6

“To Bind Up the Nation’s Wounds”

THE UNITED STATES AFTER THE CIVIL WAR

The U.S. house of race was constructed on a foundation of prejudice. Native Americans were decimated. An elaborate ideology of racial inferiority was gradually applied to Africans, slave and freed, miscegenation and the liberal tradition notwithstanding. This belief in black inferiority became a “self-fulfilling myth that prevented blacks from improving themselves and thereby disproving the image that whites had of them.”¹ Though such discrimination was pervasive, the American house of race was really two separate structures under one roof of a common Constitution. The agrarian South insisted on continued slavery, resisted by the North. To form a single republic, slavery concentrated in the South was allowed to continue, while the North took the lead in early segregation. Given continued regional tension over slavery, state unification was itself circumscribed. A weak central authority coordinated states retaining all powers not delegated to the center, including many of those regarding slavery. The genius of federalism was that providing for the rights of states or regions to construct their own social order preserved a loose confederation of those states, avoiding conflict. These arrangements reinforced the fault line running along the Mason-Dixon line and accommodated in the Constitution’s federalism.

The Nation Divided

The United States at mid-nineteenth century was torn by regional strife comparable to the ethnic conflict later culminating in the creation of South Africa. The cataclysm of the Civil War eviscerated all previous compromise. No war was “more devastating to our economy or more threatening to our national survival.”² Disputes over political control crystallized around the issue of slavery and the treatment of blacks, despite pervasive racism. Only gradually, in the aftermath of war, would this same issue be turned into a basis for holding the nation-state together.

The Civil War was not the result of liberal pressures for racial equality. The image of Negro inferiority was widespread among whites, with slavery defended as beneficial to both the slave and the master, and even liberals were careful to resist the charge of being pro-Negro.³ Few seriously challenged the assumption of the 1857 Dred Scott decision that the African race, “separated from the white by indelible marks . . . [was] not intended to be included” in full citizenship.⁴ Even Lincoln, in his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas, was unequivocal: “I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way, the social and political equality of the white and black races.. . . Blacks must remain inferior” and in his view should have been returned to Africa.⁵ Only radical abolitionists questioned black inferiority, further inflaming racist ideological defense. Frederick Douglass concluded that the issue of race was “at the bottom of the whole controversy.”⁶ But there was not enough disagreement among whites on this issue to explain the outbreak of America’s most violent internal conflict.

The future of “the peculiar institution” of slavery was a source of inescapable tension, but it was not the only cause of war nor the basis for its resolution. The Union had long stood divided on this issue. Compared with Brazil, slaves were reproducing without new imports and manumission was rare. There was little prospect of profitable slavery fading through attrition. With few blacks, the North had little to lose from abolition, and much to gain from the spread of free labor. Jefferson earlier had foreseen that slavery was “the rock upon which the old union would split,” Lincoln saw it as “an apple of discord,” and Du Bois later described it as “the symbol, but also the real basis of sectional conflict.”⁷ But disagreement over slavery cannot in itself explain why the previous compromise arrangements broke down. There was not enough new about this basic conflict to explain the sudden break with the past practice of compromise and mutual enrichment. Indeed, the Union acted against slavery with some hesitation. The Emancipation Proclamation came only in 1863, and was criticized by abolitionists for applying only to territories outside of Union control in hopes of destabilizing the South, depriving it of slave labor supporting its war effort, and encouraging black Union volunteers. The proclamation invoked neither civic authority nor moralism, further suggesting that ending slavery was not the cause of war and more a consequence of that war.⁸

Tension over slavery was exacerbated in mid-nineteenth century by a growing economic divide, which raised difficult issues about the political control and economic intervention of central authority. The South’s relative economic retardation had been of long standing, as observed by Tocqueville, without leading to conflict.⁹ But as economic development proceeded in the North, it faced a number of bottlenecks that required centralized intervention. Industrialists increasingly looked to Washington for “tariff protection, aid in setting up a transportation network, sound money, and a central banking system.. .. [They] wanted to be able to do business without bothering about state and regional frontiers.”¹⁰ As in South Africa, economic development required central state coordination, threatening autonomous interests. Though eager for more federal investment, the South resisted any expansion of federal economic intervention or centralized authority that might threaten the institution of slavery.¹¹

Economic differences had been long-standing, though a regional division of labor had been mutually beneficial. But as economic development increasingly raised issues about central authority, these issues did become disruptive. Regional economic interests did not tear apart the Union, but they did provoke a dispute about “whether the machinery of the federal government should be used to support one society or the other.”¹² The “panic of 1857” exacerbated this dispute, for declining fortunes inspired greater calls from the North for federal intervention.

The Civil War was determined by such multiple and reinforcing pressures emerging from regional competition. The South sought to preserve and extend slavery, resisting any increase of centralized federal authority that might be used by the North to challenge or contain bondage. The North sought to increase centralized authority, thus challenging regional autonomy and slavery, and to support or regulate the North’s own industrial development, at the expense of Southern agrarianism. The two issues, slavery and economic intervention, converged and reinforced each other and regional antagonism. North and South lined up on opposite sides of both issues. Neither region could be appeased without sacrificing the aims of the other. The polity reached an unavoidable crossroad, much as South Africa later reached a crisis of conflict between Afrikaners seeking to preserve their regional autonomy and the English seeking state consolidation.

Slavery, economic demands, and political realignment all came together in exerting unprecedented strain on the point of the polity’s greatest vulnerability, the federal compromise between states’ rights and central power. As a result, the preservation and consolidation of the Union and its power of local intervention emerged as the decisive issue over which no compromise could be found, as described by the rhetoric of the time. In 1858, Lincoln argued that the government could not long endure “divided"; Stephen Douglas responded that “the doctrine of uniformity” was inconsistent with “the sovereign right of each state.”¹³ Once the war had begun, Lincoln argued that “my paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.”¹⁴ Confederate President Jefferson Davis argued in 1881 that the war was “the offspring of sectional rivalry and political ambition.” With some exaggeration, Davis added that the conflict “would have manifested itself just as certainly if slavery had existed in all the states, or if there had been no negro in America.”¹⁵ Slavery and economic intervention were the particular disputes revealing a more fundamental issue of Southern resistance to national unity and central state building.

The institutional structures of government, which had previously encouraged compromise, failed.¹⁶ Until the 1850s, the admission of new states had carefully balanced slave and free territories so as to preserve the balance of power of North and South, with the latter retaining an effective veto within the Senate. Overconfident of their continued power and eager for new slave territory, the Southern-dominated Democratic Party agreed in 1850 to let new states decide for themselves whether to allow slavery or not. Their gamble was crucially miscalculated in abandoning the institutional arrangement that had protected their interests and preserved the federal compromise. The balance of regional power tilted perilously to the North’s advantage, with political parties aligned according to sectional interests. The Northern-dominated Republicans replaced the Whigs as the party advocating central power, and in 1860 their candidate Lincoln was narrowly elected as president. The North had captured control of the central authority, leaving the South with no assurance that this authority would autonomously balance regional interests. Fearing intervention, and with few protections remaining, the Southern states saw no alternative but to secede. The nation-state fissured.

The power of the center could only be established by defeating the secessionists. As in South Africa, central state unity would either be enforced or not. According to the earlier observation of John Quincy Adams, the competing claims of federal and states’ rights “can be settled only at the cannon’s mouth.”¹⁷ The flame of regional tension had long been contained within a federalist fireplace, providing carefully controlled heat. But the flame outgrew its confines, engulfing the surrounding structure. The institutional balance between center and states that had long preserved the Union now became the basis for a conflict threatening to destroy the entire edifice. The result was a war in which at least 623,000 soldiers would die, more than those lost in all other wars the country has fought added together, world wars included.¹⁸

What Lincoln fought for, he won, but at terrible cost. The Union established militarily the formal sovereignty of the center. And in the very process of war mobilization and its aftermath, the central state authority increased its capacity to dominate local state structures. War making fed state building. Conscription boosted the Union army from 16,000 troops to more than one million, requiring greatly expanded administration and funding.¹⁹ Newly enacted income taxes rapidly increased the tax burden in order to fund the war effort. A national banking system and currency were established to organize finances, while a huge federal debt was incurred.²⁰ By 1865, the federal budget had grown to over $1 billion from $63 million in 1860. And in the decades that followed, the federal government consolidated this increased size and power: the federal payroll grew from 53,000 to 256,000 between 1871 and 1901. A national pension system was created to meet the needs of veterans and their families, and land-grant colleges were founded to educate agricultural and mechanical laborers.²¹ A modern centralized state was born out of its bloodiest conflict. Symbolizing this transition, the dome atop the Capitol in Washington was built even as the guns of war boomed.

