Month: July 2008 (page 1 of 2)

July 29, 2008

Why Did Virginia Secede?

Today it seems almost inconceivable. Eleven states, in the Southern region of the United States, called constitutional conventions and in a matter of months formally withdrew from the nation. In breathtaking speed they had established an entirely new and separate nation with a capital at Montgomery, Alabama. What made this possible?

After all, secession seems entirely counterintuitive. Why would the most wealthy individuals, the men with the most to lose in society, risk everything, including slavery, as well as their lives, peace, property, prosperity, position, and inheritance? Why would they knowingly bring on a war with the United States by creating a new and risky republic in the South, and then throw everything into its defense until their capital lay in ruins, their population half-starved, and every army battered into total submission?

Historian and leading scholar of the Civil War, James McPherson answers that secession was a “counter-revolution” not a “revolution.” White southerners, he argues, saw the Lincoln administration and the Republican Party as the revolutionaries. The move to secede was a counter-revolution, a conservative effort designed to protect what they had and stem the tide of change sweeping across the nation. All of their resistance, he argues, was aimed at maintaining slavery and their position in society. To McPherson the answer is straightforward–they saw a greater risk in the Union and perceived themselves as the inheritors of the true republican virtues of the Revolution. Their new republic was, therefore, modeled on the “union as it was” before the slavery issue threatened their principles and prosperity. McPherson indicates that the South was in a way seeking to turn back the clock or at least stop time. Their vision was not progressive but regressive.

When you read the four volumes of The Proceedings of the Virginia State Convention of 1861, or an updated history of what the southern delegates said to the Virginia convention (Charles Dew, Apostles of Disunion), however, a number of further considerations become equally important. Virginia, of course, included West Virginia at the time and so delegates came from the far western, mountainous counties too where slavery was less prominent. The convention met for weeks in Richmond and those favoring immediate secession maneuvered to keep the convention in session, hoping for a dramatic event that might tip the votes their way. Eventually, the got their wish, as President Abraham Lincoln called for troops from Virginia and the other states after the firing on Fort Sumter. Lincoln clearly intended to suppress secession in the South and Virginia’s delegates voted the next day 88-55 to secede with the South and join the Confederacy.

Let’s reconsider, though, what these delegates said.

First, not a single Virginia delegate criticized slavery. Indeed, many of the western delegates were slaveholders and those that did not spoke in support of the institution. No delegate wanted to be branded an abolitionist. Delegates outdid one another to voice their commitment to slavery. Slavery and its protection was clearly in the forefront of their motivations.

Second, slavery was not just an abstract or political issue, but one that for these white men was centered on “property.” When Thomas Branch of Petersburg offered his constituents’ views in the form of a resolution to the Convention, it was to affirm that “negro slaves are property.” Somehow, these white Southerners thought, the North had lost sense of slavery as a form of property and needed to be reminded of the bare, essential nature of the rights the South was going to defend. Branch for his part only needed to state that he would represent the will of his constituents and that meant immediate secession.

Third, the debates read as if they took place outside of time, and indicate that the delegates, however duly constituted, had few ways to articulate what was happening in the spirit of the white South. Despite the fast pace of events and the complex political and diplomatic issues at stake, the Virginia delegates spent hours and days parsing words such as “sovereignty” and “person” and “vital” and “social institution.” The delegates gave long-winded explications of constitutional history and read into the record as evidence the speeches, letters, and proclamations of Lincoln, New York U. S. Senator William H. Seward, Massachusetts U.S. Senator Henry Wilson, and others. There was remarkably little discussion of the real events taking place, the possibilities of war, the nature of the conflict, or the resources at their command. The delegates were assembled to debate “secession” as a legal right and to craft an ordinance that would tender Virginia’s withdrawal from the United States of America.

Fourth, despite the close votes in February 1861 and the reluctance of some to cause a war, the majority of these delegates already understood themselves as part of a Southern, modern nation on equal footing with the North, as well as Britain, France, Russia, and Italy. Indeed, a number of delegates placed the idea of the Confederacy in the context of newly forming nation-states in Europe. They saw themselves as part of the vanguard of modern state formation. Their sense of Southern progress, civilization, and modernity may be the most surprising aspect of the debates.

