The Color of Compromise

by Jemar Tisby

  On the issue of slavery, the spirituality of the church meant that Christians could insist on the liberty of conscience to choose to practice or abstain from slaveholding since the Bible nowhere explicitly condemns it. Christians could morally regulate slavery and ensure that both enslavers and enslaved followed the commands of the Bible in their respective positions. What believers could not do was attempt to influence the government on slavery or other “political” matters. The church “has no commission to construct society afresh . . . to re-arrange the distribution of its classes, or to change the forms of its political constitutions.”28 Thornwell’s vision of spirituality required the church, as an institution, to remain silent on the most critical social, political, and ethical question of the day.

  The spirituality of the church reflected the ways segments of the American church set up dualities between physical and spiritual, moral and political, ecclesiastical and social. Just as the Virginia General Assembly legally separated baptism from emancipation in the 1660s and the Baptist General Convention separated the “political” issue of slavery from “church” issues in the 1790s, Christians during the Civil War made similar attempts to divide slavery’s ethical implications from its political context.

  The doctrine of the spirituality of the church has continued to influence the church in America, even to the present. Its adherents are diverse and often selective in how they apply the doctrine. The injunction against church involvement in policy issues was not upheld for the temperance movement, debates on evolution, attempts to keep prayer in schools, or discussions on how to overturn Roe v. Wade. Historically, the doctrine of the spirituality of the church tends to be most strenuously invoked when Christians speak out against white supremacy and racism.29 Whenever issues like slavery and, later, segregation rose to the fore, the spirituality of the church doctrine conveniently reappeared.

  This chapter did not cover many of the details of the nation’s deadliest war. These events have been retold in countless articles, books, and documentaries. Disease decimated the young men on both sides who signed up or were drafted into the conflict. Battles claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Americans at a time. Women and children stepped in to fill the gap left by absent or deceased fathers, sons, and brothers. And amidst the chaos of the Civil War, the freedom of black people was left hanging in the balance. Despite the enduring racial prejudice on both the Union and Confederate sides, black soldiers joined the war and risked their lives for liberty.

  It should give every citizen and Christian in America pause to consider how strongly ingrained the support for slavery in our country was. People believed in the superiority of the white race and the moral degradation of black people so strongly that they were willing to fight a war over it. This is not to suggest that the South had a monopoly on racism, but we cannot ignore that its leaders took the step of seceding from the United States in order to protect an economic system based on the enslavement of human beings. From then on, the Confederacy would always and irrevocably be associated with slavery. Pastors and theologians supported the Confederacy by providing theological ballast and biblical backing for the continuation of slavery. They prayed over the troops, penned treatises on the inferiority of black people, and divided denominations over the issue of enslavement. The Civil War paints a vivid picture of what inevitably happens when the American church is complicit in racism and willing to deny the teachings of Jesus to support an immoral, evil institution.

  CHAPTER

  6

  RECONSTRUCTING WHITE SUPREMACY IN THE JIM CROW ERA

  After the long night of enslavement and the chaos of the Civil War, African Americans turned their faces toward the warm dawn of freedom. For a brief, breathless moment it seemed as if the nation might finally live up to its guarantees of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But no sooner had the Confederates signaled surrender than the systematic machinations of white supremacists began to dismantle the hard-won opportunities of black Americans.

  From 1865 to 1877, black citizens embraced their new roles as emancipated citizens. They ran for political office, opened businesses, started schools, and grasped at the American dream for the first time. This period witnessed one of the most vigorous seasons of opportunity for black people in the nation’s history. But the end of the Civil War did not bring an end to the battle for black equality. White people in the North and the South sought to limit the civic and social equality of black people across the country. They devised political and economic schemes to push black people out of mainstream American life. To keep power, white Americans used terror as a tool through lynchings and rape, violently solidifying the place of people of color as second-class citizens.

  Although the demise of legalized slavery could have led to full citizenship privileges for black people, white supremacists devised new and frighteningly effective ways to enforce the racial hierarchy. They romanticized the antebellum South as an age of earnest religion, honorable gentlemen, delicate southern belles, and happy blacks content in their bondage. They also constructed a new social order, what we refer to as Jim Crow—a system of formal laws and informal customs designed to reinforce the inferiority of black people in America.

  This chapter details the events of those hopeful years of Reconstruction immediately following the Civil War, tracing the decline of black independence through the era known as “Redemption” and following the trajectory of the rising era of Jim Crow laws. Throughout this period many American Christians sought to take freedom away from black people, and they frequently invoked their faith to justify the injustice.