Greater assertion of centralized state authority did not ensure equally consolidated popular loyalty to a united nation. Mobilization and victory by the Union forces created a modern state, but also further deepened sectional differences. The conflict and its aftermath reinforced solidarity on opposing sides, much as was true after South Africa’s Boer War. Southern nationalism had emerged in the decade leading up to the war, been institutionalized by the Confederacy, and been forged in battle.²² According to Wilbur Cash, the war “had left Southerners . . . far more aware of . . . the line which divided what was Southern and what was not.”²³ In defeat, Southern “white men of upper and lower classes closed ranks in spite of antagonistic economic interests and submerged their differences in the cause of Redemption.”²⁴ Similarly, the South’s opening attack on Fort Sumter unified the North (other than the Copperheads). The conflict had then solidified the popular Northern view of the country, according to a leading newspaper, as “not one people. We are two people. We are a people for freedom and a people for slavery.”²⁵

Lincoln well understood that the prize of formally centralized rule would remain superficial and under threat if the wounds of war were not healed. As in South Africa, the price of state consolidation won by force was entrenched national division within the state. The lack of unity threatened to undermine the fruits of victory and economic growth. The impetus for nation-state building reemerged even more strongly. Central authority and unity had to be backed by popular loyalty, or at least acceptance. The institution of the United States had been reestablished; now the corresponding sentiment would have to be constructed. The state would have to “give us nationality as a people.”²⁶

To inspire reconciliation where his war machine had reinforced enmity, Lincoln applied his most evocative rhetoric. Having earlier elicited Northern loyalty to the “Union,” Lincoln increasingly referred to “the nation,” including Northerners and Southerners as victory approached and the need for future reconciliation became apparent. The “United States” became a singular noun in Lincoln’s often-repeated, almost religious evocation of unity, just when that unity was submerged in blood. Most notably, the Gettysburg Address was a paean to national resurrection, commemorating that battle, a turning point in the war.²⁷ Soon thereafter Lincoln established the Thanksgiving holiday as a symbol of shared national heritage. His second inaugural, with victory in sight, disclaimed malice and proclaimed a new goal: “to bind up the nation’s wounds.”

The issue of race was unavoidably central to the postwar order. The Civil War had been fought to preserve the Union and to end the division over slavery, and in its aftermath resolving how to treat free blacks became all the more pressing with the end of slavery as a distinct category. Abolitionists’ pressure for blacks’ rights was increased by the war effort of blacks themselves, as it would be in South Africa’s Boer War. Lincoln acknowledged that “the North could not have won the war” without 200,000 black troops and 300,000 black “helpers.” Du Bois argued that blacks had further contributed to victory by their refusal to work for the South, in what he roughly characterized as the equivalent of a general strike.²⁸ By war’s end, the Republicans had abandoned federal support for recolonization to Africa, reinforcing assumptions of postwar inclusion.²⁹ Even before the end of the war, Union General William T. Sherman had sought to reward blacks with the provision of “forty acres” in then “liberated” South Carolina. Their efforts on behalf of the North had won for blacks newfound respect, with more radical whites arguing that this contribution to the victory should be rewarded with equal rights. As Justice Harlan would argue in 1896, blacks, having “risked their lives for the preservation of the Union . . . are entitled to participate in the control of the state.”³⁰

Lincoln had some sympathy for the impetus to grant blacks equal rights after the war. But he well understood that such a policy would directly contradict the pressing need to make peace with the former Confederacy. The South had remained adamant on the need to retain and reinforce racial domination, with abolition having left a sizable black population needed for labor in the region. Freeing the slaves reinforced racism, which Lincoln understood could not simply be crushed. Even in the North, where blacks made up less than 2 percent of the population, early official discrimination and calls for increased white immigration (from Europe and the South) reflected significant social resistance to racial equality.³¹ To head off conflict arising from reforms, Lincoln had sought to appease Southerners and welcome them back into the Union. He resisted abolitionists’s continued calls for reform, countermanded military orders of abolition that preceded his own Proclamation, and again advocated African recolonization.

Lincoln pragmatically sought to appease the South not only on race, but also with direct efforts of forgiveness, much as the British would seek to appease Afrikaners after the Boer War. The president resisted Congressional pressure to limit the postwar political rights of former Confederates, instead proposing to require of them only that they swear allegiance before resuming citizenship. Death penalties for treason were not imposed. Jefferson Davis himself would be sentenced to only two years in prison.³² “Lincoln wanted no martyrs . . . he knew, too, that if a vigorous Republican party were to grow in the South it would need the support of many ex-Confederates. That was good politics as well as sweet charity.”³³

Lincoln would not live to see his nation-building project completed. His assassination by an embittered Southerner harshly reaffirmed that the sectional animosity that had spent so much blood would not be easily forgiven or forgotten. Like the Afrikaners later, the South remained proud in defeat and eager to win in peace much of the rights it had lost in battle. Like the British authorities in South Africa, the North won control of the central state and was tempted to use that power to exert revenge. Lincoln’s stirring calls for national healing would be drowned out for a decade by the din of the federal machine’s postwar retribution and intervention. Given sectional animosity, “the main forces of cohesion in American society, though growing stronger, were still very weak.”³⁴ Such cohesion would be torn further by Reconstruction, picking at the wounds of war, for unlike South Africa there was no external colonial power confidently insisting on appeasement. The Union Lincoln preserved and strengthened would be used as a blunt instrument against the vanquished rather than as a salve for the nation. Ironically, this result was hastened by initial steps in the other direction.

Lincoln’s successor ignored the moral imperative of eventually meeting blacks’ expectations and instead pursued only the pragmatic need for immediate reconciliation with the South. A Tennessean who had been rewarded for his loyalty to the Union with the vice-presidency, Andrew Johnson used his inheritance of the White House to assist the defeated and economically devastated South.³⁵ He sought to minimize federal intervention, granting in peacetime states’ rights lost in the war. He was also eager to gain support from Southern representatives, who were being readmitted to Congress in the larger numbers implied by allocating House seats by counting still-disenfranchised blacks as full members of the population. Accordingly, besides reversing Sherman’s allocation of land, Johnson rejected the extension of Freedmen’s Bureau support of blacks and black enfranchisement.³⁶ Johnson further embraced Southern racism, condemning miscegenation and efforts “to Africanize” the South in violation of “the great difference between the two races.”³⁷ Southern states took up Johnson’s concessions, imposing segregationist “black codes” that prefigured post-Reconstruction Jim Crow.

Like Hertzog’s premature efforts at Afrikaner-English unity in South Africa, Johnson’s efforts at reconciliation were crucially mistimed. His one-sided appeasement of the South provoked an equally one-sided radical response from Congress. If Republicans had been willing grudgingly to follow Lincoln’s moderate lead on Reconstruction, they were provoked to greater militancy by Johnson’s leniency. The war had not been won in order to lose the peace. The blood of one million casualties and of the Great Emancipator had not been spilt in vain. The South had not been defeated in order to return to the Union more powerful. It was not so much the mistreatment of blacks to which most Northerners objected, given prevalent racism, but rather that such mistreatment flaunted Southern disrespect for the Union’s policies and authority. To the Northern eye, “the South had been handed an olive branch and, in the fury of defeat, had shaped it into a whip. . .. [T]he South had failed to appreciate [that] if it did not rein in its excessive intolerance of the freed black man, the North would be forced to do so.”³⁸ Northern sentiment was enraged by Johnson’s too quick concessions and the South’s seizing the advantage.

The previous century of compromise with the South had been resuscitated, and if civil war was not itself sufficient to kill it, then political action would finish the job – or so the Republicans thought. Like those English in South Africa who would advocate “anglicization” after the Boer War, Congressional Republicans were eager to reject compromise and to impose their will on the defeated. Congress pushed hard for more radical Reconstruction and overturned the black codes with the 1866 Civil Rights Act. The nation-state would be rebuilt on the North’s terms. If Johnson had no stomach for it, he was expendable. In 1868 Johnson’s obstruction was weakened by his impeachment, though he remained in office.