This last point is critical. The state conventions and legal machinations that flowed from them structured the debates over secession in very specific and circumscribed ways, especially in Virginia. Unlike the deep South states where the procedures moved quickly in December 1860, Virginia with its long history of Revolutionary heritage stood in the breach for months, the decisive tipping point, and the Virginia delegates knew it. It was no wonder they acted cautiously.

Only when we take the debates for what they were–a constitutional forum burdened with the history of Virginia’s role in the United States–can we begin to see the underlying frameworks that made secession not only possible but likely. The view of slaves, of course, as property offered the decisive common ground for these white Virginians. But confidence was equally important. Not confidence in a constitutional right worthy of defense, but instead confidence in the capacity to hold up a modern nation-state on the world stage. In this respect nothing about Virginia’s secession might be considered counter-revolutionary. “Nations act on their interests,” one Virginia delegate argued, “not on their sentiments.” (Vol. II, p. 673)

The idea itself is strikingly modern. As for the South, and indeed Virginia, it could not do otherwise if it purported to be a nation, to be sovereign to itself, to be a civilization worthy of the world’s respect. “It is a fact, Mr. Chairman,” the delegate concluded, “that there is a separate national existence at Montgomery.” (Vol. II, p. 675) The question was when, not if, Virginia would join it.

July 25, 2008

Top Five Summer History Tours–New England

Where do you go to find the best history? There are so many choices! Museums, battlefields, exhibits, galleries, and walking tours. It is summertime and that means a chance to explore American history sites and tours. Sometimes, we experience the past more directly when we walk through an old house or see a historical object or stand in a historical place. This feeling is something that children experience intensely as they begin to see that they are part of a continuous flow of time and space, and they are often especially willing to be “transported” in time through history. So, take your children and visit a historic place this summer. Or go visit a historic place and get into the landscape of the past.

Here are my top five history tours for New England, a region rich in landscapes of the past where you can feel the history:

1. The Robert Gould Shaw Monument, Boston, Massachusetts

This is a must see stop on any history tour of New England. Shaw led the 54th U.S. Colored Troops in the American Civil War. He and the 54th are the subject of the film Glory (1989, directed by Edward Zwick, starring Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington, and Morgan Freeman).The bronze monument by Augustus Saint-Gaudens stands near the State House in downtown Boston on the Boston Common. Although area near the site is busy with traffic and tourists, few take the time to stand directly in front of the large memorial monument and look at it closely. The monument evokes all sorts of emotional responses and as you stare at the men, Shaw, the horse, and the weaponry, you might be overcome with the meaning of history, the war, and the scale of the conflict. Stand on the edge and look at the relief of Shaw and the horse and you will see half of them exposed, as if they are stepping out of time into our present.

Before you go, take a look at the only available letters from regular soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts to get a sense of the war from their perspective–the letters of the Demus and Christy Family. Five of these young men enlisted in the 54th at the first opportunity. Their story of the Civil War makes the monument even more powerful.

(One of the best ways to see Boston is a neat organization of volunteers called Boston by Foot–you can get your exercise and your history at the same time!)

2. Deerfield, Pocumtuck, Massachusetts

There are few sites from the colonial period so well-preserved. In and around one of the nation’s best prep schools, Deerfield Academy, are the historic buildings of the old village of Deerfield. The settlement was a frontier outpost in the seventeenth century and repeatedly attacked by Mohawk Indians determined to hold off white encroachment on their lands. The museum includes one of the most extensive collections of material culture and decorative arts in New England.

Before going, you might take a look at Richard J. Melvoin’s terrific book, New England Outpost: War and Society in Colonial Deerfield (W. W. Norton, 1989), an excellent study of the multicultural blend of people in the region and their difficult struggles on the border between and among native and English aggressive societies. The Pocumtuck Indians in the Connecticut River Valley first settled there, and yet these Algonquians faced constant pressure from their Mohawk Iroquois neighbors. and English settler moved into the village. The English society at Deerfield collapsed in King Phillip’s War (1676) as the Algonquian Indians fought across New England. Eventually, the English settlement returned and the Mohawk (with French support) attacked the village in 1704. As English settlements spread up the Connecticut River Valley and west into the mountains, the English settlement stabilized and grew.