  THE BRIGHT DAWN OF RECONSTRUCTION

  No other period of American history held as much hope for black equality as the time of Reconstruction following the Civil War. For the first time in the nation’s history, race-based chattel slavery was over, a thing of the past. Reconstruction could have been the start of a new America where black people enjoyed the full promises of liberty. Radical reforms could have led to the inclusion of other historically marginalized groups, including women, Native Americans, and the poor. While some significant reforms did happen, powerful forces conspired to re-create the former racial hierarchy in the postemancipation nation.

  For around a decade after the Civil War, the newly freed black population energetically entered the civic life of the nation. In March 1865, President Lincoln established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, typically known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. Headed by General Oliver O. Howard, the bureau’s capacious responsibilities included providing food and clothing to newly freed slaves, helping them locate family members who had been sold to other plantation owners, assisting the jobless in finding employment, setting up hospitals and schools (including higher education institutions such as Clark Atlanta and Howard University), and partnering with black people as they adjusted to life as free people. Chronically underfunded and understaffed, the Bureau suffered from corruption and ineffectual administration. Nevertheless, it signaled that at least some lawmakers believed the federal government had a duty to help the formerly enslaved and sought to offer some measure of restitution to address their centuries of persecution under slavery.1

  This era saw a blossoming of black political participation. While many whites assumed that black people did not have the moral or mental capacity to participate in a democracy, black leaders quickly proved them wrong. Hiram Revels became the first black US Senator in the nation’s history representing a state as notorious for racism as Mississippi, and P. B. S. Pinchback served for a brief time as the governor of Louisiana, the first black person ever to serve in the highest political office of a state. Fourteen black men served in the US House of Representatives at one time. During Reconstruction, 800 black men gained office in state legislatures, and at one point, black men became the majority in the South Carolina House. Countless other black men took on roles in government like postmasters, assessors, and customs officials.

  Often led by black women, freed
people aggressively pursued their education. Having been denied the right to literacy and other forms of systematic intellectual advancement, black people eagerly started public schools to learn their “letters and figures.” One of the primary reasons black people showed so much enthusiasm about reading was because they were finally able to read the Bible for themselves. Literate black people no longer needed to rely on any white person’s interpretation of Scripture; they could comprehend and apply God’s Word on their own.

  One of the heartbreaking but all-too-common activities many black people engaged in after emancipation was the search for friends and family members they had been separated from during slavery. Because slaves were treated as property, white slaveowners would rupture black families by selling members off at any time for any reason. Husbands were torn from wives, children from parents, and siblings from one another. Many family members had no idea where their loved ones had been taken. After emancipation, thousands of freedmen and women embarked on a search for their families, often engaging in rudimentary detective work by posting an ad in the newspaper. One freedwoman looking for her father placed an ad that read: “INFORMATION WANTED: Of my father, Jerry Hodges, of Norfolk, Va. I was sold from him when a small girl, about 30 years ago. My mother’s name was Phoebe, and she belonged to a man named Ashcroth.” In the plea that follows she continued, “Should any of the family be living in the vicinity of Norfolk, they will please address EMMILENE HODGES, Leavenworth, Kans. Nb. Ministers please read in church.”2 Sometimes family members were able to find one another, but more often than not they were unsuccessful, never to meet again in this earthly life.

  Formerly enslaved black people had a connection to the soil that few others did. They had toiled under the lash for generations, and the dirt from the land in the Delta and the “Black Belt” got under their fingernails and into their history. So it was only natural that after the Civil War, the men and women who had spent their lives working the land sought to own a piece of it. On January 16, 1865, Union General William T. Sherman handed down Special Field Order No. 15, which reserved a tract of land for black families 30 miles wide and 245 miles long along the east coast extending from Charleston, South Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida. He promised each family a mule to help them work the land. Sherman’s special order gave vitality to the dream of “40 acres and mule”—a hope for a redistribution of the land that would provide those formerly enslaved with a means of economic self-determination.3 Yet the dream was short-lived. The blatantly racist President Andrew Johnson, who ascended to the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination, ordered that the redistributed lands be returned to former enslavers, and many freed people went back to working the land under the sharecropping system.

  RECONSTRUCTION ERA AMENDMENTS

  Even after the calamitous events of the Civil War, many citizens and politicians maintained a moderate stance on race and civil rights. Unionists in the North tended to show more concern about the status of former white Confederates than for the status of freedpeople. Yet there were those who continued to fight ardently for the rights of black people in the post-Civil War era. They became known as “Radical Republicans.”