Congressional Reconstruction was justified by liberal ideology. The North had fought a war ostensibly to replace slaves with free labor and to spread democracy. Constitutional rule had been defended, and under such rule segregation and disenfranchisement seemed to lack legitimacy.³⁹ The North would be more formally obligated by constitutional amendments to reforms than would be the English in South Africa, though contradictions remained. Never mind that the North had pioneered its own forms of discrimination. Never mind that recolonization of former slaves back to Africa continued to be discussed and encouraged. Such legacies of racism were purportedly swept aside by the war victory and renewed liberalism. Even the treatment of Native Americans briefly improved under a new Peace Policy during Reconstruction.⁴⁰

A good portion of the motivation for radical Reconstruction was more pragmatic than idealistic. Republicans such as Thaddeus Stevens feared that continued black exclusion would ensure that the South would “send a solid rebel representative delegation to Congress,” undermining Republican rule and “the political and economic consolidation that constitutes the fruits of victory.”⁴¹ The Republicans thus pursued black enfranchisement for their own advantage, confident that as the party of abolition they would reap black votes. And they needed the black vote to defeat the former Confederates vying for the enlarged number of Southern Congressional seats. The proposed Fourteenth Amendment would ensure black enfranchisement to serve this end, establishing equal rights left vague in the original Constitution. In 1867, those Confederate states readmitted under Johnson were deprived of their status and reduced to military rule from the North within five districts. The return to civil authority was made contingent on granting blacks the vote and ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. With no formal power within the polity, the former Confederacy had no means of redress short of another secession. The South was forced to concede “the supremacy of the national state and the formal equality under the law of everyone within it. . . .” Citizenship was to be defined nationally, consolidating the United States as a nation-state with the power to impose its will on local authority.⁴²

Blacks jumped at the opportunity for inclusion and participation, which they had expected as reward for their war efforts. In the 1867 elections, close to 70 percent of the one million newly eligible blacks registered and black voter turnout was between 70 and 90 percent.⁴³ The result was far from the “black domination” Southerners feared and decried: only fifteen out of 133 state delegates in North Carolina, for example, were black. But the eventual election of sixteen black U.S. Congressmen and two black senators was indeed dramatic.⁴⁴

Not all the dreams of recently freed blacks were met, but many were. White Southerners awakened to their nightmare. With black enfranchisement consolidating their hold on Congress, the Republicans enacted significant social reform legislation. Only proposals of land redistribution were put aside as inconsistent with basic liberal protection of property.⁴⁵ The Freedmen’s Bureau provided food rations and established more than forty hospitals and 4,300 schools. Though the Bureau’s total expenditure was only $1.25 per capita, at the time it “was the most extraordinary governmental effort at mass upliftment in the nation’s history.”⁴⁶ The results were significant: black literacy rose from 10 to 50 percent between 1865 and 1890, black land ownership rose, and per capita real income of blacks increased 46 percent from 1860 to 1880.⁴⁷ And if this intervention to assist blacks were not enough of a shock to Southern whites, a large number of Northern carpetbaggers and Southern scalawags assisted in these efforts or joined the Republican Party. Many Northerners profited from effective colonial rule of the South, leaving Southerners feeling something less than part of a unified nation.

Radical Reconstruction reconfigured political and economic distributions. The reformer Carl Shurz had written in 1865, during the more moderate presidential Reconstruction, that “nothing renders society more restless than a . . . revolution but half accomplished.”⁴⁸ Radical Reconstruction moved toward completing that social revolution, or as close to one as America had seen. The centrally imposed extension of the franchise and provision of social services to blacks challenged the Southern elite’s political monopoly. But such consolidation of reform brought its own restlessness. As Lincoln had understood with his advocacy of balancing reform with reconciliation, to pursue only the former risked reawakening the regional antagonism that had already torn apart the Union. Even Frederick Douglass warned against “special efforts” on behalf of blacks that might “serve to keep up the very prejudices which it is so desirable to banish.”⁴⁹ Such warnings were ignored, yet proved prescient. “Sowing the wind” of change reawakened the “dragon’s teeth” of discord.

With Radical Reconstruction, pivotal American and South African experiences diverged. In both, central state authority was consolidated or formed by military victory. And in both, efforts to appease the vanquished and to unify the nation of whites were initially pursued, by means of backtracking on promised reforms in the treatment of blacks. But there the similarity ends. The South African state generally remained committed to racial exclusion and white unity, pursuing those aims with strong central action impelled by white racism and fear of the black majority. In the United States, the central state did not emerge from the Civil War as strong, but nonetheless was pushed by radicals to impose intervention, in part to win black electoral support. Nothing comparable was attempted in South Africa, where minority white rule would have been threatened by such reforms. As a result, segregation in South Africa was quickly enacted, endured, and was refined; it was not similarly encoded for a generation after the Civil War in the United States. Only after Radical Reconstruction further inflamed regional tensions, thereby undermining the prospect of unified white loyalty to the nation-state, would the salve of racial domination be applied – not by central authority weakened by the failed reform experiment, but by resurgent local authorities. Race making and nation-state consolidation remained linked, but the United States embraced this linkage more fitfully.

Segregation, Party Competition, and Nation-State Consolidation

The United States after the Civil War had not fully embraced the logic of diminishing intrawhite conflict through racial domination, as would be pursued by South Africans after the Boer War. But Reconstruction efforts at reform, and the renewed animosity they provoked, brought even the Republicans around. The nation had to be united, at least for whites, to make a modicum of centralized state rule workable. The South could not be forced to give its loyalty, but would have to be encouraged to do so, if need be by abandoning Reconstruction. But as in South Africa, this arrangement would not immediately erase intrawhite antagonism reflected in the ongoing competition of parties representing divergent interests. And as in South Africa, competing political parties agreed to build or allow further enforcement of racial domination for their electoral advantage. Such competition kept the issues alive, but also contained differences within the preserved polity. Party competition thus emerges again as an intermediate explanation for how nation-state building and racial domination were linked. Such competition reassured divergent groups that the central state remained responsive, at least in allowing for divergent local policies. The result was Jim Crow, with such legal enactments building on past ideology and practice, and with unforeseen consequences.

Central state imposition of Reconstruction backfired in undermining the prospects for nation-state and economic consolidation. What the South most feared were “the nationalizing tendencies in the American government unleashed by the war.”⁵⁰ Southern whites were aghast when precisely such policies were enacted, condemned by them as “revengeful legislation . . . [that] enfranchised the Negro,” seen as “unfit to rule,” and “disenfranchised the largest and best portion of the white people.”⁵¹ They were further exasperated by their relative economic deprivation and exclusion from “the great barbecue” of postwar federal expenditure.⁵² With the perception of “negro domination” causing resentment and reviving regional solidarity and antagonism, Southerners took to the streets. More than forty died in disturbances in New Orleans in 1874.⁵³ White Southerners also reacted to the threat of rising black rights and competition by taking matters into their own hands and forming the Ku Klux Klan in 1866. With the Union army demobilized, Southern state militias were the strongest military force in the region and appeared ready to resist outgunned federal authorities.⁵⁴ Even if there was little prospect of a defeated South returning to formal military conflict, the Civil War had proven that Southern threats of violent resistance could not be taken lightly. By the mid-1870s the air was again thick with such menace, raising the specter of the North’s worst nightmare, continued division threatening the Union just recently preserved by force.

If fear of violence was not enough to shake the North’s commitment to Radical Reconstruction, economic dislocation further undermined that already wavering commitment. The Panic of 1873 ushered in the greatest depression to date. This economic downturn further exacerbated class tensions in the North, which later exploded with the Great Strike of 1877 and threatened to divide by class a populace united by war.⁵⁵ White workers demanded that the social reconstruction extended to blacks “be extended northward” to them.⁵⁶ The contagion of a revolution engineered by Congress threatened to expand beyond control, raising fears of a triadic conflict between whites split by region and class, and blacks benefiting from this split. Federal authorities were confronted with the prospect of a two-front conflict, facing both outraged Southerners and Northern workers. And the economic advance that underpinned the growth and consolidation of the recently reunited state was similarly threatened on two fronts. Southern recalcitrance threatened the postwar expansion of cotton production and efforts to build a Southern transcontinental railroad needed for transporting goods were stymied. Strikes and financial panic threatened burgeoning Northern industry. Like any state, the United States needed stability and could not afford to see its economic base again undermined by conflict.

The North faced these challenges with foreboding and weariness. Unionists had expected an easier enjoyment of the fruits of their hard-won war victory. Exaggerating the actual threat, Washington was in no mood to refight the war it had just concluded. Nor were the people. Northern newspapers editorialized that “what this country wants most is a steady period of rest from agitation.”⁵⁷ Northern business was eager to constrain the “turbulence in the South,” which threatened production and investments there.⁵⁸ Capital was also eager to diminish Northern workers’ expectations raised by Reconstruction social policies. Commitments to black advancement had unsettled both North and South. Even Republicans advocated a reversal of course, back to an emphasis on regional reconciliation and stability. Again Lincoln’s more balanced approach was ignored, though now in the opposite extreme. The North’s dual aims of racial justice and preservation of a unified and stable Union had come into conflict, forcing a choice.

As national unity and stability had always been the primary goal, the impetus for racial reform would have to be abandoned. Appeasing blacks was not a strong strategic imperative, for they had not proven themselves a major threat to peace. As Justice Harlan argued later, “sixty million whites (are) in no danger from the presence here of 8 million blacks.”⁵⁹ But this lack of threat, which Harlan hoped would inspire generosity, instead allowed for abandonment. The black minority, historically set-apart and discriminated against, could be deserted with relative impunity. Appeasing the South to reaffirm stability was of greater importance than black rights. The North had tried to achieve both its aims; when it tired of the effort, it turned its attention to more pressing matters than that of the black minority.

Like the British victors in the Boer War two generations later, the North faced the strategic imperative to abandon its commitment to blacks in favor of encouraging white reconciliation and peace. And as in South Africa, pervasive racial prejudice reinforced this impetus. Even at Gettysburg, Edward Everett had spoken of the need for “reconciliation” among those Northerners and Southerners who share “a substantial community of origin.”⁶⁰ Blacks were clearly not conceived as part of this ancestral unity, and assisting them had impeded its assertion.

