction had failed. The 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld the constitutionality of segregation as long as segregated facilities were “equal,” proved crushing for the prospects of Black Americans. Two years later, the unveiling of an eighty-eight-foot-tall Confederate monument in Montgomery, Alabama, was a blunt reminder of the enduring belief in white supremacy. Adding insult to injury was the fact that the man who had laid the cornerstone was former Confederate president Jefferson Davis, who, after serving two years in prison, had been released on bond and later pardoned by Andrew Johnson, and would live out his long life unmolested.

  The Lost Cause—a myth that had sprung up after the Civil War and was built around a revisionist history that claimed the cause of the war was a heroic dispute over states’ rights having nothing to do with slavery and that Southern culture was genteel and honorable—began to gain greater currency as white Southerners continued to consolidate power.

  Before Reconstruction was over, Blacks had been effectively disenfranchised by violence and threats of violence. By 1908, ten Southern
states had rewritten their constitutions, implementing poll taxes, literacy tests, and other impediments to voting that overwhelmingly disadvantaged Blacks. Completely shut out of participatory government, Blacks were also shut out of job opportunities.

  In the Jim Crow South, sharecropping, peonage (binding laborers to indentured servitude as a result of debt), and convict leasing, often described as “slavery by another name” or “worse than slavery,” became even more deeply entrenched and ingrained in the economic system. Sharecroppers were given little choice but to buy their supplies, which were marked up from 100 percent to as much as 1,000 percent, on credit at company stores. The cycle of debt thus incurred persisted for generations.

  As Blacks were forced into labor situations that increasingly curtailed their freedoms—to support themselves, to move independently—the class structure that pitted no-wage Blacks and low-wage whites against each other came more and more to resemble the situation that had existed in pre–Civil War days.

  The violence with which these draconian labor practices were inextricably intertwined did not abate, and both were exacerbated by the unremitting drive of the government and the judiciary to curtail or erase the rights of Black people and sanction extralegal and blatantly illegal acts committed by whites. The Ku Klux Klan, formed in Tennessee on December 24, 1865, was instrumental in this effort. As during Reconstruction, violence against Blacks was neither random nor isolated but rather sustained domestic terrorism aimed at advancing the goals of white supremacy and Black subjugation.

  Over the course of the Jim Crow era, from 1877 to 1965, thousands and thousands of lynchings were recorded, and likely many more went unrecorded. Law enforcement not only sanctioned these crimes against humanity, but in many cases participated. The depravity of these lynchings was medieval, a signifier not just of white male superiority but of complete domination. It was the ultimate act of dehumanization of both the victims and the perpetrators.