While there, walk up the ridge near Eaglebrook School, to the top of the “rock” and see the whole Pocumtuck Valley below and the village (ask for directions at Historic Deerfield–this is a one mile, unmarked hike, straight up a mountain, but the view is worth it).

3. Litchfield, Connecticut, The Tappan Reeve School of Law

Litchfield, though not as uniquely preserved as Deerfield, is home to one of the most important pieces of American history, the Tappan Reeve School of Law. The school was at the center of the legal and political battles of the early republic. John C. Calhoun and Aaron Burr attended the school, and hundreds of others who went on to become U.S. Congressmen and Senators. The school was particularly important as a seedbed of Federalism.

Much of this setting remains remarkably intact and you can see the rooms, libraries, materials, and organization of the school. Historic Litchfield also includes period houses, exhibits of material culture, and the Litchfield Female Academy where Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe attended.

4. Walden Pond, Concord Massachusetts

Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 Walden stands as one of the greatest American works of nature writing and history. Walden Pond is part of a Massachusetts State Recreation Area and has been designated a National Historic Landmark. You can visit a replica of Thoreau’s cabin, and you can walk the pond and fields he planted. Don’t forget to read Walden before going! In fact, take it with you and read passages as you walk the pond and woods.

5. Newport Historic Homes, The Breakers, Newport, Rhode Island

This is a close call. Do you go to Lowell, Massachusetts, to the excellent National Park Service site to see the factory or do you take a walk through the Gilded Age society of America? The Breakers was the home of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, railroad president of the New York Central lines and heir to his father’s fortune in steamship and railroad businesses. The architect Robert Morris Hunt’s design featured 70 rooms and an ornate Italian Renaissance style. The views of the Atlantic Ocean are immense, the gardens sprawling, and the house lavishly ostentatious.

You can tour many other homes in Historic Newport and appreciate the Gilded Age’s displays of extreme wealth. Any visitor might also want to read Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence as a guide to New York high society and the changes underway at the turn of the century.

In August New England is lovely, full of bright blue skies and cool Atlantic breezes, and for any history traveler the sites are rich and rewarding.

July 21, 2008

Top Five Summer History Tours–Virginia

This week we feature Virginia. Next we will cover New England, and then the West.

Here are my top five places or sites this summer for an encounter with history that really means something (with a brief explanation why)–Jamestown, the Moton civil rights museum, Monticello, Chancellorsville battlefield, and the Tredegar Civil War Center and Museum:

1. Jamestown

American colonial history really begins at Jamestown, the first permanent English colony, settled in 1607 (much earlier than Plymouth). Here, on the James River in the great Chesapeake Bay, English, Indian (Algonquian), and African societies encountered one another at the edge of what some are now calling “the Atlantic World.” The place is undeniably important and you can stand right in the ruins.

Go to the Island first, the original site of the fort: what is called Jamestown Rediscovery. Begin there not the Jamestown Settlement reproduction and museum nearby. The island is owned jointly by the National Park Service and the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA). The history-making archaeological dig underway at the island, led by William Kelso, has discovered the original Jamestown fort, and this work is transforming the way historians think about the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. You can tour the dig as well as the new, beautifully displayed artifacts at the “Archaearium” (that’s right). The Archaearium display is a powerful look at the work of archaeologists and features the process of what happened in the dig at Jamestown Fort. Although the exhibit at the Archaearium downplays English-Indian conflict too much, and generally does not explain the Algonquian experience, children will be fascinated with the artifacts that Kelso and his team uncovered. The well, into which Jamestown’s first colonists seemed to have thrown everything, is a marvel.

The experience of standing in the original footprint of the fort along the James River is powerful. You can look right down the river and see where the signal posts were to guard the tiny colony from any approaching Spanish fleet. Because Spain’s military governor in Havana had sailed right into the Chesapeake in 1571 to search for a missing Jesuit mission and because Roman Catholic Spain was Protestant England’s enemy on the seas, the idea of a Spanish attack was not fanciful. The line of sight down the James River today from the fort is still remarkably unbroken by modern structures, so the effect of this view is well worth the trip.