Formal abandonment of Reconstruction was finally forced by political developments. The administration of former Union general Ulysses S. Grant had become mired in corruption fed by the massive increase in federal expenditure. In the South, blacks were blamed for this corruption, which had coincided with the election of black representatives, tarring Reconstruction with the brush of graft. Suffering under the economic depression, Southerners and Northerners looked for an alternative to Republican rule and its Reconstruction. The result was increased electoral support for the Democratic Party, controlled in the South by the former slaveholding planters, aligned with Northern partisans. The Democrats were able to win a Congressional majority in 1874 and to deadlock the presidential election of 1876. The solution to this impasse produced a major turning point in American history.

The stalemated 1876 presidential election exacerbated the already exaggerated but much-feared “menace of war or anarchy” and forced a new settlement.⁶¹ Compromise effectively reaffirmed existing conditions. The North had already lost control of the situation in the South, with little army left mobilized to coerce obedience. The North had also lost interest in exerting such control, for the South provided little economic return and depression made it difficult to pay the costs of federal imposition.⁶²

Impasse required a deal. Northern Republicans were willing to concede the restoration of states’ rights formally in order to restore stability and preserve Republican control of the White House. In return for the South’s acceding to the election of Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republicans agreed to “the appointment of a Southerner to Hayes’s cabinet, generous federal aid for internal improvements in the South, federal assistance for completion of the Texas Pacific Railroad, Democratic control of federal patronage in the South, and the withdrawal of the troops in the South.”⁶³ To “promote the pacification of the South,” the South would be “redeemed” and the centrally imposed policies of Reconstruction, already in tatters, would be abandoned in favor of restored regional autonomy. Even reformer Carl Schurz advocated a reassertion of “the rights of local self-government.”⁶⁴ Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans secretly agreed to the deal, with both hoping to find electoral advantage in such autonomy. Hayes was inaugurated; he committed himself to “reconciliation between North and South,” to avoiding further chaos in the South, and to “pacification of the country.” He quickly signaled this policy with a dramatic “goodwill tour” of the South.⁶⁵ “Effusive Blue and Gray speeches and tearful reunions of old troopers were the order of the day. Hardened South-haters melted . .. the genuineness of the national response to the policy of conciliation and peace was evident.”⁶⁶ In effect, the old tradition of regional compromise and a constitutional division of power was restored to encourage nation-state consolidation.

The price of this reconciliation was to be paid by African-Americans, much as black South Africans would be sacrificed for white unity. As part of the Compromise of 1877, Southerners had publicly committed themselves to legally required “full and equal protection” of black and white citizens.⁶⁷ The emptiness of this rhetoric was quickly revealed by the purposeful disregard of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and resurgent efforts to “repatriate” blacks to Africa.⁶⁸ Racial inferiority per se was used to justify discrimination and exportation as consistent with adherence to the “democratic creed of the nation” as applied only to whites.⁶⁹ The North acceded to this logic. The federal judiciary undermined new constitutional duties to enforce equality and the executive ignored any moral obligation to reward black loyalty in the Civil War. For instance, in 1883 the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was overturned by the Supreme Court.

As the English would find in South Africa, prior commitments to blacks were easily abandoned. To the Southern eye, it seemed that “our Northern fellow citizens begin to feel the race sympathy stilling within their breast.”⁷⁰ More concerned with restoring stability than with “helping the Negroes,” largely “indifferent to the problem” and sharing Southern racial attitudes, the North acceded to the abandonment of Reconstruction efforts. They had become “tired of the worn-out cry of Southern outrages” and the claims of “the everlasting nigger.”⁷¹

The African-American was not just abandoned “as a ward” of the nation “no longer singled out for special guardianship.”⁷² Following a logic similar to that pursued later in South Africa, blacks were also purposefully discriminated against, with emerging segregationist policies providing a “crucial and final step on the long road to sectional reunion” of former adversaries.⁷³ According to Du Bois, “all hatred that the whites after the Civil War had for each other gradually concentrated itself on [blacks]. . . . Had there been no Negroes, there would have been no war. Had no Negroes survived the war, the peace would have been difficult because of hatred.”⁷⁴ Displacing sectional animosity onto blacks helped to pacify the regional antagonism that threatened the Union and its economy. Whites could be and were unified as a race through a return to formal and informal discrimination. Blacks thus served as a scapegoat for white unity, allowing for greater stability and reducing the impediment of regional antagonism standing in the way of further nation-state consolidation. The maintenance of the Union formally won in the war would come to be consolidated with racial domination, which would remain for close to a century. “God wept” as African-Americans returned to a life not so different from slavery, excluded from the polity for which they had fought and from which they had expected more.⁷⁵

Black exclusion was not preordained, but instead emerged from alternatives tried and failed, and from continued intrawhite conflict and competition. Deportation was again considered and abandoned as impractical. Nor can the eventual outcome of official segregation be explained simply as the legacy of earlier racism, for Reconstruction had been attempted. Segregation as it later was codified also cannot be explained as a centrally imposed policy (as in South Africa), for Jim Crow would emerge locally, in fits and starts, not as a result of some grand design. The Compromise of 1877 did not establish the rules of black subordination immediately or finally. But it did signal the trajectory, much as the 1902 peace treaty in South Africa would establish a similar pattern. And as in South Africa, party and class competition led to continued remaking of the “deal” of racial domination to reconcile whites in a unified nation-state.

Party competition played a central role in elaborating racial domination in the post-Reconstruction era. The Republican Party abandoned its earlier attempts to impose racial justice in order to win Southern white support. Hayes committed his administration to ending “the distinction between North and South,” overcoming his “anxiety [that] to do something to promote the pacification of the South is perhaps in danger of leading me too far.”⁷⁶ Republicans remained concerned that appeasing Southern whites ran the risk of losing Civil War gains, were angered by later limits on black suffrage, and even threatened a return to Reconstruction. But partisan efforts to win over enfranchised Southern whites were more pressing than such concerns, not least because many Republicans believed in black inferiority. The gambit failed, with Republican votes in the South falling from 40.34 percent in 1876 to 36.95 percent in 1888. “Republicans actually found their party worse off in the South in 1896 than it had been in 1876, when they sought to redeem it.”⁷⁷ But even though the Republican Party failed to make inroads in the South, its efforts to do so reinforced its abandonment of black rights.

Southern Democrats successfully contained party challenges by trumping Republican commitments to racial domination, in order to retain their control over the South. The Republican Party in the South was decried as “composed almost exclusively of negroes,” backed by the threat of federal force.⁷⁸ The greatest threat to the Democratic lock on the South was the Populist movement, which emerged during the depression of the late 1880s and early 1890s, and called for greater federal intervention. Challenging “white solidarity,” Populist rhetoric advocated an alliance between small black and white farmers who had been “made to hate each other” for the economic advantage of the “progressive” alliance of planters and capitalists.⁷⁹ But the Populists were defeated by fraud and violence and by planters’ appeals for regional solidarity of whites against Washington and the Republicans. Racial regulations were gradually reinforced to head off the Populist movement, disenfranchising blacks who had supported this opposition.⁸⁰ Racism was a tide against which Populists were not strongly committed and could not swim; instead they eventually joined it.⁸¹

By the mid-1890s the Populists had been largely eclipsed by Democrats projecting themselves as “the party of the white man.” Election to office came to be determined by the Democratic primary, further constraining any opposition. The Democrats enforced party discipline, warning against a triadic conflict of divided whites and blacks, arguing that “if whites split . . . the Negro would hold the balance of power.”⁸² By 1898, Louisiana Democratic conventioneers were emboldened to proclaim: “What is the state? It is the Democratic Party . . . We met here to establish the supremacy of the white race, and the white race constitutes the Democratic Party of this state.”⁸³

The Democratic Party ensured its lock on the South not only by excluding blacks, but also by selectively disenfranchising those whites who had sided with the Populists. Class and party conflict among whites was eclipsed by the image of consensus enforced by voting limits – the “progressive” era of stable white rule rested upon disenfranchisement. Seen by party leaders as undependable and unworthy or ignorant and brutal, poorer whites had to be eliminated to ensure white Democratic rule, particularly in the Black Belt regions.⁸⁴ In a series of state constitutional conventions beginning in the 1890s, poll taxes and property requirements were enacted, excluding many whites.⁸⁵ In Alabama, “23.6 percent of the white, male voting-age population was disenfranchised by the poll tax alone.”⁸⁶ Even the secret ballot ensured that illiterates would get no help in voting. When these legal moves proved insufficient, mob violence and electoral fraud further disenfranchised. Sixty-four percent of adult males voted in the South in the 1880s, but after 1900 participation had fallen to 30 percent.⁸⁷ During these decades, the South came to be ruled by whites only, and only by those whites who supported the Democratic Party.

