The Struggle for Equality: Essays on Sectional Conflict, the Civil War, and the Long Reconstruction

By Orville Vernon Burton, Jerald Podair and Jennifer L. Weber

This collection of essays, organized around the theme of the struggle for equality in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, also serves to honor the renowned Civil War historian James McPherson. Complete with a brief interview with the celebrated scholar, this volume reflects the best aspects of McPherson’s work, while casting new light on the struggle that has served as the animating force of his lifetime of scholarship. With a chronological span from the 1830s to the 1960s, the contributions bear witness to the continuing vigor of the argument over equality.

Contributors>: Orville Vernon Burton, Clemson University * Tom Carhart, Independent Scholar * Catherine Clinton, Queen's University Belfast * Thomas C. Cox, University of Southern California * Bruce Dain, University of Utah * John M. Giggie, University of Alabama * Michele Gillespie, Wake Forest University * Joseph T. Glatthaar, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill * Brian Greenberg, Monmouth University * James K. Hogue, University of North Carolina, Charlotte * Judith A. Hunter, State University of New York, Geneseo * Ryan P. Jordan, University of San Diego * Philip M. Katz, American Association of Museums * Monroe H. Little, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis * Peyton McCrary, U.S. Department of Justice * Jerald Podair, Lawrence University * Jennifer L. Weber, University of Kansas * Ronald C. White Jr., University of California Los Angeles

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9780813931777

Book preview

Introduction

James M. McPherson and the Struggle for American Equality

ORVILLE VERNON BURTON AND JERALD PODAIR

No single word has divided Americans more than equality. Deceptively simple, it is a marker for the complexities of national identity. Arguments over its scope and meaning have been so passionate because the stakes have been so high. Those who control the word equality control the direction of American history itself.

The essays in this volume seek to tell the story of the struggle for equality in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—to define it, achieve it, and defend it. They do not, of course, offer a complete accounting of that struggle. No single volume could. But examining the ways in which different groups and generations of Americans reimagined the nation’s core principle over the course of almost 150 years affords a unique perspective on the contested, often fractured nature of the American experience. We see evolving black and white understandings of equality that frame arguments over the word. Is equality a privilege solely of white males? Does it connote merely a political citizenship? Or does it include a more expansive vision of economic and social justice? Are Americans entitled to a rough equivalence of life outcomes or life opportunities? Is American equality material in nature, based on substantive rights guaranteed to all? Can the demands of class equality be squared with those of race?

The subjects of these essays argue over these questions without resolving them. Instead, they illustrate the paradoxes of American equality: its power to define the nation’s history while resisting definition itself and to serve simultaneously as a symbol of failure and promise. The argument over equality is the most important in American history. This volume bears witness to its continuing vigor.

THESE ESSAYS WERE INSPIRED by the life and work of James M. McPherson, who taught and trained its authors over the course of a forty-two-year career at Princeton University. James McPherson is America’s historian. No one in the contemporary historical profession combines his devotion to scholarly craft and concern with the public audience. No one has done more to connect the worlds of the academic historian and the educated general reader. No one has interpreted more insightfully our nation’s defining event— the Civil War—and defining president—Abraham Lincoln—and shown how they speak to our lives as twenty-first-century Americans.

The animating theme of both McPherson’s scholarship and this volume of essays is the struggle for equality in America. Indeed, this was the title of the first book McPherson published. Everything he wrote afterward sought to explore the ways in which Americans, famous and anonymous, fought over this elusive word and debated its relationship to the other defining word of the American experience—freedom. McPherson encouraged his students to think deeply about equality in their own work. The result has been scholarship of remarkable breadth, extending beyond the historical periods traditionally associated with McPherson. The impressive chronological span of the essays in this volume, which range from the 1830s to the 1960s, reflects the influence of a historian at home in both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. The pieces collected here honor a life spent with the uniquely American questions that engage us as historians and as citizens, in this century and those to come.