The Jamestown Yorktown Foundation’s site (The Settlement) and its museum and reproduction of the fort is near Jamestown Island, and its exhibits are also worth visiting. Although many visitors think this is the original site, you should bear in mind that the entire creation is a reproduction, and if you have visited the original site first you will not be confused about this. The Settlement exhibit includes a carefully reproduced Algonquian village. Living historical actors dress in Indian clothing and use Indian implements to cook, grow corn, and treat deer hides. Although children may find the site fascinating for this reason and although the huts and equipment are reproduced faithfully (largely based on the drawings by John White from 1585 and the writings of John Smith that describe Indian towns and structures in some detail), the site is placed so close to the fort that it appears as if Indians lived next door to and in feudal vassalage to the English fort’s colonists. They did not, of course. The best part of the Settlement is the reproduction ships, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery.

Before any tour of Jamestown you might look online at the biggest archive of Jamestown materials, The Virtual Jamestown Project. Here you can read John Smith’s accounts, letters from the period, and important original documents.

2. The Moton Museum in Farmville, Virginia, Prince Edward County

This site is a historic place in the Civil Rights Movement, and the little museum is a gem. In 1951 students at the segregated, black Robert Russa Moton High School staged a strike to demand that the school board build a new black high school. The leader of the student strike, Barbara Johns, organized the student body to walk out of school down to the county building and make their demands known. The students did not go back to school for several weeks as they sat out “on strike.” The event prompted civil rights attorney Oliver Hill to visit the community, and he and the NAACP eventually took on the case. The case became one of the five included in the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. In reaction to the landmark Brown decision striking down segregated schools, local white leaders in Prince Edward County shut off all funding for public schools and closed the schools rather than integrate them. The schools remained closed for five years, from 1959 to 1964. These circumstances make the site especially important and dramatic. You can stand in the small, cramped auditorium where Barbara Johns rallied the students for the strike and see the “tar paper shacks” that the school erected because it had no funds. The effects of segregated schools become instantly clear and the improbable effects of the student strike of 1951 intensely felt.

You should contact the Moton Museum before going to make sure of its hours. You can walk from the museum on the same roads that the students took when they walked en masse in May 1951 down to the county office building. This one mile walk past the historic black church where NAACP meetings were held gives you an important view of the early beginnings of the civil rights movement. I encountered this story through the work on original films from local television stations–you can see these films too and look at the Prince Edward situation at: http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/civilrightstv.

3. Monticello

There are few places like this in the United States. Any summer history tour should visit the historic home of Thomas Jefferson. His epigraph says it all, or at least all he wanted to say about himself: “author of the Declaration of Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Founder of the University of Virginia.” President for two terms, Secretary of State, Envoy to France, Governor of Virginia, and political party founder, Jefferson could claim much more on his tombstone. He valued liberty, religious freedom, and learning above all. Of course, he designed his home at Monticello in the middle of all of this, and it is an exquisite statement of his values and aspirations for the nation.

Monticello has firmly placed slavery in the story of Jefferson and his life. The site includes tours of the slave living and working sites, and the team of archaeologists and historians are continually uncovering new evidence about this experience. Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemmings is clearly explained and affirmed in the tours. Slavery, freedom, and the political basis of the American republic were at the heart of Jefferson’s life and experiences. Jefferson’s wrestling with all three are on display in the design of Monticello and the material objects found there. Jefferson had great faith in us, the generations to come after him in the American republic. And it is humbling to be reminded just how much faith he had and how much trust he placed in our democracy.

4. Chancellorsville Battlefield

No summer history tour is complete without a Civil War battlefield experience. There are, sadly, many to choose from. The war tore through the heart of America and killed hundreds of thousands. It is far too easy to forget the consequences of war and to glorify set-piece battles as if they were played like a game. But when you visit a battlefield and see the ground on which armies fought, the war and its destruction take on a new meaning.

The great battlefields include Gettysburg, Petersburg, Vicksburg, Shiloh, Antietam, Manassas, and of course Chancellorsville. All are run by the National Park Service and have extensive, high quality historical interpretation. You will find expert park rangers and historians at all of them.