Party rivalry coincided with regional animosity, but actually helped to keep the reunited polity intact. Competing tendencies both saw their interests represented by parties vying for power in a central state not fully captured by either side. And as in South Africa between 1910 and 1948, this dynamic was lubricated by common agreement on racial domination. Superimposed regional and party tensions were contained by white solidarity. Issues other than race might have divided whites and were downplayed.⁸⁸

The major “other issue” contained by racial solidarity was that of divisive intrawhite class antagonism that had emerged after the Civil War. Class conflict had continued to plague development.⁸⁹ But the enforcement of racial domination encouraged the unity of whites across class, serving “to transfer class hatred so that it fell upon the black worker.”⁹⁰ In the South, planters benefited, with Farm Bureau regulations ensuring cheap black labor for cotton and tobacco production when sharecropping diminished.⁹¹ Less developed Southern manufacturers generally went along. Southern white labor’s interests were also accommodated. Planters offered personal and economic assistance to reinforce white unity and to deflect worker mobilization or alliances with blacks, as it had earlier.⁹² But tensions within and between classes remained just below the surface image of white consensus, and would compel even stronger efforts at unity to preserve the region’s political power and stability.⁹³ As C. Vann Woodward puts it, “Having served as the national scapegoat in the reconciliation and reunion of North and South, the Negro was now pressed into service as a sectional scapegoat in the reconciliation of estranged white classes and the reunion of the Solid South.”⁹⁴

The same pattern of using racial domination to diminish intrawhite class conflict also emerged in the North, albeit with important differences. After the Civil War many Northern white workers remained fearful of an influx of black labor from the South. They headed off this threat by imposing their own segregation, reserving for themselves certain jobs and higher wages. As early as 1862, Irish longshoremen in New York called for the dismissal of black competitors. Subsequent waves of European immigrants, themselves discriminated against by nonimmigrants, found employment from which blacks were excluded.⁹⁵ Unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor generally defended their white members against black incursions.⁹⁶ Between 1881 and 1900, more than fifty strikes were waged by white immigrants to keep blacks out of their jobs.⁹⁷ Resulting segregation helped hold together the diverse parts of the white working class and strengthen it.⁹⁸ But for capitalists this was a price worth paying to avoid the even greater threats of sectional conflict and potential unity between white and black workers.

Locally determined segregation policies reflected the distinct regional balance of economic power and demography. In the North, where capital was stronger than labor, employers benefited from paying blacks lower wages than whites.⁹⁹ Stricter Jim Crow would have limited the use of such cheaper labor. White workers, including immigrants, were appeased by informal policies of discrimination, in part because blacks were few in number and little threat. Capital did then benefit from a racially segregated labor market enforcing cheaper black wages, but full-scale legal Jim Crow was not imposed upon the relatively small black population. Informal discrimination sufficed, as it would in Brazil. In the post-Reconstruction South, blacks were more numerous. They posed a greater threat to white workers, and their potential alliance with those white workers posed a threat to planter capital. Immediately after abolition, informal discrimination and black codes constrained black opportunities, even in the absence of those more elaborate job and wage color bars of the type later imposed in South Africa. Native white Southerners retained significant bargaining power in shaping Southern segregationist policies as they moved toward greater codification.

The legal expression of racial domination in the South was Jim Crow. The term referred to popular imagery of blacks as “cheerful and merry” in their inferior position, akin to South Africa’s tendency to disingenuously label such discrimination as “progressive.”¹⁰⁰ Southern elites retained a paternalistic image, with the president of the 1890 Mississippi Constitutional Convention proclaiming that “each race is fond of the other.”¹⁰¹ The reality was vicious segregation, evident earlier but significantly reinforced by legal codes refined through the 1930s.

Most fundamental was the abandonment of the black franchise that had so inflamed, humiliated, and unified Southern whites during Reconstruction. Louisiana state conventioneers were eager “to eliminate from the electorate the mass of corrupt and illiterate voters who have during the last quarter of a century degraded our politics.”¹⁰² “Restricted by the Federal Constitution, we have tried to secure more enlightened elective franchise without race discrimination or injustice,” the Louisiana conventioneers claimed, though their aim was still “white manhood suffrage.”¹⁰³ Southern states employed an array of “nonracial subterfuges,” including property and literacy requirements, and the poll tax, designed to avoid federal intervention and to deny the vote to blacks.¹⁰⁴ Poorer and less educated whites were also so excluded, as noted, but these measures were most strictly applied to blacks, whose numbers on the voting rolls fell precipitously. For example, black turnout in Tennessee gubernatorial contests fell from 60 percent in 1888 to none in 1890, 1894, and 1898. By 1901 the last black Southern Congressman had lost office.¹⁰⁵ Residential segregation, relatively uncommon before the turn of the century, was enforced and defended by violence.¹⁰⁶ Blacks were also excluded from juries, ensuring that Southern courts would not provide “equal protection.”

For all of the subterfuge involved, the race-specific nature of post-Reconstruction social policies was commonly understood. It was perhaps most directly revealed in the application of such policies to mulattoes. Before abolition, a primary social distinction was between slave and nonslave, with freed mulattoes treated as an intermediate category that did not disrupt the basic bifurcation. After Reconstruction, a biracial order was reinforced in order to encourage regional reconciliation, with race replacing bondage as the primary distinction. Segregation, not required to demarcate difference under slavery, was imposed according to race. Mulattoes had to be placed within this new order, to avoid any slippage that might have fed Southern resentment. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that even an “octoroon” was subject to segregation within supposedly “separate but equal” facilities.¹⁰⁷ Miscegenation and “mixed marriages” were made illegal.¹⁰⁸ Whites were ever more distinguished from blacks, regardless of mixed ancestry.

Describing the trajectory of post-Reconstruction social policy in this way runs the risk of a false impression. What appears schematically coherent, centrally controlled, and compressed actually developed in a relatively disorganized and protracted process. Reconstruction itself had revealed the limits of the ability of the central government to impose its will on the South. “To enforce [black] rights would have required a concentration of national authority and efficient bureaucratic administration that was beyond the capacity of the American state” at the time, despite state consolidation during the Civil War.¹⁰⁹ The abandonment of Reconstruction signaled the end of attempts at extending such centralized control and interference, and a resurgence of what William Jennings Bryan would describe as states again “sovereign in your local affairs.”¹¹⁰

Unlike South Africa’s centrally imposed policies, segregation would be imposed unevenly and fitfully, resulting in the lag between 1877 and the full elaboration of Jim Crow in the 1890s and thereafter. Even then, Jim Crow was enforced as much by hoodlums as by local authority. Often the two were indistinguishable, as elected judges and other officials turned a blind eye to the mobs who had voted them into office.¹¹¹ More than two thousand blacks (and some whites) were lynched during the last two decades of the century, while the federal government declined to intervene.¹¹²

Lack of a grand design or strong central action did not ameliorate the effect on blacks. As they were largely concentrated in the South, it made little difference in real terms to blacks whether their plight was enforced by Washington, local and state officials, or mobs. With “nothing but freedom,” the end of Reconstruction left blacks without the paternalistic security of slavery. To meet the labor needs of planters, they were forced into debt peonage and sharecropping, and in some respects worse off and more subject to racial prejudice.¹¹³ By the 1890s, black codes had been refined, and were applied most strongly in urban areas, where whites and blacks lived more closely.¹¹⁴ Residential segregation in the North proceeded apace, defended by white mobs and real estate agents.¹¹⁵ According to a speaker at the Louisiana Constitutional Convention in 1898, “the negro in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago . . . is no more accepted as an equal than in New Orleans.”¹¹⁶ The term “segregation” came into use by the early twentieth century, and its practice was extended even to the galleries of the U.S. Senate.¹¹⁷

The establishment of legal racial domination in the South and continuing discrimination in the North diminished the regional antagonism kept alive by Reconstruction. It also divided the working class along race lines. But these outcomes also produced reverse effects. “The South surrendered claim to substantial economic and political power in the nation in return for social and racial autonomy at home.”¹¹⁸ Such solidified Southern regional autonomy and solidarity also appeased. Confederate spirit was kept alive in subsequent generations by the solid Democratic Party control over the region and continued antagonism against Northern intervention. White working class unity, in both the North and South, was also solidified by white racial solidarity.¹¹⁹ Such sectionalist party politics and worker mobilization ran counter to the nation-building project of diminishing regional and class antagonism. But these outcomes could not be avoided as consequences of pursuing the larger aim that predominated; allowing such assertions of regional and class interests had the effect of containing more explosive antagonism within overarching white racial solidarity.

