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Jun 5, 2008
The North's Banned History
SEGREGATION IN THE NORTH
When deTouqeville visited America he noticed that in the North whites worked exclusively on construction (unions pre- Civil War were started to keep Blacks from the jobs), but in the South he was shocked to see Blacks and whites working side by side. In the next few posts I'll examine the race codes pre and post Civil War. Will the rhetoric of the North match the facts? We'll find out. Also, check the footnote on a new book on the Northern death camp for Confederate soldiers.
Most people assume that school segregation was a phenomenon exclusive to the South. In his latest book, "Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle Over Northern School Segregation, 1865-1954," law professor Davison M. Douglas examines the untold story of northern school segregation between the end of the Civil War and the early 1950s. Douglas, the Arthur B. Hanson Professor of Law, is a legal historian with an expertise on the interplay of race and law in American history. He recently sat down with the W&M News to discuss his book, which is being published by Cambridge University Press and will be available this month in stores.
Q: How did you become interested in writing this book?
Douglas: I grew up in the South and had been interested in the southern civil rights movement since my childhood. In my first book, I examined school desegregation in the pivotal southern city of Charlotte, N.C. In the course of doing research for that book in the archives of the NAACP, I discovered a number of legal disputes in northern states during the first half of the 20th century involving school segregation. I had known that many northern communities had operated racially separate schools, but I had always assumed that such segregation was due to residential segregation. What I noticed in the NAACP archives, though, was that many northern towns segregated schoolchildren in a manner similar to southern towns, by establishing a white school for all of the town's white children and a "colored" school for all of the town's black children. Or by operating a single school with racially separate classrooms, racially separate playgrounds, and even racially separate American flags. The more I researched, the more examples I found of this kind of explicit segregation in the North. I realized that most of us don't know much about this aspect of our nation's history and so decided to write a book exploring the history of northern school segregation.
Q: The casual observer probably assumes that school segregation was just a southern practice. Why do you think the story of the north has not been told?
Douglas: School segregation was so overwhelming in the South – every southern state had laws that mandated racially separate schools and compliance with those laws was 100 percent. By the same token, most northern states had laws that prohibited school segregation. Hence, most historians interested in studying school segregation have focused their attention on the South – and in the process have missed a really interesting story.
Q: Was this a case where you had laws on the books that prohibited school segregation, but local communities that ignored those laws?
Douglas: That's exactly what happened. Most northern states enacted laws after the Civil War that prohibited school segregation. But in many northern communities, local school boards insisted on racial segregation in defiance of state law – particularly after thousands of southern blacks began to migrate northward during and after World War I. Many northern communities operated racially segregated schools before the onset of what we call the "Great Migration," but white insistence on school segregation sharply increased as more blacks arrived in the North. And even though segregation violated state law, many school boards acted in defiance of the law. A few lawsuits were brought challenging school segregation, almost all of which succeeded, but many northern school boards were not deterred – they persisted in their defiance. As a legal historian, I was fascinated with this disconnect between laws that prohibited school segregation and an on-the-ground reality at odds with that legal mandate. I wanted to know how this could happen. And I wanted to know what this might teach us about the role of law in accomplishing racial change in the United States.
http://www.wm.edu/news/?id=5438
BLACK LIFE IN THE LAND OF LINCOLN:
ILLINOIS, INDIANA
The legal history of the black codes in these two states is essentially similiar, and in fact Illinois simply continued Indiana's code when it organized as a territory.
The new states that entered the union in the North after the gradual emancipation of northern slaves were just as concerned as the old ones with maintaining their racial purity. To do so, they turned to an old practice in the North: the exclusion law. Slaves could not be brought into the Northwest Territories, under the ordinance of 1787, but slaves already there remained in bondage. Once states began to emerge from the old territories, most of them explicitly barred blacks or permitted them only if they could prove their freedom and post bond. Ohio offered the first example, and those that followed her into the union followed her lead on race.
Both Indiana (1816) and Illinois (1818) abolished slavery by their constitutions. And both followed the Ohio policy of trying to prevent black immigration by passing laws requiring blacks who moved into the state to produce legal documents verifying that they were free and posting bond to guarantee their good behavior. The bond requirements ranged as high as $1,000, which was prohibitive for a black American in those days. Anti-immigration legislation was passed in Illinois in 1819, 1829, and 1853. In Indiana, such laws were enacted in 1831 and 1852. Michigan Territory passed such a law in 1827; Iowa Territory passed one in 1839 and Iowa enacted another in 1851 after it became a state. Oregon Territory passed such a law in 1849.[1]
Like colonization, exclusion ordinances often were advanced by self-professed friends of the black race who saw only tragedy in attempts of the races to share the same land. Robert Dale Owen, speaking in Indiana in 1850, asked if any decent person desired "the continuance among us of a race to whom we are not willing to accord the most common protection against outrage and death." The rhetoric hardly is an exaggeration: during the constitutional debate in the state that year, one speaker had frankly acknowledged, "It would be better to kill them off at once, if there is no other way to get rid of them. ... We know how the Puritans did with the Indians, who were infinitely more magninimous and less impudent than the colored race."
