Reconstruction's Defeat: From Hattie McDaniel to Breonna Taylor

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

08-10-2020

Roger Martinez contributed to this commentary.

 

My first reaction to watching this video was mixed. The whole Nazi like parade in Georgia around this film and the absence of the Black cast was nauseating. Then the Confederate veterans being paraded, the survivors of a supposedly defeated racist regime being honored. The cowardice of Clark Gable, Vivien Lee and all the European/white American actors in participating in it. It is so disgusting. When it shifted to the Oscars I got even angrier and thought about what this woman had to endure indeed. I didn’t expect her to be invited on the stage and when she was I hoped she would tell them to stick the Oscar up their collective asses and screw their pathetic attempt to appear like normal human beings.

 

But she accepted it with grace and thanked them. I can’t fault her for that as a representative of a group of people totally marginalized, excluded from all the basic normality’s of a supposedly democratic society. Maybe her success would change something. But is this treatment any different than the way Jews were treated by the Nazi regime. Exterminating Black Americans was not viable though as they were the backbone of the Southern economy.

 

Though it was getting late and I was a bit knackered from a hike earlier in the day I grabbed my copy of Eric Foner’s splendid book on the Reconstruction era as well as a couple of other texts and called my friend to discuss it a bit. 

Reconstruction is an interesting era in US history and for Black folks, many who had fought in the Civil War on the Union side, it was supposed to be the beginning of a new day. And in many ways it was, for a brief period.  

 

Oliver Otis Howard was the Union general in the Civil War who was in charge of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the US government agency that was to integrate the poor, the refugees and the freed slaves and their families in to the new society after the war and the defeat of one of the most brutal regimes in human history. White public opinion could not "conceive of the negro having any rights at all", Howard wrote in his autobiography….. “Men, who are honorable in their dealings with their white neighbors, will cheat a negro without feeling a twinge of their honor; to kill a negro they do not deem murder; to debauch a negro woman they do not think fornication; to take property away from a negro they do not deem robbery….They still have the ingrained feeling that the black people at large belong to the whites at large.”  Foner Reconstruction p 150

 

During Reconstruction there were committed men involved in the Freedmen’s Bureau, men like Howard who wanted to ensure that freed African Americans were given land that they could farm themselves and made efforts to do accomplish this. They wanted to develop a small farmer or Yeoman class and also there were skilled Black artisans who as “free labor” would play an important role in the Southern economy as the consolidation of the nation state based on free market and free labor policies gained momentum. After all, this was what the US Civil War was about; the struggle between the Northern Industrialists and the Southern Slaveocracy. Capitalism needs free labor and this conflict was the second half of the American Revolution.

 

There was General Fisk who was responsible for Louisiana who “began locating blacks on the 65000 acres under his control”, writes Eric Foner. Thomas Conway, “…invited applications from freedmen who wished to, ‘procure land for their own use’”.  “Orlando Brown…” Foner tells us, called on Oliver Howard to, “take possession of all the abandoned and confiscated land we require, and permit negroes to work it on their own behalf.”

 

General Rufus Saxton, a long time abolitionist who was in charge of Freedmen’s Bureau land stated that he would, provide the freedmen that he was responsible for “forty-acre” homesteads. “where by faithful industry they could readily achieve independence. “Put in all the cotton and rice you can…” Saxton told black farmers, “…for these are the crops which will pay the best….”.

 

Howard had issued the directive, Circular 13 that directed the agents under his command to “set aside” forty acre tracts for freed slaves. But Andrew Johnson, who became president after Lincoln was assassinated and served from 1865 to 1869 countered Howards orders and changed the nature of the Freedmen’s Bureau sealing the fate of the freed Blacks. He issued pardons to many of the confederate landowners which allowed them to take back their property and cemented this policy with his Circular 15. “Had Howard’s policy stood, as many as 900,000 acres of plantation lands previously belonging to slave owners might have been redistributed”. Rick Beard, A Promise Betrayed

 

The aforementioned Saxton refused to comply, “Thousands of them are already located on tracts of forty acres each,” he wrote Howard. “Their love of the soil and desire to own farms amounts to a passion—it appears to be the dearest hope of their lives.” Furthermore, Saxton argued in a second letter, “the faith of the Government is solemnly pledged to these people who have been faithful to it and we have no right now to dispossess them of their lands.” https://www.historynet.com/a-promise-betrayed.htm

 

Johnson eventually had Saxon removed under pressure from the confederate planters.  Along with this betrayal of some 4 million Black Americans new laws were instituted called “Black Codes”  that were designed to force now landless freed slaves to negotiate with their former slaveowners for labor contracts. Vagrancy laws that didn’t apply to whites for example.   In 1877 another betrayal and somewhat of a protection from white racist violence was removed when the Great Compromise between Democrats and Republicans was made that led to the removal of Union troops from the South entirely. So when we hear some black folks ask “where’s my forty acres and a mule” or Martin Luther King saying in that speech on the Homestead Act that we’ve “come for our check”, it has a real historical significance.