JAMES M. MCPHERSON WAS BORN in Valley City, North Dakota, on October 11, 1936. He moved to St. Peter, Minnesota, as a young boy and grew up there, graduating from Gustavus Adolphus College in his hometown in 1958. From there it was on to the Johns Hopkins University for graduate work. The Baltimore McPherson encountered in 1958 was a city in transition, still bearing the mark of segregation but on the cusp of the civil rights revolution. His experiences there, as well as his training under the eminent Southern historian C. Vann Woodward, awakened him to the centrality of race in the American historical narrative. The issue of race, and the broader question of equality in national life, would define his career as a scholar.

In 1962, McPherson joined the history faculty at Princeton University, the only academic position he would ever hold. His first book, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction, appeared in 1964. It represented a sharp departure from the prevailing historical understandings of Reconstruction and a rejoinder to those who minimized the contributions of Northerners to the cause of racial equality during this period and questioned their motives. For decades, historians had viewed Reconstruction as a tragic era of avarice, dishonesty, and cynicism. The Struggle for Equality helped rehabilitate the reputations of Northerners who went south after the Civil War. McPherson portrayed them in a new light—as idealists, often religiously motivated, seeking racial justice. The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP, which he published in 1975, extended this story into the twentieth century. Today most historians take for granted the view of Reconstruction as a noble experiment in interracial democracy, but McPherson swam against a powerful historiographical tide in order to produce these books. The interpretation of this period that prevails today is in large measure the result of his work.

McPherson was also a pioneer in the field of African American history, playing a major role in establishing it as a recognized area of study. McPherson came to this field in the early 1960s, before other scholars. He consistently maintained that the history of African Americans was central to our nation’s past, and not merely an appendage to it. In The Negro’s Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted during the War for the Union (1965), he showed how black soldiers were crucial to the Northern war effort and to the outcome of the conflict. Once again, McPherson’s work broke with prior scholarship. He argued that African Americans were active agents in winning their freedom, and not the passive bystanders of earlier accounts. McPherson’s goal was to merge the story of black Americans into that of the nation as a whole. He wished to construct a history that regarded the African American narrative not as a special case, but as an integral part of the record of the American past. That most contemporary historians share these aims honors McPherson’s commitment to a truly inclusive history of the United States.

By the 1980s, McPherson was one of the nation’s most respected and influential academic historians. He was not, however, widely known outside the scholarly community. This would change with the 1988 publication of Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, a volume in the Oxford History of the United States series. Every American generation has its great chronicler of the Civil War, and Battle Cry of Freedom made McPherson ours. To date, it has sold more than seven hundred thousand copies, making it one of the most popular works of history ever produced. It reached number six on the New York Times best-seller list. It received unanimous critical acclaim, capped by the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for history. Most important, it became one of the rare books that resonated with both professional historians and general readers. Academic historians in the 1980s seemed cut off from the educated public, with the reputation of writing primarily for each other. The age of the historian as public intellectual, in the tradition of Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and C. Vann Woodward, among others, appeared to have ended. But Battle Cry of Freedom almost single-handedly restored the connection between the academy and nonacademic audiences. At a time when obscure, jargon-clotted prose served almost as a badge of honor among scholars, its clear, vivid writing stood out. Battle Cry of Freedom gave full expression to the idea of history as literature.

Battle Cry of Freedom also brought history back to its narrative roots. When it was published, narrative had been out of favor within the academy for a generation, accounting in large part for the increasing insularity of scholarly history. The new birth of narrative history that McPherson forged not only made it possible for other academic historians to take up this form without running the risk of being considered out of fashion but also reintroduced academic history to a broad audience of nonacademic readers.

Battle Cry of Freedom was also noteworthy as an outstanding example of historical synthesis. McPherson integrated political, military, social, and cultural history, helping to break down the barriers between traditional top-down history and the new social history that had emerged in the 1960s. Demonstrating the value of both, Battle Cry of Freedom mediated their decades-long civil war. McPherson refused to be limited in the history he wrote, making it possible for his colleagues also to transcend the artificial labels of old and new, political and social, and simply be historians.

