Reckoning with Race: America's Failure

By Gene Dattel

Reckoning with Race confronts America's most intractable problem—race. The book outlines in a provocative, novel manner American racial issues from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. It explodes myths about the South as America's exclusive racial scapegoat. The book moves to the Great Migration north and the urban ghettos which still plague America.



Importantly, the evergreen topics of identity, assimilation, and separation come to the fore in a balanced, uncompromising, and unflinching narrative. People, cities, and regions are profiled. Despite civil rights legislation, the racial divide between the races remains a chasm. A plethora of reports, commissions, conferences, and other highly visible gestures, purporting to do something have generated publicity, but little else. There remain no adequate structures—family, community or church—to provide leadership. Destructive cultural traits cannot be explained solely by poverty.



The book asks and answers many questions. After emancipation, how were blacks historically segregated from the rest of American society? Why is self-segregation still a feature of black society? Why do large numbers of blacks resist assimilation and the acceptance of middle class norms of behavior? Why has there been so little black penetration in the private sector? Why did the removal of overt legal segregation and civil rights legislation in the 1960s not settle the racial conundrum? What are the differences and similarities between the leaders of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and today? Why do we still have the problems enumerated in the Kerner Commission report (1968) after trillions of dollars have been spent promote black progress? What, if anything, should be done, to eliminate the racial divide?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Release date: Sep 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9781594039102

Book preview

Chapter One

Racial Attitudes in the North, 1800–1865

White abolitionists best love the colored man at a distance.

—SAMUEL R. WARD, BLACK ABOLITIONIST, 1840S

The great fact is now fully realized that the African race here is a foreign and feeble element . . . incapable of assimilation . . . a pitiful exotic unnecessarily transplanted into our fields, and which it is unprofitable to cultivate at the cost of the desolation of the native vineyard.

—WILLIAM H. SEWARD, ANTI-SLAVERY ADVOCATE, NEW YORK GOVERNOR AND SENATOR, SECRETARY OF STATE, LINCOLN’S RIGHT HAND, 1860

[Free blacks] have no economy; and waste, of course, much of what they earn. They have little knowledge either of morals or religion. They are left, therefore, as miserable victims to sloth, prodigality, poverty, ignorance, and vice.

—TIMOTHY DWIGHT, PRESIDENT OF YALE UNIVERSITY, 1810

African Colonization is predicated on the principle that there is an utter aversion in the public mind, to an amalgamation and equalization of the two races; and that any attempt to press equalization is not only fruitless but injurious.

—WILBUR FISK, PRESIDENT OF WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY, 1835

[Blacks must] learn trades or starve . . . and learn not only to black boot but to make them as well.

—FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1853

White foreigners who are, or may hereafter become residents of [Oregon] . . . shall enjoy the same rights in respect to the possession, enjoyment, and descent of property as native-born citizens.

No Negro, Chinaman, or Mulatto shall have the right of suffrage.

No free Negro, or Mulatto, not residing in this state at the time of the adoption of this constitution, shall come, reside, or be within this state, or hold any real estate, or make any contracts, or maintain any suit therein; an [sic] the Legislative Assembly shall provide by penal laws, for the removal, by public officers, of all such Negroes, and Mulattoes, and for their effectual exclusion from the state, and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state, or employ, or harbor them.

—OREGON STATE CONSTITUTION, 1857 (THE BLACK EXCLUSION LAW WAS REPEALED IN 1926.)

The Antebellum Free States

The end of slavery in the United States did not change white attitudes toward blacks. From the early nineteenth century, when gradual emancipation began in earnest, the presence of free blacks had presented a problem for the antebellum North. From New England to California and Oregon, whites asked themselves, what shall we do with them? The overwhelming response was that blacks belonged nowhere but in the South.

Race-based slavery was a moral and economic anachronism. For the South, where slavery was implanted in large-scale staple agriculture, morality was an issue, but the advent of the tornado that was cotton gave slavery a vital economic role. In one decade, the 1830s, the South completely revised its rationalization of slavery to account for its economic benefits.