 

Southern Democrats were instrumental in undermining the Freedmen’s Bureau and ensuring control remained in the hands of the white racist power structure and the gains made during construction were lost and the era of Jim Crow began.

 

The ideology of the Confederate ruling class was always based on racism and white supremacy and this constructed notion of the White Race. Alexander Stevens the Vice President of the Confederacy in 1861 made that clear in 1861 when he announced:

“The new Constitution has put to rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution-----African slavery as it exists among us-----the proper status of the Negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and the present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as “The rock upon which the Old Union would split.”……The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically…. These ideas however, were fundamentally wrong.   They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error….

 

"Our new government is founded on exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon, the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that Slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. (Applause.) This, our new Government, is the first in the history of the world, based upon this great physical philosophical and moral truth.” The Emancipation Proclamation, George Novack, America’s Revolutionary Heritage, p. 264.

 

It is impossible to understand the collective horror and shock the Black population must have had after fighting alongside Union troops to defeat the Confederacy and then to be stabbed in the back in that way.  Howard tried to calm them and encourage them to “negotiate” with their former slaveowners. Imagine that scenario.  Land being farmed by Blacks in Louisiana, Virginia, North Carolina and elsewhere was returned to the “enemy” against who the war was fought. Blacks were evicted from their land. And people say we should never forget 911 and we shouldn’t, but it is a minor episode in US history by comparison and Black people are accused of being unable to let it go. They have to listen to some whites who say that they are looters, terrorists and so on. Those who choose to obsess over the latest football scores and get angry at Colin Kaepernick for his mild protest at the conditions that Black Americans still face should be ashamed of themselves.

 

With the onset of the Jim Crow era Black people in the Southern United States lived in a state of perpetual fear. The war was fought for nought. There was those Blacks that claimed they were better off with their former owners than under the so-called free regime of Jim Crow. As the Blacks were dispossessed of their land, whites were given free land as US capitalism expanded westward. Here’s a short clip of a speech by Martin Luther King detailing this.

 

This history, from the beginning of “white” as a racial definition in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, detailed in the two volumes written by Theodore Allen titled, The Invention of the White Race, was a conscious development as a means of undermining labor solidarity between European and African American workers and it has served the US ruling class well. It has meant a violent and tragic history for Black Americans, but all workers have been harmed by it.

The conditions of workers in the South were always worse than the North and unions either non-existent or weaker due to racism. But this condition was not easy to create, as Lerone Bennett Jr. wrote in the Shaping of Black America:

“Curiously unconcerned about their color, these people worked together and relaxed together.  They had essentially the same interests, the same aspirations and the same grievances. They conspired together, and waged a common struggle against their common enemy-------the big planter apparatus and a social system that legalized terror against black and white bondsmen………….the available evidence, slight though it is, suggests that there were widening bonds of solidarity between the first generation of blacks and whites.  And the same evidence indicates that it proved very difficult indeed to teach white people to worship their skin.” 

 

The support the Black Lives Matter movement has received form young white workers is a refreshing development and while plain solidarity and anti-racism is a factor, the lack of opportunity and a future for European Americans is not bright; the declining life expectancy of European Americans is also a contributor. Hopefully this movement will expand its reach and also its demands.  Neither the police nor racism can be abolished within the framework of capitalism, they are integral to its survival. There is no doubt that solidarity is involved in this but also the continued deterioration of the living standards of the white population.

 

I hope folks watch that video and are also encouraged by this rather off the cuff and perhaps a somewhat rambling contribution, to look at history with an open mind and from the perspective not of the rich and powerful at the top, but history from below. Perhaps those white workers who think that Black people complain too much might ask themselves this question: What was it that caused a huge section of the US population to lose their legal right to vote after the war they fought in that was supposed to guarantee it for them.

 

If we do that one can’t help recognize that the conditions that prevail in the Black working class communities are not of their own creation but they are a product of centuries of violence and exclusion and that their efforts to overcome them are just.