I chose Chancellorsville for several reasons. First, the battlefield landscape is rapidly changing, as housing developments, golf courses, and commercial strip malls have taken the place of farms, fields, and barns. It is increasingly difficult to see the battlefield, so go now.

Second, the battle was huge, extending over dozens of square miles and had tremendous importance in the flow of the war, giving the Confederacy vitality and energy at a key turning point. The best tour is to begin at Zoar Baptist Church where Stonewall Jackson’s troops first encountered Hooker’s Federal forces and in the first hours of the engagement changed the dynamic of the battle with an aggressive attack. Then, you can follow Jackson’s long march route around the Federal right flank and his surprise attack on the 11th Corps. You can do this in a car, but on bike is also fun. And if you take a car, stop along the way and get out to walk the route because the Wilderness effect is still there. Another good walk to do is the short distance from the Hazel Grove to the Chancellor House ruins. The high ground of the Hazel Grove and the open sight lines to the House give you a sense of the desperate stakes in the artillery battle there.

5. The American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar

Tredegar Iron Works cast iron before the Civil War for railroads and during the war supplied the Confederacy with much of its cannon and other armaments and ammunition. The works were extensive and have been preserved in downtown Richmond. Few sites give a feel for the work of nineteenth-century industry and how it operated. Tredegar holds added importance because so many slaves were employed in heavy industry here. The Civil War center has been dedicated to explain the experiences of Confederate, Union, and African-American soldiers and civilians in the Civil War. Few museums attempt such an interwoven set of exhibits. And few treat the experience of the U.S. Colored Troops with any degree of completeness, but Tredegar has made that effort its main mission. Although the exhibits are useful, informative, and interesting, the grounds, buildings, and equipment at Tredegar offer visitors a window into the nineteenth century and into the machinery that was at the heart of the Civil War and its destructiveness. You will not be disappointed.

So, enjoy these great sites. Next, we take a tour of New England and then the West for the best summer sites to visit.

July 18, 2008

The Rise and Fall of Segregation

In the final months of the Democratic primary, presidential candidate Barack Obama faced an unexpected dilemma. His minister at Trinity Church in Chicago, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, became the subject of intense criticism and attention, so much so that Obama felt compelled to distance himself from his remarks. Wright had preached incendiary sermons, holding America accountable for generations of racial injustice, sermons that condemned, sermons like none that many white churchgoing Americans had heard before. They were downloaded off the Internet, and the most controversial clips were played again and again on television and the radio. Wright’s sermons sparked frenzied commentary, as many Democrats were left flat footed and many Republicans pounced on the Obama candidacy as insufficiently patriotic and deeply out of touch with American values.

Historian and author Garry Wills has likened Obama’s speech in answer to these charges to the one that Abraham Lincoln made as a Republican candidate for president at the Cooper Union in which he distanced himself from John Brown and presented his moderate positions against slavery’s extension clearly, firmly, and forthrightly. In The New York Review of Books, Wills points out that Obama emphasized both the painful realities of our racial past and the positive progress the nation has made. Obama, more than any other presidential candidate in history, presents the future as open to change, able to be shaped, and this optimism resonates among many younger voters who believe that an era of racial division and discord has passed.

If slavery dominated the first 250 years of the nation’s racial history, then the rise and fall of segregation certainly characterized the next 150 years. From about 1880 to 1965 legal segregation in one form or anther prevailed in large parts of the United States, and the legacies of that system continued to have far reaching effects in American society into the 1990s. In the long context of racial division, Rev. Wright’s remarks, however challenging, cannot be surprising. We ought to ask, now more than ever, what sustained racial segregation for so long and what caused it to fall when it did.

C. Vann Woodward, the eminent Southern historian, pointed out in The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) that segregation emerged in Northern cities before the Civil War and that for a long period after the war in the South formal, legal segregation did not take root. The autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and of Harriet Jacobs described their encounters with segregated rail cars in the North. And there is considerable evidence that southern racial boundaries were shifting, unclear, and in flux in the 1870s and 1880s. No one knew then, Woodward indicated in his still landmark analysis, that segregation would become so pervasive and resistant to change. Woodward held out the hope that the South had not always been so racially divided. He provided a history for how we became who we are in a way that allowed Americans, especially Southerners, black and white, to recover an experience of racial integration.