  White Radical Republicans such as Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and James Ashley fought against the racist policies of President Andrew Johnson and his supporters. Johnson vetoed two bills—one intended to increase financial allocations to the Freedmen’s Bureau and the other designed to guarantee black civil rights. The president claimed that using federal interventions to ensure black civil rights “violated ‘all our experience as a people’ and constituted a ‘stride towards centralization, and the concentration of all legislative power in the national Government.’ ” Johnson also made claims that interceding for black people actually discriminated against white people. “The distinction of race and color is, by the bill, made to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race.”4 In opposing the use of government power to protect civil rights, Johnson voiced many themes that opponents of the political reforms that empower black people continue to invoke to this day.

  Despite President Johnson’s opposition and the timidity of many moderates, the Radical Republicans managed to pass three constitutional amendments that afforded black people unprecedented status in America. The Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Lincoln on January 1, 1863, only applied to a limited number of slaves. It freed enslaved persons in states that had seceded but not in the slaveholding border states that had sided with the Union. Even in the Confederate states, the proclamation did not apply to areas that had already succumbed to Union forces. Further, the effectiveness of the statement depended on the Union winning the war, which was not inevitable at the time.

  To address this, the Thirteenth Amendment was passed, giving all black people in America their full freedom, decisively freeing all slaves: “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,” reads Section 1. The wording of one particular clause—“except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”—would later prove devastating to black people. For now, however, black people were free, at least in theory.

  The Fourteenth Amendment followed, granting citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.” This did not apply to Native Americans who were still classified as “dependent” nations within a nation. Notwithstanding this failure to apply civil rights to all Americans, the Fourteenth Amendment effectively nullified the Three-Fifths Compromise of the Constitution and reversed the Dred Scott decision of 1857. After centuries of chattel slavery, the United States no longer legally considered black people as property.

  Lastly, the Fifteenth Amendment granted black men the right to vote: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” This amendment did not apply to women though, and racist whites devised numerous ways to suppress the black vote. It would take the Civil Rights Act of 1965 to reassert the right of all citizens to freely cast their votes.

  THE MYTH OF THE LOST CAUSE

  In the aftermath of military defeat, former Confederates searched for some way to make sense of their loss. They surveyed the devastation of the countryside around them, the disappearance of slavery, and the apparent demise of the southern way of life. Many southern eyes looked heavenward for an explanation of their loss and for a way to interpret the Civil War in cosmic and religious terms.

  The “Lost Cause” is a narrative about southern society and the Confederate cause invented after the Civil War to make meaning of the devastating military defeat for southern white Americans. The Lost Cause mythologized the white, pre–Civil War South as a virtuous, patriotic group of tight-knit Christian communities. According to the Lost Cause narrative, the South wanted nothing more than to be left alone to preserve its idyllic civilization, but it was attacked by the aggressive, godless North, who swooped in to disrupt a stable society, calling for emancipation and inviting the intrusion of the federal government into small-town, rural life. Confederates reluctantly roused themselves to the battlefield not because of bloodlust or a nefarious desire to subjugate black people but because outsiders had threatened their way of life and because honor demanded a reaction. Even today, the Lost Cause mythology functions as an alternative history that frequently leads to public disputes over monuments, flags, and the memory surrounding the Civil War, the Confederacy, and slavery.

  In the book Baptized in Blood, historian Charles Reagan Wilson details the religious character of Lost Cause mythology. More than just a story about the political fortunes of the South, southerners blended Civil War memory and Christian dogma together as a way of confirming their shared suffering and giving their losses divine significance. In an act of God’s mysterious providence, former Confede
rates believed the Almighty had chastened them with the Civil War, allowing this bitter result to remind them of their first love and calling them to holiness.5 The sense of holiness they were called to, though, did not include abolishing slavery or allowing black people their civil rights.

  After the Civil War, the Lost Cause myth contributed to the cultural disenfranchisement of black people as they sought to participate as equals in a free society. While it is true that many southerners after the Civil War did not mourn the demise of slavery, others, including many clergy and religious leaders, did not change their mind on the biblical permissibility of slavery: “On the racial question, indeed, the southern historical explanation as embodied in the Lost Cause provided the model for segregation that the southern churches accepted.”6 White supremacy lurked behind the Lost Cause narrative and helped cement the practice of segregation in the church as the new normal.

  Wilson points out that the Lost Cause functioned as a form of civil religion replete with saints, devils, liturgies, and symbolism. For advocates of the Lost Cause, no individual figured as prominently or garnered more respect than Robert E. Lee. Lee came to symbolize valor in battle and a manly Christianity that was equally chivalrous and courageous. A Confederate chaplain named R. Lin Cave lauded Lee’s “reverence for all things holy.” Another preacher of the time even went so far as to declare: “Lee was pure enough to have founded a religion.”7 In the Lost Cause myth, General Lee was the quintessential “crusading Christian Confederate.”