Battle Cry of Freedom established McPherson as America’s most well-known historian and the premier narrator of the nation’s most important story. To many readers, he was the Civil War. Over the next two decades, McPherson continued to write about the conflict for both scholarly and popular audiences, linking it to the enduring American argument over the nature of equality and freedom. He also turned his attention to the war’s greatest leader, a man with whom McPherson discovered he was relatively unfamiliar during a radio interview as a graduate student in 1959 and examined closely thereafter. In Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (1990), McPherson situated our sixteenth president at the center of a political, social, and economic transformation based on principles of universal freedom and equality. Recognizing before most of his peers that the war on the battlefield had become a remorseless revolutionary struggle, and a violent argument between Northerners and Southerners over America’s future as a democracy, Lincoln engineered a second American Revolution that redeemed the ideas of the first.¹

McPherson amplified this theme in We Cannot Escape History: Lincoln and the Last Best Hope of Earth, an edited volume of essays published in 1995, and in Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War, which appeared the following year. The latter contained a spirited defense of Lincoln’s role in ending slavery and an explanation of how the American sense of mission invoked by Lincoln—the idea that this New World experiment was a beacon of freedom for oppressed peoples everywhere—not only helped win the Civil War but inspired supporters of democracy and liberation worldwide.² Drawn with the Sword also contained the essay What’s the Matter with History? in which McPherson laid out the case for the use of narrative synthesis in historical writing and for scholarship that engaged professional and general readers simultaneously. McPherson then turned his attention to Lincoln’s military leadership and in 2008 published Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief. In this comprehensive study, McPherson once again offered fresh insight into the most closely studied figure in American history, an illustration of both the depth of his subject and the continued strength of his analytic powers. McPherson remains among the most influential Lincoln scholars of his era.

McPherson has also played a major part in reenergizing the study of American military history, long considered the academy’s stepchild. For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, winner of the 1998 Lincoln Prize, was inspired by McPherson’s walks along the route of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg during the battlefield tours he conducted for his students at Princeton University. McPherson’s reflections on this and other high-casualty attacks were the genesis of a broader study of the motivations for the war’s countless acts of personal bravery. Utilizing a trove of letters and diaries produced during the conflict, he argued that combatants were driven by both standards of masculine obligation and a strong belief in principle. Most soldiers fight for each other, but Civil War soldiers fought as well for Northern and Southern understandings of equality and freedom. For Cause and Comrades realized the promise of a military history that transcended descriptions of engagements and campaigns and employed social and cultural history to offer a richer portrait of the men who fought the Civil War. Similarly, in Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (2002), McPherson integrated battlefield events into the story of the Emancipation Proclamation with a deep appreciation for history’s contingencies. Once again, he employed his synthetic powers to write history that crossed traditional disciplinary boundaries. In McPherson’s hands, military history, like all great history, engaged the vital questions of the national experience.

James McPherson is one of the handful of historians who have changed the way American history is written today. He was a pioneer in African American history. He offered a new perspective on the Reconstruction period. He presided over a rebirth of the narrative historical form. He wrote our era’s definitive Civil War study, reaching a huge nonacademic audience and restoring academic history to relevance among general readers. He has synthesized old and new history in ways that have enhanced both. As he enters his sixth decade of writing about the American past, he remains its indispensable voice.

JAMES McPHERSON’S CAREER HAS BEEN FILLED with recognition and honor, but his mark on the graduate students he supervised over the course of his long career at Princeton may be his most important legacy. These students reflect the arc of McPherson’s career. Many in the 1960s and 1970s specialized in African American and Southern history. A significant number were themselves African American, at a time when students of color were relatively scarce at major graduate institutions. By the 1980s, McPherson was attracting doctoral candidates interested in the Civil War, a trend that accelerated after the publication of Battle Cry of Freedom and continued through his 2004 retirement. Another group of students wrote on race. Given his longstanding and wide-ranging interest in this subject, McPherson was well positioned to supervise them as well. To all his graduate students, he offered kind encouragement, wise counsel, and productive criticism. He read dissertation chapters with a sharp eye for precise language and for American history’s essential questions. Despite enormous demands on his time—his telephone seemed to ring every five minutes—he always prioritized his students. James McPherson’s example as a teacher, scholar, mentor, and friend is enduring. The essays that follow are based on a selection of papers presented at a conference to honor a remarkable career and a remarkable man.