With the growth of slavery due solely to the expansion of profitable cotton agriculture came a gradual shift in the rhetoric of slavery. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the cotton and land boom of the pivotal 1830s. Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in 1831 and the growing anti-slavery movement in the North exacerbated Southern racial fears. In 1831 the Mississippi lawyer and politician Seargent S. Prentiss expressed a commonly held belief: That slavery is a great evil, there can be no doubt—and it is an unfortunate circumstance that it was ever introduced into this or any other country. At present, however, it is a necessary evil, and I do not think admits of a remedy. Just five years later the quotable Prentiss offered a diametrically opposed view in his recommendation to the Mississippi state legislature:

Resolved, that the people of the state of Mississippi look upon the institution of domestic slavery . . . not as a curse, but as a blessing, as the legitimate condition of the African race, as authorized both by the laws of God and the dictates of reason and humanity. . . . We will allow no present change, or hope of future alteration in this manner.

From a great and necessary evil to a blessing in five years to justify an economic force.

The white North, without the ability to cultivate cotton, had no such economic imperative for slavery, but it nonetheless had to grapple with the existence of a small free-black population in its midst. While Americans have often conflated anti-slavery attitudes with pro-black sentiments, in fact, white Northerners were anti-slavery and also predominantly anti-black. In every Northern state the pattern of responses to free blacks was similar. There was no thought of creating a biracial society based on freedom and equality. White Northerners wanted blacks shipped overseas to Africa, the Caribbean, or Central America via colonization societies or sent to segregated regions within America or placed in designated all-black states or forced into physically separate communities, the forerunners of the modern urban racial ghettos. Above all, after emancipation they wanted blacks contained in the South.

White America’s hypocrisy and its true racial attitudes were fully on display in the North. There, racial animosity was rife, and an all-consuming fear of black migration was well entrenched. Northern bigotry played a vital role in curtailing the physical and economic mobility of blacks. Trapped in the South, they were needed as cotton-field laborers, first as slaves, then as free blacks, for with emancipation the economic imperatives of cotton did not go away. The consequence was a separate community of free blacks, first induced by white Northerners, then adopted by the white South after Emancipation, then reinforced by blacks during the long period of compulsory exclusion. Historians generally ignore the North’s racial containment policy designed to keep blacks in the South. The policy worked, for on the eve of World War I 90 percent of all blacks in America lived in the South. Only another economic force—a labor shortage in the North—toppled the containment policy.

Black American identity was put to the test early in the North, where slavery was being eliminated by gradual emancipation. The living and social conditions of the small number of free blacks in the antebellum North is well worth reviewing, beginning in the New England and Middle Atlantic states.

Separatism asserted itself early on. As a twenty-six-year-old, Richard Allen, a former slave turned gifted Methodist orator, preached to a small number of blacks in 1786 at St. George’s Church in Philadelphia. The young leader was allowed to perform his service at 5 a.m., before the white service. At a later date, either 1787 or 1792, Allen and his fellow black worshipers were told to vacate the white section of St. George’s Church. Allen’s black colleague, the Reverend Absalom Jones, in a prayer position on his knees, was pulled up by a white trustee. You must get up; you must not kneel here, the trustee said. The black congregants had been assigned instead to a newly built, racially segregated balcony. Thus provoked, blacks left the church, never to return. An increase in the black communicants, as W. E. B. Du Bois later wrote, had alarmed the white church and prompted racial segregation. Allen and others would found a racially separate religious entity, the African American Church (Bethel), and a mutual aid society, the Free African Society of Philadelphia. The white North would not be a promised land for free blacks.

In a pattern that would be repeated throughout American history, an increase, or anticipated increase, in the number of blacks in a particular community invariably provoked a policy of forced separation. Historians rationalize the establishment of separate black institutions by Allen and others as evidence of black resilience and ingenuity, but in doing so they ignore the devastating long-term consequences of racial segregation.