The rise of segregation in the South came as it did in the North with the development of the most advanced technologies of the day–the railroad. Once segregation began, it was difficult to stop. Segregated cars, then depots, water fountains, bathrooms, beaches, pools, lunch counters, and voting booths. Like a cancer it metastasized, moving silently into unexpected places. By the 1950s segregation had become deeply entrenched in the South, a pattern of thinking and behavior, a wall of racial categories and divisions, a series of daily practices enacted with such consistency that few could comprehend how to challenge them. Anne Moody in Coming of Age in Mississippi gives us one of the most moving accounts of how disabling and and pervasive racial separation became in the rural South.

Historians have begun to reconsider the fall of segregation. First, historians have pointed out that resistance to segregation began much earlier than we commonly think, long before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. In the thirties, indeed in the teens and twenties, black Americans protested and opposed political disenfranchisement and segregation laws. So, the movement to oppose segregation did not spring out of white Americans’ recognition after World War II of racial injustice, nor did it arrive in 1954 in the form of a Supreme Court decision as if out of the clouds. Black Americans actively and consistently opposed segregation much earlier, and the growing movement in the 1950s and 60s extended from and connected to these earlier efforts.

Second, scholars are beginning to look again at what made the broad social movement to end segregation possible, what made it take off, when so many social reform movements in American history have failed. The pillars holding up segregation were significant, based in political power, legal precedent, and social custom. The Supreme Court in its Brown decision in 1954 and again in 1955 rendered segregation in schools unconstitutional. And states in the South responded with what Virginia’s U.S. Senator Harry F. Bryd called “massive resistance.” Virginia in fact passed a series of “massive resistance laws” in a special legislative session in August 1956 designed to prevent desegregation by closing affected schools if necessary. In 1957 in Virginia J. Lindsay Almond won the governorship in a bitter campaign against Ted Dalton that hinged on the politics of who would defend segregation better. Then in 1958, Virginia plunged into “massive resistance” full force. The state closed schools in four places rather than allow them to integrate under federal court order, and in that same year, in rural Caroline County, sheriffs served a grand jury indictment against Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter for violating Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage.

But often in these years, when whites were asked questions and prompted to defend segregation, they could not precisely say why segregation should prevail. They fell back on tradition, conservative values, and twisted constitutional logic and legalisms. A good example of this befuddlement occurred when WDBJ intervew with Norview High School Students students at Norview High School were asked directly about desegregation in February 1959. When asked why he did not want black students at Norview, this student could only say “I don’t know why, I just don’t.” Yet, other students could easily see a time, probably in their lifetime, when interracial marriage would be accepted.

The forces holding up segregation were many and well-defended, and we should not underestimate them. Dozens were killed for challenging segregation and hundreds brutally beaten. Blind allegiance to a past way of doing things was powerful and provided the strongest elements of resistance to change. Despite the bluster of Virginia’s “massive resistance” and the stuffy and esoteric doctrine of “interposition” cobbled together by Richmond News Leader editor, James J. Kilpatrick, many whites, like the young man from Norview High, defended segregation for reasons that they could not fully articulate.

One of the most interesting recent perspectives on the struggle for civil rights in the South is David L. Chappell’s, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) which stresses black prophetic religion as the decisive force in what was, in effect, a cultural battle. He points out that black southern leaders were driven by a deep sense of realism, indeed a form of conservativism. They had little faith that economic progress would bring social justice. After all, segregation spread across the South at the very time of the region’s modern development and it came hand-in-hand with that era’s most modern devices.

There was no reason to believe, in other words, that time would solve the problem of racial injustice. Most of all, Chappell argues, black southerners seemed to have little of what white liberals so valued–optimism. Instead, a profound pessimism rested at the core of black prophetic views. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s hope, Chappell explains, was carved from a mountain of despair. The black ministers and leaders were, it turns out, not idealistic at all. They read Neibhur. They drew on a deep reservoir of the Hebrew Prophets–they could not count on the world to improve itself, nor could they simply stand by while injustice persisted.