They are arranged in rough chronological order and divided into three sections. The first, Sectional Conflict, explores the paradoxes of American equality during the nineteenth century. Civil War contains essays on important political, military, racial, and gender aspects of the conflict. The last section, The Long Reconstruction, seeks to deepen our understandings of the post-Civil War struggle for equality by extending its narrative into the twentieth century and linking it to the modern civil rights movement. Together, the essays offer a history of the idea of equality in the United States and the arguments over its nature and meaning that are at the heart of American identity. All bear the fruit of James McPherson’s knowledge, guidance, and friendship.

I. Sectional Conflict

The Quakers have earned a rather hallowed spot in American history as being at the forefront of the abolitionist movement. As early as the mid-eighteenth century, they opposed slavery, and their activism against the peculiar institution lasted right until the Civil War. But as Ryan P. Jordan points out in his essay, abolitionism did not necessarily mean the Friends were free from bigotry. To the contrary, many of them were very much a product of their time in terms of their attitudes toward African Americans, even going so far as to consign blacks who attended Quaker services to a Negro pew. With his surprising revelations, Jordan takes a bit of the shine off the Quakers’ halo.

Then we have the strange stories of two men who did not follow the expected path. James S. Wadsworth and John Meredith Read Jr. were men of wealth. They were American aristocrats. Wadsworth, Judith A. Hunter writes, did the unexpected by turning his back on his father’s Whig Party and becoming a Democrat as a young man. Yet his distaste for the influence of Southern slave owners in that party, starting in the 1840s, moved him increasingly to the left, particularly on the matter of slavery. He supported the Free Soil ticket in 1848 and then joined the Republicans, the partisan face of the antislavery movement, when they formed in 1854. By the time he died in the battle of the Wilderness a decade later, General Wadsworth was a fullblown abolitionist. Curiously, though, his increasing radicalism did not have a moral foundation; it was purely a practical response to the political and military situations of his time. In this he mirrored thousands of like-minded Northerners whose antislavery impulses increased over time and who by 1863 were the foot soldiers of Abraham Lincoln’s Second American Revolution.

Read, on the other hand, traveled in the opposite direction, as Philip M. Katz tells us in Our Man in Paris. The scion of a wealthy and well-connected New York family whose ancestors included three signers of the Declaration of Independence, Read, like Wadsworth, was an active member of his local Wide-Awake club and stumped enthusiastically for Lincoln. Rather than moving to the left, however, Read became increasingly conservative with age. The watershed event in his transition appears to have been the French crackdown on the Paris Commune, which Read observed up close as an American diplomat. Shaken by what he had seen, he began to question the value of democratic and republican forms of government. His diplomatic tenure distanced him not just physically but also psychologically from his own country. Eventually, Read withdrew to Europe, where he pined for hereditary titles in his homeland and wondered what had become of the American political system. Where Wadsworth reacted against aristocracy, Read ultimately embraced it.

II. Civil War

In many ways, the Civil War was about politics—or the failure thereof. Politicians could not resolve the increasing tensions over slavery in the 1850s, and so the Southern states seceded. While historians have tended to overlook the political dimensions of the armies, Union and Confederate, both were shot through with politics in various ways: political generals, political debates, and political votes. Joseph T. Glatthaar and Jennifer L. Weber look at two understudied dimensions of politics in the armies.

In A Dynamic for Success and Failure, Glatthaar writes about the effects of Rebel soldiers voting for their own commanders. The Confederate army was undisciplined, and even at the time army inspectors blamed the familiarity between officers and their men for this unruliness. They specifically cited the fact that the men elected their own officers. Former Confederates and later historians have identified the discipline problem as an important factor in the South’s defeat. Glatthaar disagrees. He argues that the men on the line generally did a good job picking their superiors, voting out the incompetents, the aged, and the infirm. Holding elections for officers helped maintain a sense of individuality and personal rights among the men and was an important source of morale. More important, choosing their own officers made Confederate soldiers more amenable to the great discomforts and suffering that they endured.