Philadelphia, like other Northern cities before the Civil War, offers a glimpse of the squalid conditions of most free blacks in the North. In 1862 the English visitor Edward Dicey provided this account of the city:

Everywhere and at all seasons the colored people form a separate community. . . . As a rule, the blacks you meet in the Free States are shabbily, if not squalidly, dressed; and as far as I could learn, the instances of black men having made money by trade in the North are few in number. . . . In every Northern city, the poorest, the most thriftless, and perhaps the most troublesome part of the population are free negroes.

There is . . . [no] city, wrote Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist and orator, in which prejudice against color is more rampant than in Philadelphia. Such was the reality in the City of Brotherly Love.

By the time Philadelphia’s most famous citizen, Benjamin Franklin, was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he had become an abolitionist. Earlier he had owned slaves for thirty years; in 1770 he had lobbied the English government for approval of the state of Georgia’s slave codes; in 1779 he had contacted the French police to help recapture Abbe, a female slave owned by John Jay, another of his compatriots living in France. (Jay was a founding member of New York’s abolition society when he still owned slaves.) The French police found Abbe and imprisoned her until she repented her ingratitude. Franklin had also asked the French government to allow his relative, John Williams Jr., to keep a slave in France after the French had abolished slavery.

More important for our purposes, Franklin’s ideas for the improvement of free blacks were harsh. In the fall of 1789 he issued a formal plan for a committee of Abolition Society members to oversee emancipated blacks. Because he feared a mass of free slaves unleashed on American society, he also recommended that a branch of our national police . . . supervise emancipated slaves. A committee of inspection would superintend the morals, general conduct, and ordinary situation of Free Negroes. A committee of education was formed to superintend the children of Free Blacks, who would be taught moral and religious principles. A committee of employ would find constant employment for those Free Negroes who are able to work, as the want of this would occasion poverty, idleness, and many vicious habits. The jobs contemplated would require little skill. Apprehensive white abolitionists like Franklin wanted comprehensive white regulation of the lives of blacks after emancipation.

Examples of white Northern racial animosity abound, often with a modern resonance. In the 1790s, residents of New Haven, Connecticut, and Salem, Massachusetts, argued that the movement of blacks to white neighborhoods precipitated a 20 to 50 percent decline in property values. Citizens of South Boston bragged in 1847 that not a single colored family resided in the neighborhood. Abolitionist Boston had its segregated Nigger Hill when only 1.3 percent of the population was black. Groping for a positive interpretation of this situation, black historians cite examples of Boston blacks and whites living adjacent to one another. But, in fact, Boston greeted blacks with residential segregation; separate and inferior schools; separate churches, lecture halls, and places of entertainment; and, according to the historian James Horton, condescension in polite circles. Blacks held the worst jobs at the lowest pay. Even the Irish, according to Frederick Douglass, were able to push blacks out of their normal occupations. The two decades before the Civil War were a time of economic crisis for Boston’s blacks. As the white population doubled from 84,400 to 177,800, the black population held stagnant at 2,261 (1.3 percent).

Historians heap praise on the Massachusetts legislature for banning racial segregation in schools in 1855. The act affected all of fifty children. (When time came for real integration via busing in the 1960s, Boston’s resistance, led by Louise Day Hicks, was legendary.) In 1860 only thirty thousand black children out of an American black school population of eighty-six thousand in the free North attended any form of school. A small number attended integrated schools. In contrast, 6.3 million (two-thirds) of white children were enrolled in school.

The absolute numbers of black people residing in a Northern city or state in the antebellum years are critical to understanding racial separation and animosity. They reinforce the distinction made by the white North in opposing slavery but despising the presence of blacks. Blacks constituted a mere 2 percent of the North’s antebellum population, and 94 percent of them were not allowed to vote, even with such minuscule numbers. That proportion was preferred even in Boston, the hotbed of abolition and twentieth-century liberal politics. In 1930 the black population in the entire state of Massachusetts was 1.3 percent out of a total of four million. By contrast, as David Cohn has noted, the cotton-dominated Bolivar County, in the Mississippi Delta, alone had the same number of blacks—fifty-two thousand. A hospitable North would have drained the South’s labor force after the Civil War.