The white liberals, from Chappell’s viewpoint, were especially ineffective, if sincere and well meaning. Liberals at the moment of their greatest cultural authority, the 1930s, seemed to have failed to achieve anything substantial for black rights. They read Gunnar Myrdal, not the Hebrew Prophets, and believed that reason somehow would eventually wear down prejudice. But it did not and it probably would not.

Black southerners had no such illusions about their odds, nor about what they were up against. And Chappell asks an interesting and surprising question: why were the forces of resistance to change so culturally weak? Neither liberals (think of Kennedy) who wanted to slow down change and contain and control it (let time run its course of progress without intervention), nor segregationists who wanted to resist greater black freedom, were able to use religion to inspire self-dedication and solidarity to their cause. Chappell considers white religion the weak link in the segregationist armor. The failure of segregationists–for all of their political and legalistic authority–to get their churches to give them active support stripped the massive resistance campaign of cultural force, of conviction, of deep social power. Search as they might, white Bible readers could find little of the sanction for segregation that their grandfathers found for slavery.

The rise of segregation was not a by-product or inevitable extension of slavery. C. Vann Woodward told us that. Instead, segregation took shape around the modern spaces and technologies in the 1880s, gained strength from the progressive reform movement as a means to “clean” up politics, and gathered cultural weight with the rise of scientific racism or eugenics. Segregation, more than anything else, became a means of economic control and oppression.

The fall of segregation was equally complex and contingent. The new medium of televised news affected the way Americans saw racial injustice. The federal government’s battle with Cold War adversaries prompted wholesale changes, such as the desegregation of the military. And the black prophetic ministers preached sermons of great power, determination, and conviction.

Black prophetic criticism of American racial segregation sparked intense reaction in the 1950s and 60s. White politicians and government leaders cast suspicion on them as un-American and Communist-influenced. They were criticized for their pessimism, for protesting during the Cold War conflict, for calling attention to America’s blemishes and flaws. The prophetic voice of protest, whether black or white, has often been marginalized in the United States, where progress and optimism have held sway in the public square. Without that voice, however, Americans may never have heard the call, much less maintained the conviction, to end segregation.

The South has changed, and so has the nation. Jim Crow segregation has been brought down, though racism obviously persists. In the March 3, 2007 special issue of The Economist which focused on the American South, there is ample evidence of a progressive South, of a true “new South,” a South to which African Americans are moving at rate that exceeds those leaving, a South where there are more black elected officials than any other region in the nation, a South where polls show widespread acceptance of interracial dating.

Some aspects of the South, however, have not changed. There is still a place for the voices of change. Most significantly from The Economist special report came the disturbing news that the South’s schools still lag far behind the rest of the nation’s in nearly every category of measurement. It is safe to say that the region’s persistent undercapitalization of education over such a long time–one of the deepest legacies of segregation that has extended through the 20th century into the 21st–has crippled the South much more severely than all destruction by Sherman’s army in the Civil War.

July 10, 2008

Race and Violence: A Conversation Comparing the Post-Civil War West and South

This podcast with Will Thomas and Andy Graybill explores a little-known episode in the Indian Wars–the Marias Massacre–and the wider issues surrounding race and violence in the West and South during Reconstruction. The U.S. Army attacked a camp of Blackfeet Indians on the Marias River in Montana in January 1870, killing over 173, including nearly 90 women and 50 children. The New York Times reacted with disgust, as did much of the Eastern press, and called the event a “slaughter.” Yet, many white Americans in the Western territories greeted the news enthusiastically. The murder of a prominent Montana trader, Malcolm Clark, in August, 1869, set these events in motion, and led to calls for the Army the hunt down Indian “marauders.” The Army, it turned out, attacked the wrong camp of Blackfeet, one afflicted with small pox and unconnected to Clark’s murder. We discuss what led to this event and explore its significance for Indian policy, the Army, and the West, and we compare the event with racial violence in the South.

Andy Graybill is the author of Policing the Great Plains: Rangers, Mounties, and the North American Frontier, 1875-1910 (University of Nebraska and University of Calgary Press, 2007) and is currently researching and writing a study of the Marias Massacre.