Weber focuses on the politicization of the Union army. Although this generation of soldiers had grown up in the shadow of fierce political debates and many were active party members, nothing mobilized them quite like the Peace Democrats at home, Weber says. Alerted to the growing appeal of the Copperheads by the 1862 election results, Union soldiers increasingly saw their interests as being connected with Lincoln’s policies. This meant that an army initially divided deeply over emancipation in September 1862 had swung very much behind it by April 1863. Disgusted by the peace wing of their party and believing the Copperheads’ rhetoric devalued their sacrifices, many Democratic soldiers switched parties. Republican soldiers, new and old, became powerful advocates for Lincoln in 1864, even when civilians had lost confidence in him. The Union army’s support, Weber argues, helped keep Lincoln’s political fortunes afloat even in his darkest days.

Lincoln, of course, was at the very center of the war. Not only was he the political leader of the North, but it was his election that had prompted the Southern states to secede. Southerners feared that the election of a Republican president would mean the end of slavery, despite Lincoln’s own protestations that he sought only to limit its expansion into the territories, not to eliminate it in the states where it already existed. By leaving the Union and bringing on the war, Southerners hastened the end of slavery. Still, Lincoln’s relation to slavery and African Americans has long been the source of great debate, and so it continues here.

In Abraham Lincoln’s Last ‘Stump Speech,’ Ronald C. White Jr. discusses a letter that Lincoln wrote to his old friend James Conkling with the intention of having Conkling read it to a gathering in Springfield, Illinois, in September 1863. A year had passed since the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, and African Americans were now serving in the Union armies. Unfamiliar to many people today, the letter was well-known in Lincoln’s time, largely for its staunch defense of freedmen and their role in the war. Lincoln pulled no punches in his critique of Northern whites who refused to fight for their country or freedom while blacks swelled the army ranks. There will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation, Lincoln wrote, while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it. This missive, White argues, is evidence of Lincoln’s commitment to blacks—enslaved and free—and demonstrates that he meant to deliver on the promise of the proclamation.

In contrast, Bruce Dain is more skeptical about Lincoln’s racially egalitarian impulses. Dain argues that the president’s feelings and policies about race were complicated, subtle, and informed by a somewhat dark view of human nature, as he tries to strike a new path for considering Lincoln’s racial views. Even though he was disappointed in the inability of the Founders to make good on the promises contained in the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln never seriously challenged his own racial assumptions nor those of his fellow Americans. Instead, he focused on what he could do: eradicate slavery and extend political rights to African American veterans and talented blacks. Ever the pragmatist, he left it to future generations (much like the Founders had with slavery, one could argue) to resolve the question of racial equality.

The Civil War left a deep mark on American culture in many ways, but Catherine Clinton unearths one of the better-hidden aspects of the war in her essay ‘Public Women’ and Sexual Politics during the American Civil War. The Civil War, she writes, created the largest increase in the sex trade in nineteenth-century America, perhaps the single greatest growth spurt in the nation’s history. In that war, as in later ones, the sex trade created problems for the military on both sides, as doctors and commanders had to deal with men forced out of action by venereal disease. The problem was so bad in Nashville that the Union commander there deported more than a hundred women in the summer of 1863; the ship they were put on became known as the floating Whorehouse. On the Confederate side, Richmond’s city fathers were happy to let the public believe that the bread riot of 1863 was carried out by prostitutes rather than by destitute and starving women. So, argues Clinton, the North and South had this much in common: whenever women acted up, governmental authorities responded with blunt force, employing sexual blackmail to stifle dissent.

III. The Long Reconstruction

Most of the principal figures from the antebellum and Civil War eras lived to see Reconstruction. Many continued to shape events actively, although they tend to fall off the historical radar a bit. Brian Greenberg and James K. Hogue reintroduce us to two of the major characters of their times, the abolitionist Wendell Phillips and the Confederate general James Longstreet, with studies of the surprising turns these men’s lives took in the postbellum era.