Connecticut provides a vivid portrait of Northern disdain for free blacks. Slavery was hardly an economic bonanza in Connecticut and was simply not profitable enough to expand. In 1784 the state ended race-based slavery via legislation for gradual emancipation, by which all slaves born after 1784 would be freed at age twenty-five; females were to be freed at age twenty-one. In 1775 the state had had more than 5,100 black slaves, about 3 percent of the population. In 1800, in a population of 451,520, only 8,627 (1.9 percent) were black.

Supposedly, slavery in New England was benign. Still, an article in the Connecticut Journal in 1774 exhibited widespread notions of black inferiority. The writer categorized the Negroes of Africa as animals to be ruled by white descendants of the biblical Adam.

God formed [blacks] . . . in common with horses, oxen, dogs, &c. for the white people alone to be used by them either for pleasure or to labour with other beasts in the culture of tobacco, indigo, rice, and sugar. [This was before the advent of cotton production.]

Connecticut has left an extraordinary record of white attitudes toward free blacks in the antebellum North. In 1800 the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences conducted a survey of more than one hundred Connecticut towns. The major sponsors were Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale College, and Noah Webster. The survey consisted of thirty-two articles, of which Number 26 dealt with race. Specifically, it wanted to know if a black person born enslaved was different than one born free:

Free blacks; their number, vices and modes of life, their industry and success in acquiring property; whether those born free are more ingenious and virtuous, than those who were emancipated after arriving to adult years.

The inquiry embodied the optimistic viewpoint that blacks had been degraded by slavery and, once freed, would undergo a transition to proper morality and productive citizenship. In Connecticut a brief period between gradual emancipation and the first decades of the nineteenth century evidenced white idealism and a hope that the effects of slavery could be whitewashed from black character. A thorough apprenticeship, similar to Benjamin Franklin’s proposal for improvement, with white tutelage and charity, was envisioned. The goal was the acceptance of white Christian norms. If this transition could not work in Connecticut, what would be the fate of blacks in the rest of America?

The Connecticut town responses were devastating, with a damaging assessment of blacks as lazy and immoral. No distinction was drawn between the character of emancipated blacks and that of freeborn blacks. In all, blacks were recognized in early-nineteenth-century Connecticut as an intractable problem.

Timothy Dwight, the well-educated Congregationalist minister, wrote the report from New Haven in 1811. In one of his own sermons in 1810, Dwight was highly critical of New Haven blacks:

[T]hese people . . . are, generally, neither able, nor inclined to make their freedom a blessing unto themselves. When they first became free, they are turned out into the world, in circumstances, fitted to make them nuisances to society. They have not property; nor any skill to acquire it. Nor have they . . . generally any industry. . . . They have no economy; and waste, of course, much of what they earn. They have little knowledge either of morals or religion. They are therefore victims to sloth, prodigality, poverty, ignorance, and vice.

In the report of the Connecticut towns survey, Dwight expanded on the destructive behavioral characteristics of blacks.

Their vices . . . are usually intended by the phrase low vice. Uneducated to principals of morality, or to habits of industry . . . they labor only to gratify gross and vulgar appetites. Accordingly, many of them are thieves, liars, profane drunkards, Sabbath-breakers, quarrelsome idle. . . . Their ruling passion seems very generally to be . . . fashionable.

The conservative scholar Thomas Sowell has blamed white Southerners for such destructive traits in blacks. The characteristics—aversion to work, neglect of education, drunkenness, improvidence, proneness to violence, love of fine clothes and good living . . . more than . . . a bank account, and low standards of ability, ambition, and morals—sound very much like those of early-nineteenth-century Connecticut; yet the erudite Sowell finds that Southern blacks, whom he calls black rednecks, inherited these habits from white Southern rednecks. There were no white Southern rednecks in Connecticut in 1800 to influence blacks.