Whites were somewhat unified by race, across class. Economic development did bring increased competition, but first among whites and only later with blacks. Intrawhite class conflict grew in both the North and South, together with race conflict.¹²⁰ Elites sought to minimize the risk of a triadic conflict, through racial discrimination in its various forms. White workers, including immigrants, were appeased by the exclusion of black competitors and by higher wages. To an extent, capital and workers combined to keep blacks suppressed, forging a kind of class compromise. Business accepted the costs of segregation as a means of allaying white workers’ fears of black competition, while occasionally using cheaper black labor to undercut whites and hold down their wages. As Williamson concludes:

Business exists to make money. Segregated facilities were more expensive than unsegregated facilities so that businesses with unsegregated facilities resisted oncoming segregation. But disorder and violence destroys business altogether. If the violence was to be ended by segregation, business readily adapted and passed the costs along.¹²¹

Economic development and the tensions it brought did contribute to the reinforcement of racial domination. But white capital and labor had contrary and often internally divided interests. Racial domination cannot then be attributed to narrow or uniform class interests. Instead, class conflict and internal class division help to explain the racial order. Racial domination, helping to unify whites as whites, served to diminish class conflict more than it exclusively served the interests of any one class or fraction thereof. Building on prior ideological and cultural prejudice, both white capital and white workers participated. As Du Bois concluded, “the white workers . . . are just as culpable as the white owners of capital.”¹²² Particular policies still differed by region, with Washington effectively letting each region go its own way. But in sum, the variegated racial order preserved peace, avoiding the economic dislocation of further regional or class warfare.

Northern Republicans still on occasion pushed for reforms, but their lack of success again demonstrates the impetus to unify whites politically and economically via race. Efforts to repeal the Fifteenth Amendment were resisted and debt peonage was challenged in the early twentieth century, but the amendments and restrictions on “servitude” remained unenforced. The most notable attempt at Northern reforms was the proposed “Force Bill” of the 1890s, which threatened again to send federal officials South to ensure “that every man who is entitled to vote has an opportunity to caste his vote freely.” Guaranteeing the franchise was described by the bill’s supporters as a national obligation. The bill’s leading advocate, Henry Cabot Lodge, argued that blacks deserve “some better reward” for their “loyalty.. . . We owe them no more and no less than we owe all American citizens.” But even Lodge acknowledged that “the negro question” remained “a matter of party politics, dividing sections and keeping alive sectional animosities and agitation. . . . Each state and each community must work out its own salvation,” even as he argued that the franchise “is a different question.” The earlier logic of leaving such issues to local authority so as to dampen regional antagonism again won the day. Southern objections against Northern efforts to again “oppress the people” were given greater weight than any moral obligation to blacks.¹²³ Having passed in the House, the Force Bill was defeated in the Senate, black disenfranchisement proceeded further, and the federal government continued to allow Jim Crow. Enforcing the black franchise continued to be set aside for the larger goal of nation-state consolidation.

By the end of the century, regional animosity had significantly abated, eclipsed by the purposeful allowing of racial domination to encourage regional reconciliation. Symbolizing this victory, President McKinley visited Alabama in 1898, joining a “prolonged celebration of sectional reconciliation . . . singing both Yankee Doodle and Dixie.”¹²⁴ With the consolidation of Jim Crow in the South, America entered what has been described as “the golden age of racism” in the North as well.¹²⁵ The racial order was reaffirmed both domestically and internationally. Immigration was restricted according to race categories, and even Native Americans were subject to renewed repression. Imperialism and the Spanish-American War placed millions of Caribbean and Pacific peoples under American rule, with these subject peoples popularly viewed as “a varied assortment of inferior races.”¹²⁶

As the fruits of “the American century” were enjoyed, the scars of the earlier regional conflict began to heal. In 1912 a Southern-born Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, was elected president. Southerners returned to positions of power in Washington, and even black federal civil servants were subjected to segregation.¹²⁷ Racial domination, regional reconciliation, national unity and prosperity all grew together. The wisdom of the founding fathers’ federalism, balancing central and state powers in order to hold together a diverse nation of whites, was celebrated anew. Reconstruction reforms were retrospectively described as a “blunder,” with the “race problem” left to be “worked out in the South.”¹²⁸ The painful episodes of the Civil War and Reconstruction faded into memory as aberrations.

Centralizing Power and Greater White Unity

With Reconstruction, the United States diverged from the path that South Africa would take. But by the late nineteenth century, the country had reverted to a pattern similar to that in South Africa in encoding or allowing for racial domination to encourage nation-state consolidation among whites. The South was appeased by allowing for Jim Crow. This arrangement had its intended result, gradually diminishing sectional animosity, much as segregation would contain ethnic tension in South Africa. Southerners and Northerners began to converge nationally, economically, and politically. As tensions diminished, central state authority increased and was able to meet economic and geopolitical challenges. Eventually that central authority would return to apply its greater strength to impose an end to Jim Crow, pushed by rising black protest to use its power to “heal the wounds” of race and to contain this new challenge to nation-state unity, as we shall see in Chapter 9. The focus here is on how nation-state consolidation emerged more fully, on the basis of racial domination, and was then turned against it.

Central state authority rapidly expanded to head off the economic dislocation of the Great Depression. The spectacle of widespread “destitution through no fault of their own” encouraged popular support for federal intervention into areas of social policy previously outside of the public realm. Even the South, long committed to states’ rights, advocated a stronger central authority to meet pressing needs.¹²⁹ President Franklin D. Roosevelt encouraged this view and sought to deliver. His administration expanded the federal machinery, drawing away the autonomy of the states, shifting power toward the center. In the crisis of the moment, federalism was again reconfigured, though the racial order remained largely intact.

The New Deal represented a resurgence of centralized power not seen since Reconstruction. But it also purposefully avoided reawakening the demons of race reform and Southern resistance. While poor blacks suffering disproportionately from the Depression benefited from new forms of assistance and some patronage, they were not targeted by such programs.¹³⁰ In fact, they were often implicitly excluded.

Party politics ensured this result. Enjoying dominance in their region, Southern Democrats were often assured reelection, gaining seniority and committee chairmanships in Congress. They used their power to prevent federal economic intervention from threatening racial domination. For instance, agricultural and domestic workers were excluded from Social Security and Old Age Insurance, leaving millions of blacks uncovered. With the federal bureaucracy still underdeveloped, Aid to Dependent Children and other programs were left to states to administer, and Southern states were thereby free to discriminate. Proposed anti-lynching legislation and efforts to extend the franchise to blacks in the South were considered by FDR “too hot to touch.”¹³¹ The president feared that addressing such issues would antagonize those Southern legislators on whom he depended to pass the New Deal, which he considered more important than addressing black concerns per se. The South had regained its political foothold in Washington, with Northern Democrats constrained by their alliance with Southern Democrats.

Increased federal power was not applied immediately to race reform, but did create the potential for such reform at a later date.¹³² African-Americans embraced this expectation and in gratitude for their limited benefits from the New Deal shifted their support to the Democratic Party, by then the leading advocate of federal intervention. Jim Crow lived on, though the trajectory of growing federal power posed a future threat to local segregation, as it had under Reconstruction. But as long as most blacks remained in the South and disenfranchised, they could not exert the full potential of electoral pressure for reforms, including enfranchisement. This vicious cycle kept race from becoming a more prominent issue at the time.

Economic transition and new migration patterns began to undermine the prior stasis. With dramatic black migration north, particularly after cotton production in the South collapsed, and with decreased white immigration during the First World War, Northern industry was increasingly eager to employ a greater proportion of cheap black labor.¹³³ And in Northern manufacturing, blacks were used as strikebreakers to diminish working-class bargaining power and to suppress white wages. Capital benefited from such divide-and-rule tactics by deflecting white labor hostility onto blacks and away from employers.¹³⁴ This type of resentment exploded in the East St. Louis riots of 1917, when white workers actually attacked blacks. With rising black employment in the North, white unionists began to shift tack, recognizing that their interests would be better served by a cross-race alliance. By 1940, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) had unionized a half million blacks, insisting on their continued inclusion after merging with the more conservative American Federation of Labor (AF of L).¹³⁵ Disagreement over the inclusion of blacks within the union movement remained.

While white workers in the North began to abandon segregation, the centralization of power under the New Deal was further consolidated by the Second World War. The war effort and its aftermath then further undermined the racial order. The war itself brought increased industrial employment for women and blacks replacing white male laborers called into service. Other blacks joined the army, where they “had a chance to compete and showed they could excel.”¹³⁶ All veterans, including blacks, were rewarded for their efforts with increased educational opportunities provided by the G.I. Bill of Rights. But the impact of the war spread beyond such policies, raising black expectations of reform as a reward for their service and in keeping with the Allies’ antiracist rhetoric. The war had broken the isolation of America and of black Americans, with unforeseen consequences.

American embarrassment at the contradiction between the anti-racist rhetoric of the war and segregation at home was made all the more acute after the war by the country’s emerging international position and concern about its reputation. The war had shaken European colonial control over Africa and Asia, and the United States was eager to win allies among newly independent states that might otherwise be lost to the Soviet Union.¹³⁷ The U.S. government was therefore eager to present the best possible image of domestic race relations to the world. President Harry Truman, eager for Northern black votes, appointed a national commission calling for reform and desegregated the army. But after many Southern Democrats bolted the party and refused to support him for election in 1948, Truman was under relatively little pressure on civil rights and largely ignored the issue of race.

