DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
29 December 2008
“Separate but Equal”
African Americans respond to the failure of Reconstruction
This article is excerpted from the book Free At Last: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 3.6 MB).
More than 600,000 Americans perished in the Civil War. Their sacrifice resolved some of the nation’s most intractable conflicts. Slavery at last was prohibited, and the principle that no state could secede from the Union was established. But incompatible visions of American society persisted, and the consequences for African Americans would prove immense.
One vision, associated during the 19th and early 20th centuries with the Democratic Party, blended American individualism and suspicion of big government with a preference for local and state authority over federal power, and, at least in the South, a dogged belief in white superiority. The Republican Party, founded in the 1850s, was more willing to employ federal power to promote economic development. Its core belief was often called “free labor.” For millions of northerners, free labor meant that a man — the concept then generally applied only to men — could work where and how he wanted, could accumulate property in his own name, and, most importantly, was free to rise as far as his talents and abilities might take him.
Abraham Lincoln was a model of this self-made man. As president, he would boast: “I am not ashamed to confess that 25 years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flat-boat. … ” Even as many Republicans condemned slavery as immoral, all viewed the South as lagging in both economic growth and social mobility. As the historian Antonia Etheart has written, Republicans saw in the South “an unchangeable hierarchy dominated by the aristocracy of slaveholders.”
After the North’s military victory ended slavery, its free-labor ideology required that the freedmen possess their civil rights. During the years that followed the Civil War, northern Republicans at first were determined to “reconstruct” the South along free-labor principles. Although many white southerners resisted, northern military might for a time ensured blacks the right to vote, to receive an education, and, generally, to enjoy the constitutional privileges afforded other Americans. But northerners’ determination to support blacks’ aspirations gradually ebbed as their desire for reconciliation with the South deepened. By the end of the 19th century, southern elites had reversed many black gains and imposed an oppressive system of legal segregation.