In his report, Dwight then describes the white tutelage that will be necessary to bring blacks properly into white society. Two racially separate schools were set up for black children, one of which was funded by charity. For Dwight, education was the only rational hope of a reformation for blacks.

But the idea of a black transition to freedom was essentially abandoned by Connecticut. By 1818 the state constitution had disfranchised its tiny black population. By 1820 Connecticut joined the American Colonization Society (ACS), which sought to encourage blacks to leave America for Africa. Short of deportation, this was the ultimate form of exclusion. Few recall that Harriet Beecher Stowe gave a nod to colonization when she sent the heroes and heroines of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as missionaries to Liberia. The powerful New Haven Congregationalist minister Leonard Bacon in 1823 referred to free blacks as aliens and outcasts who should seek a home on the . . . shores of Africa. White tutelage had vanished; assimilation was impossible. You cannot bleach him, wrote Bacon using the color metaphor, into the enjoyment of freedom.

Connecticut never evolved toward racial tolerance. With a tiny black population, in 1857 the state reaffirmed its disfranchisement of blacks when 76 percent of whites voted against allowing the vote to its 1.9 percent black population. Again, after the Civil War Connecticut voted against ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to enfranchise blacks.

At the root of this support for colonization and disfranchisement, as elsewhere in the North, was a fear of black migration from the South and an endorsement of separatism. Further evidence may be seen in the Reverend Simeon S. Jocelyn’s 1831 proposal that a Collegiate school [for teaching] a manual labor system for blacks be established in New Haven. In the years before the Civil War most Northern blacks lived in poverty, typically working as domestic servants or manual laborers. Successful black barbers were an exception.

Jocelyn’s school was designed to help blacks cultivate habits of industry. The clergyman had impeccable credentials as a friend of blacks: he had helped found the anti-slavery society in New Haven, was pastor of New Haven’s Temple Church, which had a black congregation, and was actively involved in charities for blacks. Nevertheless, his was a voice in the wilderness. Despite the town’s anti-slavery trappings, its citizens had voted heavily against black suffrage in 1857. In a hastily convened town council meeting, the air ran hot and foul as New Haven condemned Reverend Jocelyn’s proposed school on racial grounds. A resolution passed by the mayor, aldermen, and the Common Council was clear:

Yale College, the institutions for the education of females, and the other schools [in New Haven] . . . are important . . . and the establishment of a College in the same place to educate the Colored population is incompatible with their prosperity, if not the existence of the present institutions of learning, and will be destructive of the best interests of the city. . . . We will resist the establishment of the proposed College in this place by every lawful means.

The proposal died, and thousands of free blacks over the years lost an educational opportunity. Yale certainly had a hand in this. New Haven, like every Northern city, sought to prevent blacks from moving there.

The fear of black migration also derailed a black school founded in Canterbury, Connecticut. The well-documented efforts of Prudence Crandall to educate young black girls in 1831 met with staunch resistance by Canterbury citizens. Connecticut had instituted black laws in 1833 to prevent out-of-state blacks from coming into the state for an education. Crandall was accused of violating these laws and was acquitted on a technicality. Afterward her school was the target of vandalism and attempted arson when the citizens of Canterbury descended on the school and destroyed all its windows. The entire episode was brought about because twenty young African American girls were attending Crandall’s school. Eventually she abandoned Connecticut for Illinois, an even worse environment of racial intolerance.

Connecticut claims as a daughter Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, whose emotional appeal was a catalyst for the anti-slavery movement and the Civil War. Hartford boasts the Harriet Beecher Stowe house, a museum that was once the home of the famous author. Stowe captured the horrors of slavery in her monumental novel that appeared in 1852. Despite her difficulty in finding a publisher, copies of the book literally flew off the press: ten thousand copies in the first week, three hundred thousand in the first year. The book spawned theater productions and other slave stories as its monetary success became widely known.