When the executive branch faltered, the judiciary took up the lead. From the late 1930s, the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld a number of reforms in education, housing, and electoral design. But the real bombshell came in 1954 with the Brown v. Board of Education decision, overturning Plessy v. Ferguson and mandating school desegregation. The Court concluded that “education is the most important function of state and local government” and that discriminatory policies established by such authorities were inconsistent with national norms and requirements for “good citizenship.”¹³⁸ International reputation, noted for instance in briefs before the Court, certainly had a bearing on this decision; but this was a secondary concern. More to the point, Brown was a capstone to the new judicial impetus upholding federal intervention.

A more progressive Court, encouraged by the post–New Deal expansion of central authority, endorsed federal intervention into the last bastion of states’ rights. Local authority over race had been granted after Reconstruction. But in the intervening decades, federal power had grown by leaving the divisive issue of race where it lay, and was approaching sufficient strength to address this issue head on. Intentionally or not, the Court acted on this dynamic, helping to set the country on a new trajectory, pushed much further by subsequent black protest demanding inclusion in the nation-state.

Despite national consolidation, sectional animosity remained an impediment, and the promise of federal intervention remained stronger than the reality. The “deliberate speed” of school desegregation did not materialize. But to blacks the Court’s decision meant that “for the first time since Reconstruction they felt the federal government was actually on their side.”¹³⁹ The implication was even broader than school desegregation; Brown v. Board of Education pronounced segregation per se to be discriminatory and unconstitutional. Blacks henceforth began to engage in direct action.

Even the relatively conservative President Dwight D. Eisenhower could not avoid the shifting terrain of growing central authority and pressure for race reforms signaled by the Brown decision and the emergent civil rights movement. Eisenhower himself was reluctant to challenge racial norms, favored gradual change, opposed “social mingling” across race, and was reluctant about federal intervention.¹⁴⁰ But as commander-in-chief he took very seriously any menace of insurrection threatening central state authority. Such a threat was posed by the activities of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan and of White Citizens’ Councils, which emerged throughout the South in the wake of Brown, and the refusal of Arkansas to implement court-ordered school desegregation in its capital. Eisenhower responded by sending the army to Little Rock, the first such commitment of federal troops since Reconstruction.¹⁴¹ Southern blacks understood this intervention as a direct challenge to states’ rights. Eisenhower subsequently supported the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and created a Commission of Civil Rights, whose representatives were welcomed by Southern blacks as a signal that “the Big Government has really come all the way down here to help us!”¹⁴²

John F. Kennedy shared Eisenhower’s political concern that federal intervention on the issue of race would heighten sectional animosity, cost votes, and further divide the nation. Southerners urged Kennedy not to “interfere in the affairs of a sovereign state,” and Kennedy himself was concerned about further antagonizing Southern white Dixiecrats. “The Kennedys did not want to rock the boat. They kept their eye on the prize of a solid Democratic Southern vote. They did not want to start another civil war.”¹⁴³ Kennedy’s dilemma was the same faced by FDR, and like Roosevelt he sought to project a progressive image without taking firm action on divisive issues of race. Kennedy had promised an executive order to desegregate federally supported housing with “a stroke of a pen.” Blacks sent thousands of pens to the White House, but the order remained unsigned. At the same time, Kennedy continued to use Harris Wofford, his assistant for civil rights, as a buffer to resist pressure for further reforms. The administration later tried to divert such pressure into more manageable activism for voter registration.¹⁴⁴

Despite his reluctance, Kennedy like Eisenhower was not willing to see central authority defied and was even more ideologically predisposed to consolidating federal intervention in society. Though Kennedy argued that civil rights was “not a sectional issue . . . nor is this a partisan issue,”¹⁴⁵ the history of the United States suggested otherwise. His own liberal rhetoric had raised expectations among blacks that could not then be easily contained despite the political risks. For instance, the day after Kennedy’s inauguration, James Meredith became the first black since Reconstruction to register at the University of Mississippi. In the resulting confrontation, Kennedy saw little alternative but to use force to desegregate the university despite resistance from Southern states’-righters of his own party. According to Kennedy, “if the United States government had failed to exert its influence to protect Mr. Meredith . . . that would have been far more expensive [than not acting]. The country cannot survive if the U.S. government and executive branch don’t carry out decisions of the court.”¹⁴⁶ According to Burke Marshall, “only in the sixties did the Executive Branch see the need to intervene” to exert its authority. Washington’s edicts had to be enforced, and administration officials sent South for this purpose had to be protected.¹⁴⁷ Kennedy himself understood his actions in a historical light, describing his efforts to secure black rights as a “Second Reconstruction.”¹⁴⁸ He even noted that he had signed the order to enforce desegregation at Ole Miss on General Grant’s table. The president urged an aide not to reveal this private aside so as not to “antagonize the South any further with reminders of the Civil War.”¹⁴⁹

Significant black electoral and protest mobilization pushed Kennedy further. His narrow victory in 1960 was attributed to the swing of black votes to the Democrats, indicative of both the continuing party realignment among blacks and the rising proportion of blacks registering to vote as they migrated north. To win these votes, Kennedy had promised to address civil rights more than any previous presidential candidate. Pressure from expectant blacks was reinforced by the concern of the Kennedy administration that discrimination was “making our country look ridiculous before the world.”¹⁵⁰ Cold war competition with the Soviet Union heightened this concern. James Forman urged his fellow black activists to play “on the [white] man’s politics and the man’s fears. . . . [Whites have] to give in to our demands because he’s hurting in the cold war.”¹⁵¹

Kennedy’s policies reflected both his slowly fading ambivalence and the growing pressure of black protest. Though he initially resisted fulfilling his campaign promises, in 1961 Kennedy did establish the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity to enforce desegregation within the government and its contractors. His subcabinet Group on Civil Rights pressed for desegregation of interstate transportation. By 1963, Kennedy had publicly declared that after “one hundred years of delay . . . the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise.”¹⁵² His proposed Civil Rights Act aimed to fulfill that promise.

Kennedy’s assassination brought to the presidency a Southerner who emerged as a major advocate of reform, even though cognizant of the political costs. Lyndon B. Johnson recognized that federal intervention that “looks like the Civil War all over again” would force Southerners “right into the arms of extremists.”¹⁵³ But with massive counterpressure from the civil rights movement he nonetheless persevered, pushed far beyond Kennedy’s own ambivalent record to assert central authority. Encouraged by his electoral victory in 1964 against an explicit opponent of civil rights, Johnson embraced the rhetoric of the movement, proclaiming to Congress that “we shall overcome.” Later Johnson wrote that “nothing is of greater significance to the welfare and vitality of this nation than the movement to secure equal rights for Negro Americans.”¹⁵⁴ The challenge of civil rights had to be met to fulfill “the meaning of our nation” and its promises of rights and citizenship.¹⁵⁵ At the risk of reigniting the sectional divide, Johnson moved to heal the more pressing challenge to nation-state consolidation posed by black protest and violence.

The era of using compromise and delay in order to achieve sectional reconciliation was over. Congress passed the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1966 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965; in 1964 the Twenty-Fourth Amendment ending the poll tax was ratified. Other legislation consolidated civil rights guarantees, with some incorporated into the more general Great Society war on poverty. Reaffirming the historical connection between expanded federal authority and the imposition of civil rights, Johnson’s administration represented the high point of both. Federal officials had often cited the strength of “police power and decision making under control of the states” as an impediment to enforcing desegregation from the center.¹⁵⁶ Civil rights activists well understood that reform on “racial issues seems to require a capability for national action,” and proceeded to press for precisely such action.¹⁵⁷ According to James Forman, “we saw the powers of the federal government as an instrument to be used over the state governments of the South.”¹⁵⁸

Black protest brought civil rights to the forefront of the national agenda under Johnson, with this issue strongly interconnected with the issue of central state authority. That central authority had expanded from the New Deal until the 1960s, and blacks pressed for its application to their demands. They understood from prior experience that redress rested upon the assertion of federal power, even if that power in part had been centralized precisely by the avoidance of race reform. Blacks pressed for further action, despite continued white resistance. That black demands were gradually met attests not only to the strength of their protest, but also to the strength of central power willing to resist white counterdemands.

Each assertion of such federal authority over the states to force desegregation was resisted by Southern claims to states’ rights, and catalyzed their abandonment of the Democratic Party. George Wallace in particular perfected the Southern politician’s rhetorical resistance to integration as a violation of the federal balance of powers. “Both themes were popular in Alabama – segregation and against big government,” the former governor later recalled.¹⁵⁹ Wallace’s appeal, evident in the support for his third-party presidential bids in 1968 and 1972, was “two-pronged – antiblack and anti–federal government,” with the two inextricably linked in Southern tradition.¹⁶⁰ Signaling a national shift to come, even some Northerners supported Wallace.