Once the shooting stopped, Phillips turned his attention to the wage slaves—a term, incidentally, that he never used. Nevertheless, he became quite interested in the labor movement, and that was the target of his post-bellum reform efforts, according to Greenberg. Among other things, Phillips pushed for an eight-hour day and collective bargaining. His interest in these issues stemmed from not only a moral sensibility but a political one as well. Phillips feared that the increasing power of industrial titans endangered the republican system of government. In fact, the onetime political atheist even ran for governor of Massachusetts, urging workers to push back against what Greenberg calls the autocratic power that threatened the country as it industrialized. Unfortunately for Phillips, the changes that would come for labor would occur long after his time.

The twist in Longstreet’s career would seem utterly bizarre but for the relatively little-known fact that he and Ulysses S. Grant had been close friends in the Old Army. Indeed, Longstreet may have been the best man at Grant’s wedding. After the Civil War ended, the two men resumed their relationship, and Longstreet took a post in Grant’s administration. The job was commanding a multiracial army in New Orleans, and in 1874, with Long-street wearing a blue uniform rather than a gray one, his men were involved in a street battle that, as Hogue writes, led the way for a ‘posterior counterrevolution’ that ultimately led to a Solid South. In The Strange Career of Jim Longstreet, Hogue examines the contingencies of history that led the general to become a defender of the racial policies of Reconstruction.

Reconstruction was not just a Southern phenomenon. Much in America was changing, and perhaps nowhere as much as in the West during this time period. Thomas C. Cox fills us in on the understudied Grasshopper Plague of 1874–78. This catastrophe wiped out many Plains families financially, prompting the first mass disaster-relief effort in American history, with private charities, state governments, and the federal government—including the army—working together to help those affected. Cox shows how these efforts served as a precursor of similar government-sponsored initiatives during the Progressive Era.

Reconstruction turned into Jim Crow, with its culture of systematic oppression. Henry O. Flipper was the first African American graduate of West Point (class of 1877), but his army career was short and bitter. Flipper was court-martialed and drummed out of the service on dubious allegations of fraud, according to Tom Carhart, and his reputation lay in ruins for more than a century, until President Bill Clinton formally pardoned him. It was James McPherson who spearheaded and provided impetus for the Flipper pardon.

Even during this nadir of race relations, Southern African Americans created sustaining and long-lasting institutions, as John M. Giggie describes in For God and Lodge. Here he traces the relationship between two pillars of African American society in the Jim Crow era: churches and fraternal organizations. At a time when black Americans had limited political rights and financial opportunity, secret societies played an important role, especially for men. These groups gave them the opportunity to assume positions of leadership and helped cement black communities, especially in the early years after emancipation. They also served as a means of preserving the citizenship rights won on the battlefields of the Civil War. Organizations such as the black Masons also were critically important to many families financially because they were the only places where men could buy life insurance that would pay for burial costs and help their families after their death. Initially, African American churches were content to coexist with fraternal groups. But when pastors came to believe that these organizations were impinging too much on the religious sphere, they pushed back. At the end of the nineteenth century, the churches were at odds with the secret societies. As membership in these groups dwindled—but the payout of insurance policies did not—secret societies collapsed under the financial burdens of the insurance policies that had attracted so many members in the first place. Now seriously weakened, they no longer posed a threat to black churches. As a result, church leaders once again ordained the lodges as a legitimate element of the African American community. As the nation moved into the twentieth century, black lodges once again saw their stars on the rise.

African Americans were not alone in trying to carve out a space for themselves in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. White Southern women, many of them widowed or never married because of the vast human toll of the Civil War, also had to figure out their way in the world. Michele Gillespie traces the story of one extraordinary woman, Mary Ann Harris Gay, from the Civil War to the time of her death in 1918. After a series of extraordinary adventures during the war, this Georgia woman refused to be trapped at home. Instead, she started writing and then hit the road to peddle her books and raise money for religious causes and memorials to the Confederate past. Leaving her half sister and her brother’s widow to keep house, Gay spent the better part of forty years scraping together a living, sometimes barely, as she traveled from one town to another. While many Southern women had nothing whatsoever in common with Scarlett O’Hara, Gay did. Her gumption, not to mention some of her stories, provided inspiration for Margaret Mitchell as she wrote Gone with the Wind.