Stowe’s enlightenment had limits. We know what she thought about slavery, but what was her attitude toward free blacks? The reader of Uncle Tom’s Cabin may easily overlook the book’s denouement, the fate of its heroes and heroines—Stowe sent them to Liberia. She deliberately followed the colonization scheme and fictionally deported them to Africa as missionaries. She speaks through George Harris, the former slave. After gaining his freedom, he articulates his future plans:

I might mingle in the circle of whites, in [America], my shade of color is so slight, and that of my wife and family scarce perceptible. . . . But to tell you the truth, I have no wish to. . . . I have no wish to pass for an American, or to identify myself with them. . . .

We have more than the rights of common men;—we have claim of an injured race for reparation. But, then, I do not want it; I want a country, a nation, of my own.

As a Christian patriot, as a teacher of Christianity, I go to my country,—glorious Africa. I go to Liberia, not as to an Elysium of romance, but as a field of work.

This is a staggering and prescient statement by the author of the most powerful anti-slavery tract ever written in America. Harriet Beecher Stowe sent her characters George, Eliza, and their family and Topsy to Liberia as missionaries to civilize and proselytize. Here, consciously or subconsciously, was an argument that blacks needed to be separate. It is also the first mention of reparations for the injustice and harm done by slavery, a demand that continues even today. Notably, the white Stowe rejected reparations, as has white America.

In response to Stowe’s colonization solution, the black leader Frederick Douglass was indignant. "The truth is, dear Madam, we are here, & we are likely to remain. The colonization attempts championed by Abraham Lincoln, by many abolitionists, and by white Southerners are often dismissed as impractical. Indeed, African Americans, despite the harsh reality of the lives of free blacks, thought of themselves as Americans: Why should we leave this land? the Reverend Jehiel C. Beman asked in 1835. Truly this is our home, here let us live and here let us die. When encouraged by an abolitionist in 1853 to consider leaving America through the colonization effort, an Ohio black was adamant: I would die first, before I would leave the land of my birth."

In 1853 Harriet Beecher Stowe, with her newly minted wealth, rejected Frederick Douglass’s proposal for a vocational school for blacks in New Haven, Connecticut. Douglass expressed his great disappointment at her response, which had put him in an awkward position before the colored people. Stowe explained her refusal in a letter to the abolitionist Wendell Phillips:

Of all the vague unbased fabrics of a vision this floating idea of a colored industrial school is the most illusive. If [black people] want one why don’t they have one—many men among the colored people are richer than I am & better able to help such an object.—Will they ever learn to walk?

Stowe thought that blacks should be responsible for their own progress.

After the Civil War, Stowe provided $10,000 for her son Frederick and two of his Connecticut army friends to rent a cotton plantation in Florida, near the St. John’s River. She stayed with him in 1866 and described the work ethic of emancipated blacks in her book Palmetto Leaves: As a class they are more obedient, better natured, more joyous, and easily satisfied [than whites]. At the time, conventional white (and some black) American opinion held that blacks were better suited than whites to manual labor in hot climates. Stowe agreed. Blacks seemed at home in the cotton fields:

The thermometer, for these three days past, has risen over ninety every day. No white man that we know of dares stay in the fields later than ten o’clock. . . . Yet, the black laborers whom we leave in the field pursue their toil, if anything more actively, more cheerfully, than during the cooler months. The sun awakes all their vigor and all their boundless jolly. . . . A gang of negroes, great brawny, muscular fellows, seemed to make a perfect frolic of this job which, under such a sun, would have threatened sunstroke to any white man.

For Stowe, education during the transition from slavery to freedom resembled the much-criticized practical philosophy later espoused by Booker T. Washington. Here is the education she envisioned for black children:

The teaching in the common schools ought to be largely industrial, and do what it can to prepare the children to get a living by doing something well. Practical sewing, cutting and fitting, for girls, and the general principles of agriculture for boys, might be taught with advantage.

Unfortunately for Stowe, cotton was easier for her to write about than to grow. The army worm, an insect capable of devastating a cotton field, intervened. Her brave Union captains who had won many military battles were defeated and routed over a period of just two days. Only two bales of cotton were harvested from her farm, and she lost her entire $10,000 investment. She returned chastened to the North. Her commitment to black uplift in the South dissipated once there was no easy golden fortune in the cotton fields.