Black rights had been intertwined with federal power since at least the Civil War and Reconstruction. Though Wallace argued that it was “just coincidental . . . that the nation’s central power was manifested by matters pertaining to race,” it was not.¹⁶¹ The federal government grew in power and reach, with federal reformist policies and programs of social intervention and regulation over race contributing to this growth. Indeed, the federal budget grew from $92 billion in 1960 to $195 billion ten years later, not so much as a result of the Vietnam War but as a result of the Great Society and civil rights programs.¹⁶² Johnson accepted Southern antagonism as the cost of state consolidation and national incorporation of blacks.

Johnson’s legislation signaled a new high-water mark of centralized power, and reinforced concrete changes in the socioeconomic status of black Americans. A disproportionate number of the two million federally funded government jobs created went to blacks, who as early as 1962 had accounted for 13 percent of the federal workforce.¹⁶³ Polls showed that blacks saw the government, including the military, as offering prospects for the best jobs.¹⁶⁴ A 1965 executive order requiring nondiscrimination by federal contractors further encouraged black employment.¹⁶⁵ Government policies and hiring, spurred on by general prosperity, dramatically decreased aggregate black poverty levels, which fell to a low point of 30.6 percent below the official nationwide poverty level in 1978.¹⁶⁶

As in the New Deal, federal economic intervention was profound in its effects, changing the lives of blacks, the federal government itself, and party politics. The advancement of some blacks certainly increased inequality within the black community. Critics pointed out that only a relatively small “black elite” benefited from state-created jobs.¹⁶⁷ Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that Johnson’s policies aimed at serving the poor actually created employment for those working for the programs more than for the target population.¹⁶⁸ Thus, addressing issues of race and poverty served to reinforce central state power via increased government employment. Not surprisingly, federal intervention fed further state consolidation. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party embraced this image as provider of jobs, reaping electoral rewards. Programs of assistance benefited some blacks more than others, but consistently enlarged the federal bureaucracy and power.

Federal intervention for civil rights nurtured the growth of central state authority, but was the direct result of protest and electoral pressure from blacks who had migrated north, urbanized, advanced economically, and registered in increasing numbers. Unlike in South Africa, they could and did vote for reform from within the political system, reinforcing the pressure brought by mobilization and protest. The proportion of U.S. blacks living in the South fell from 89 percent in 1910 to 53 percent in 1970, largely as the result of their own migration and shifting labor demands. The proportion of blacks living in urban areas increased from 27 percent to 81 percent in the same period. Over 64 percent of blacks had registered to vote by 1968, approaching levels not seen since Reconstruction.¹⁶⁹ Later, with the franchise extended to the South, even politicians there were forced to appeal to blacks. Johnson himself urged George Wallace that “like it or not, the niggers are going to vote. You better go home and make some friends.”¹⁷⁰ These changing conditions clearly contributed to pressure for reform, most notably by increasing the interest of politicians in winning the black vote. And reforms themselves helped to encourage further migration, urbanization, and voting, reversing the prior vicious cycle of black disenfranchisement and lack of reform. This new cycle of progressive forces added pressure for change upon otherwise reluctant politicians. “Political leaders respond to anxiety,” James Farmer observes. “They had to be pressured . . . [since] doing nothing is always safest for politicians.”¹⁷¹

Black voting reinforced a realignment of political party policies that further undermined the South’s ability to resist federal intervention. During the late nineteenth century and thereafter the South had remained solidly Democratic and the North more Republican. This general superimposition of party and regional loyalty had reinforced sectionalism and the South’s ability to protect states’ rights through Democratic pressure in Washington. Northern Democrats went along. The reformist policies of Democratic presidents such as Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and especially Johnson undermined this arrangement. Democrats began to lose support among white Southerners. Blacks had long seen federal intervention as essential for their advancement, supporting first Republicans and then Democrats who favored such intervention. Recognizing the consequence of his civil rights advocacy, Johnson himself concluded that he had “delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” The solid South was split: the Democrats lost five Southern states to Goldwater in 1964 and seven Congressional seats in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi in 1966.¹⁷² Still, the South was unable to block civil rights and federal intervention, outvoted by the Democratic alliance of liberal whites and blacks.

The end of legal racial domination in the United States was largely the result of these structural changes and protest. But such protest would not have succeeded, perhaps not even emerged as strongly, if a central authority had not grown sufficient to overcome white resistance. Indeed, white racism was somewhat diluted by growing nation-state consolidation and economic change, earlier encouraged by racial domination.

Central government power in the United States had historically been constrained by the individual power of each state, regionally grouped. Growing central authority could only come at the expense of local authority, as it did. The Civil War itself, as well as the two world wars, had reinforced central state capacity to mount a major war effort, each time leaving the central state even stronger after the war. Demobilization never reduced the central state’s power to its prewar levels. The crisis of the Great Depression also brought further consolidation of central authority and capacity under the New Deal, establishing the national government’s relatively strong intervention in the economy and social policy. The federal machinery – its bureaucracy for social intervention – dramatically expanded. In the half century after 1926, government spending as a proportion of net national product almost tripled.¹⁷³ The post–New Deal Supreme Court mostly upheld this increasing federal intervention, and if need be, Washington had the military force necessary to impose its will.

This is not to suggest that assertions of states’ rights disappeared, only that they diminished. Efforts to appease the South had largely succeeded, with the South gradually lowering its guard. Southern resentment toward the North and Washington had gradually abated. Common national experiences such as the world wars and New Deal had reinforced national unity further. The South was “Americanized.”¹⁷⁴ The growing participation and power of Southerners in Washington, as indicated by FDR’s fear of the “Southern veto,” further indicates that the South had been incorporated, much as Afrikaners were incorporated in South Africa. And again as in South Africa, representation in party politics, in particular then through the Democratic party, further assured the South that its interests would be defended within the polity.

Appeasement of the South was not only achieved politically, but also through rising prosperity in the region and economic integration of the country as a whole. After abolition, Southern merchants and planters had invested in industry, such as textiles and later iron. Northern industrialists provided some further capital, and federal expenditure for railroads and other services in the region increased, leading to an economic rebirth. The New Deal then forced higher wages and provided assistance, spreading prosperity to Southern workers.¹⁷⁵ In just four years, thanks to war production, Southern manufacturing jobs almost doubled to 2.8 million by 1943.¹⁷⁶ Per capita income in the South exploded after 1940, diminishing the economic disparity between North and South via rising Southern industrialization, urbanization, and cross-regional migration.¹⁷⁷ Much as the Afrikaners reached greater parity with the English in South Africa, the South prospered under Jim Crow.

Ironically, as the South was appeased, developed, and integrated with and increasingly reconciled with the North, it gradually lost the power it had exerted through the continued threat of sectional conflict. Allowing states’ rights to be preserved amid party competition preserved the union and quelled resentments, allowing for the gradual diminution of those very states’ rights. The nation-state was consolidated among and for whites, as it was in South Africa.

Also as in South Africa, the Union aim of racial justice had been abandoned in order to secure the primary goal of national unity through regional appeasement. Southern incorporation suggests that this strategy had worked, as it had in South Africa. But with the greater achievement of white unity, blacks increasingly demanded an end to the racial domination that had helped unify the white nation. The regional balance of power had had disastrous consequences for black Americans for as long as central authority remained weak. Federal moves to force the end of Jim Crow in the 1960s were a response to rising black protest, but also indicated the greater power of the center made possible by the earlier appeasement.

The South recognized its vulnerability to intervention, foresaw that accommodation to its racial order was ending and again challenged federal intervention, but it was too late. The indignation of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson at Southern challenges to national authority provoked even further imposition of such authority over local race policies. Racial domination had remained in many ways the defining component of states’ rights, and federal intervention to meet black demands marked the last step toward consolidation of the nation-state and of Washington’s power. Central authority had achieved enough strength to finally move forcefully into the last bastion of states’ rights.

By the mid-twentieth century, the central state was strong enough to consolidate its power more fully, even to impose reforms of the racial order in the South. Sectionalism was dampened and unity encouraged, allowing for the gradual centralization of political power sought by the North. Blacks had paid the price of this nation-state consolidation: their exclusion and domination had appeased the South and unified whites nationally on racial grounds, thereby diminishing the sectionalist threat. Later black pressure on the polity was ironically enhanced by the very economic integration, migration, and urbanization made possible by prior racial domination. Such pressure eventually reinforced a new threat to the nation-state in the form of black protest, and that could only be defused by ending legal domination. None of this is intended to suggest that Southern regional loyalty and resistance to the center ever disappeared. To the contrary, federally imposed reforms rekindled such antagonism. But by then the South had become much more fully integrated into the nation-state, could not plausibly threaten to secede, and therefore had little ammunition with which to resist. Racial domination had reinforced the nation-state, which then, under pressure, tried to rid itself of its original sin.