The first two decades of the twentieth century have been viewed as the nadir of American race relations. Yet even as whites moved to disenfranchise them across the South, African Americans continued to maintain influence on the ground in local politics. Peyton McCrary’s study of municipal reform in Norfolk, Virginia, adds new evidence regarding the racial dimension of political activity in the Progressive Era South. Although the Virginia Constitution of 1902 included a literacy test and a poll tax, and the state Democratic Party adopted a whites-only rule for participation in its primaries, African Americans played a significant role in Norfolk’s ward elections until 1917. That year, white concerns about the influence of black voters led to the implementation of at-large council elections and a city manager system of government. McCrary shows that forms of African American political expression survived for decades in the face of strenuous efforts by Southern whites to suppress them.

It is accepted historical wisdom that World War II played an integral role in kicking off the civil rights movement, or the Second Reconstruction, as C. Vann Woodward so perceptively labeled it. African American soldiers who had fought to defend freedom overseas began to ponder their own status at home. When the war was over and they returned, they began to take action against the American system of apartheid. While we know the story from a wide angle, we have very little in the way of firsthand accounts of the metamorphosis that many soldiers underwent. In School of a Soldier, Monroe H. Little helps us get a close-up with his study of Joseph Taylor, a sociologist who went into the army as an enlisted man. A sensitive and perceptive man, Taylor kept a diary throughout the war, and this allows us to see just when and how this one African American soldier’s experiences in World War II influenced his thinking and actions about the oppression he himself faced as an American black man. The roots of America’s Second Reconstruction lie in the stories of men like Taylor, who experienced firsthand the contradictions of a wartime nation committed to eradicating racism abroad yet unwilling to address it at home.

The Second Reconstruction lasted through the 1960s, and in An Awful Choice, Jerald Podair captures an anguishing moment in its twilight. Bayard Rustin, the African American socialist who organized the powerful and poignant March on Washington in 1963, confronted a terrible dilemma just five years later. A dispute erupted between a largely white teachers’ union and an African American school board in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville district, a predominantly black and deeply impoverished part of Brooklyn. Rustin, who had spent his life equally committed to the labor and the civil rights movements, was forced to make a life-changing decision just months after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Rustin chose to support the teachers’ union, a painful decision that left him an outcast with African Americans who now vilified him as the black George Wallace. His inability to rally New York’s black community to the cause of the union symbolized organized labor’s failure during the 1960s to blunt race’s centrifugal force through class-based appeals to the common economic interests of black and white workers. Rustin’s awful choice at Ocean Hill-Brownsville exemplified the arguments over the nature of equality that have coursed through American history and the tensions between race and class that have made them so intractable.

THE CIVIL WAR REPRESENTED ONLY the most violent aspect of the struggle for equality in America that has served as the animating force of James McPherson’s lifetime of scholarship. But the scope of his work transcends armed conflict. History has been aptly described as argument without end.³ No American argument, in peace or war, has been as sharply controverted as that over the meaning of equality. It is part of every American life, an ongoing exchange that in a democracy is meant to have no end. This volume is both a testament to the resiliency of that argument and a contribution to it.

Notes

1. Quoted in James M. McPherson, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 80.

2. James M. McPherson, Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 210.

3. Pieter Geyl, Napoleon: For and Against (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), 15.

I

SECTIONAL CONFLICT

The Radicalism of the Abolitionists Revisited

The Case of the Society of Friends

RYAN P. JORDAN

Though possibly forgotten by younger scholars, James McPherson’s first success as a professional historian came not with a work about the Civil War per se, but with the publication of a study of abolitionism, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction, released the same year as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This book represented one of many reevaluations of the nineteenth-century abolitionists—men and women who still suffered from the irresponsible agitator image held by historians at the time of The Struggle for Equality’s release. As with other books written by young academics engaged in the freedom struggles on behalf of African Americans in the 1960s, McPherson’s early work helped to set the stage for numerous other studies that explained the heroic and farsighted nature of the unpopular antebellum movement for immediate emancipation. The history written by academics like McPherson reminded his generation that they were not the first Americans to grapple with the challenge of changing racial attitudes and practices in their society.