Northerners had no use for fiction that portrayed the true lives of blacks in the North. The first novel written in English by an African American was Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859). The author, a black woman named Harriet Wilson, of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, related the brutality and poverty of daily existence for Frado, the black heroine, at the hands of her white custodians. Wilson shows that slavery’s shadows fall even in Massachusetts. At the beginning of her story, she apologizes for embarrassing her anti-slavery friends by revealing the brute racial hatred of free blacks in the North. The six-year-old Frado is abandoned by her mother on the doorsteps of a white family, the Belmonts. During her period of indenture she is beaten repeatedly: at one point Mrs. Belmont inflicted a blow which lay the tottering . . . [Frado] prostrate on the floor . . . [and then] snatching a towel, stuffed the mouth of the sufferer, and beat her cruelly. Daily routines included Mrs. Belmont’s spicing the toil with words that burn and frequent blows on [Frado’s] head. After running away, Frado is maltreated by professed abolitionists, who didn’t want slaves at the South, nor niggers in their own houses, . . . to lodge one; to eat with one; to admit one through the front door; to sit next to one; awful!

Harriet Wilson’s novel lay in obscurity until 1983, a testament to the lack of interest in descriptions of the lives of free blacks in the North. Slavery would sell books, but the sordid condition of free blacks was largely ignored.

To further illustrate the North’s distinction between slaves and blacks, consider the case of William Henry Seward, the scruffy but sociable senator and former governor of New York. On May 18, 1860, Seward received 172 votes on the first ballot of the Republican National Convention in Chicago; Abraham Lincoln, the eventual nominee, received only 102 votes. Seward had been the favored candidate from the most populous state in the Union. The awkward Illinois lawyer would go on to win the Republican nomination and then the presidential election with only 40 percent of the popular vote. In Lincoln’s administration these two ambitious competitors who earlier had barely known each other would develop a close working relationship. Seward, the most powerful New York politician of the nineteenth century, became Lincoln’s secretary of state, his Right Hand, his Indispensable Man.

Seward and Lincoln had distinctly different backgrounds. Seward grew up in an affluent family in the small southern New York town of Florida. His father, Henry Seward, was an enormously prosperous farmer, land speculator, and well-connected politician who left an estate worth millions in today’s dollars. Henry’s access to power allowed him a three-hour visit in 1831 with former president John Quincy Adams. The precocious son, William Henry, was a superb student, and after graduation from Union College and the study of law he traveled to Europe with his father, attending debates in the House of Commons, walking in the Swiss Alps, and speaking with the aging Lafayette in Paris. By then the son’s vision for America was fully formed: [T]he fearful responsibility of the American people to the people of the nations of the earth, [is] to carry successfully through the experiment which . . . is to prove that men are capable of self-government.

Formally educated, cosmopolitan, and well-connected, Seward contrasted sharply with the homespun, self-taught, crafty, pragmatic, opportunistic lawyer from Illinois. The man who wrote and delivered some of America’s most inspiring prose had no formal education and used no focus group. Perhaps one element of Lincoln’s background needs further comment: he was a corporate lawyer who represented the Illinois Central Railroad on various matters, including taxes.

Seward is best remembered for his consistent anti-slavery position and his realism. The anti-slavery stance is sharply revealed in his famous higher law speech of 1850, in which he appealed to a higher law than the Constitution in his condemnation of slavery. Seward’s higher law was handed down by the Creator of the Universe. Seward the realist foresaw an irrepressible conflict, a collision over slavery: [T]he United States, must and will . . . become either entirely slave-holding or entirely a free-labor nation (1858). There was no equivocation about his position on slavery.

Seward’s attitude toward blacks was also clear. He saw slavery as the paramount issue—it must be abolished for the country to survive; but free blacks were of little concern. Like most other anti-slavery politicians, Seward held blacks, either free or enslaved, in low esteem. In 1860 he spoke of black inferiority and the impossibility of black equality.

The great fact is now fully realized that the African race here is a foreign and feeble element . . . incapable of assimilation . . . a pitiful exotic unnecessarily transplanted into our fields, and which it is unprofitable to cultivate at the cost of the desolation of the native vineyard.

This is a damning statement from the man who was clearer in his attack on slavery than even Abraham Lincoln.

The North has nothing to do with the negroes, Seward said in conversation in 1866. I have no more concern for them than I have for the Hottentots. They are God’s poor, they always have been and always will be so everywhere. These remarks, published in 1888, are perfectly consistent with Seward’s earlier statements. As much as white Americans would like their heroes to be racially enlightened by twenty-first-century standards, they must face the truth of pervasive racial animosity in the North as well as the South.

Seward strongly adhered to the plan (Lincoln’s and then Andrew Johnson’s) for a swift and lenient integration of the Confederate states into the reconstructed Union. He believed the states, not the federal government, should determine regulations for black suffrage. In a cabinet meeting in 1865 he voted against black enfranchisement. He also advocated vetoing the bill that would have renewed and strengthened the Freedman’s Bureau, the agency set up to oversee the welfare of freed slaves. In April 1866 Seward reiterated his views on a prompt reconciliation without concern for blacks, and advocated no federal intervention on their behalf.

I am ready to leave the interests of the most intelligent white man to the guardianship of his state, and where I leave the interests of the white I am willing to trust the civil rights of the black. The South must take care of its own negroes as the North does. . . . The North must get over the notion of interference with the affairs of the South. . . . The South longs to come home.

Seward supported black suffrage in New York State, where their numbers were negligible, but in 1867 he opposed a bill that enfranchised blacks in the city of Washington because of the size of the potential black vote. Only in time, he thought, would black enfranchisement be appropriate. He also thought that the civil rights legislation of 1866 was unconstitutional on technical grounds.

Today historians may concentrate on the racial implications of Reconstruction, but Seward and many of his contemporaries were consumed with the grand vision of international trade. According to Seward, commerce was the chief agent of . . . advancement in civilization and enlargement of empire. Thus despite his impeccable anti-slavery credentials, he declared that if necessary he would vote to admit California to the United States, even if she had come as a slave state. In the scheme of economic expansion, the preponderance of free blacks was assigned to their oppressive role of cotton laborers, with highly limited freedom and mobility.

A rather large and imposing statue of William Henry Seward rises on the southwest corner of Madison Park in New York City. By twenty-first-century norms of political correctness, Seward was distinctly anti-black and squandered an opportunity to assist free blacks. His words and actions clearly illustrate the distinction between Northern anti-slavery sentiment and anti-black attitudes.

Seward’s New York was decidedly anti-black. In 1790 the total black population of the state, both free and enslaved, was 6.27 percent of the total. A law providing for gradual emancipation intervened in 1799, and on the eve of the Civil War, in 1860, the black population of New York was 1.9 percent—representing an explosive growth in the white population and the numbers of slaves sold to the South. In 1821 New York eliminated a property requirement for white voters while increasing the suffrage qualification fee for blacks from $100 to a prohibitive $250. Thus in 1861 only three hundred blacks in New York City could vote. The state’s black voting restrictions were upheld in 1846 by a vote of 224,336 to 85,406. In state constitutional conventions of 1860 and 1869, a majority again defeated black enfranchisement by requiring a property value. In each case black inferiority became a talking point, and delegates overwhelmingly voted against black enfranchisement even with the state’s minuscule black population. New York voted against the Fifteenth Amendment, too. As ever, Northerners feared a black migration north.

The New York Times, a staunch supporter of Lincoln, advocated the reform of slavery rather than abolition. We have admitted, the Times argued on January 22, 1861, the impossibility and the folly of immediate abolition of Slavery, [and] pointed out the ruin certain to flow from the sudden release of four millions of ignorant slaves from the dependence and control of masters. . . . The great need of the South was a modification and amelioration of her system of slavery, which would keep blacks in the region’s