However, this sympathetic view of the abolitionists came under renewed scrutiny in the decades following McPherson’s first study of them, though not from scholars who viewed the abolitionists as too radical. Rather, another generation of historians began to focus upon the antislavery reformers’ limitations as largely upper middle-class white people who at times failed to live up to more modern multicultural ideals. For these scholars, the efforts of white abolitionists to advance some degree of social equality for African Americans did not possess as much significance as the fact that most of these white Victorians possessed a common set of assumptions about their [African Americans’] incapacity, dependency, and need for external control.¹ As a mentor, Professor McPherson often took a more skeptical view of such statements, even as he acknowledged the cultural limitations of antebellum white reformers. For his part, McPherson encouraged students to appreciate the extreme difficulties facing even the most moderate of antislavery activists or politicians in the nineteenth century. After all, the antebellum republic was a place where one could literally lose his or her life in defense of any degree of black autonomy. The question, therefore, of what the abolitionists were up against seemed to be a more important question for McPherson than interrogations of the blind spots or limitations in the reformers’ respective world-views. With this in mind, I undertook a study of how the largest antislavery church in the antebellum period, the Quakers, translated private theological beliefs into public practice with only the greatest of difficulty. It was my hope that this story would remind historians of what it meant to be an abolitionist in the three decades before the Civil War. In addition, the antagonism between abolitionists and Quakers adds to historians’ understanding of the radicalism of the American Anti-Slavery Society’s campaigns for the rights of Northern free blacks and Southern slaves within a republic desperately trying to avoid agitation over slavery’s future.

In the 1830s and 1840s, the public struggles of the American Anti-Slavery Society were many. Nearly every institution in the free states rejected abolitionist demands to end slavery in the nation’s capital, to stop the colonization movement supported by slaveholders, and to eliminate the interstate slave trade. Within the free states, the abolitionist desire to treat African Americans as social equals—whether in schools or in churches—also upset conventional white assumptions regarding the subordinate place of free blacks in the antebellum United States. Antiabolitionism took many forms: life-threatening mobs lashed out at reformers and led to the death of at least one committed reformer, Elijah Lovejoy. But opposition to the abolitionists also came from many respectable quarters of the same antislavery Christian community that had influenced a newer generation of abolitionist reformers such as Lovejoy. For example, the nation’s largest church to disallow slaveholding, the Society of Friends, generally opposed the tactics and philosophy of the American Anti-Slavery Society. This opposition may come as a surprise given the fact that the terms Quaker and abolitionist are often seen as synonymous. But in fact, the minority of Quakers who supported the American Anti-Slavery Society faced numerous challenges from fellow church members regarding support for racial integration or for other political efforts on behalf of African Americans.²

In the 1830s, the American Anti-Slavery Society had hoped that the leaders of the Society of Friends would support their movement. After all, the American Anti-Slavery Society based its campaign for the immediate emancipation of slaves in no small part on the pamphlet of a British Quaker, Elizabeth Heydrick (published in 1824), and no less an abolitionist than William Lloyd Garrison declared that he knew of no other church with theological and social beliefs closer to his own regarding the need for individual dissent against violent state power. The Society of Friends stood out as the largest Christian denomination to forbid its members from owning slaves (even as there were smaller groups such as the Reformed Presbyterians, Moravians, Freewill Baptists, and the United Brethren who took a similar stance on slaveholding members). Furthering the impression that Quakers supported the immediatists was the fact that many articulate Quaker reformers such as John Greenleaf Whittier helped form the American Anti-Slavery Society in