Not content with mere legislation, Illinois, Indiana, and Oregon had anti-immigration provisions built into their constitutions. In Illinois (1848), in clause-by-clause voting, this clause was approved by voters by more than 2 to 1. Most of the opposition to it came from the northern counties of the state, where blacks were few. In Indiana (1851), it was approved by a larger margin than the constitution itself. In Oregon (1857), the vote for it was 8 to 1. The Illinois act stayed on the books until 1865. Such laws were seldom invoked, but they served blacks as grinding reminders of apartheid intentions and legal subjugation, and they offered white authorities and mobs excuses for harassment and violence against blacks.
The Black Codes dealt with more than just settlement. Oregon forbid blacks to hold real estate, make contracts, or bring lawsuits. Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, and California prohibited them from testifying in cases where a white man was a party. When the Illinois state constitution was adopted in 1818, it limited the vote to "free white men" and excluded blacks from the militia.
On closer examination, even the designation of "free state" can be question in a case like that of Illinois. Illinois, as a territory where slaves were held, had been restricting the freedom of black residents since before it became a state. In December 1813, Illinois Territory prohibited free blacks to immigrate to the territory and decreed all who did must leave within 15 days after notice or receive 39 lashes. As a state, it maintained the black codes inherited when it had formed part of Indiana, and thus continued its system of what one historian has described as "registered and indentured slavery."[2]
[S]he permitted non-resident slave-owners to hire their slaves to citizens of Illinois for a period of twelve months, yet not give the slave his freedom; and justified her act with the excuse that laborers were wanted to erect mills and open up the country, and that salt could not be profitably manufactured by white men.[3]
When the legislature once attempted to alter the black law to strip out the provision that allowed slaves to be imported into the colony, the governor vetoed it.
Furthermore, Illinois wouldn't even emancipate the few old slaves who had been in the territory since before 1787. Every person bound to service or indenture in the territory was to continue as such under state government, though children born of such persons were to be emancipated -- the boys at 24, the girls at 18.
http://www.slavenorth.com/northwest.htm
DENYING the PAST
As the reality of slavery in the North faded, and a strident anti-Southern abolitionism arose there, the memory of Northern slaves, when it surfaced at all, tended to focus on how happy and well-treated they had been, in terms much reminiscent of the so-called "Lost Cause" literature that followed the fall of the Confederacy in 1865.
"The slaves in Massachusetts were treated with almost parental kindness. They were incorporated into the family, and each puritan household being a sort of religious structure, the relative duties of master and servant were clearly defined. No doubt the severest and longest task fell to the slave, but in the household of the farmer or artisan, the master and the mistress shared it, and when it was finished, the white and the black, like the feudal chief and his household servant, sat down to the same table, and shared the same viands." [Reminiscence by Catharine Sedgwick (1789-1867) of Stockbridge, Mass.]
Yet the petitions for freedom from New England and Mid-Atlantic blacks, and the numbers in which they ran off from their masters to the British during the Revolution, suggest rather a different picture.
Early 19th century New Englanders had real motives for forgetting their slave history, or, if they recalled it at all, for characterizing it as a brief period of mild servitude. This was partly a Puritan effort to absolve New England's ancestors of their guilt. The cleansing of history had a racist motive as well, denying blacks -- slave or free -- a legitimate place in New England history. But most importantly, the deliberate creation of a "mythology of a free New England" was a crucial event in the history of sectional conflict in America. The North, and New England in particular, sought to demonize the South through its institution of slavery; they did this in part by burying their own histories as slave-owners and slave-importers. At the same time, behind the potent rhetoric of Daniel Webster and others, they enshrined New England values as the essential ones of the Revolution, and the new nation. In so doing, they characterized Southern interests as purely sectional and selfish. In the rhetorical battle, New England backed the South right out of the American mainstream.
The attempt to force blame for all America's ills onto the South led the Northern leadership to extreme twists of logic. Abolitionist leaders in New England noted the "degraded" condition of the local black communities. Yet the common abolitionist explanation of this had nothing to do with northerners, black or white. Instead, they blamed it on the continuance of slavery in the South. "The toleration of slavery in the South," Garrison editorialized, "is the chief cause of the unfortunate situation of free colored persons in the North."[1]
"This argument, embraced almost universally by New England abolitionists, made good sense as part of a strategy to heap blame for everything wrong with American society on southern slavery, but it also had the advantage, to northern ears, of conveniently shifting accountability for a locally specific situation away from the indigenous institution from which it had evolved."[2]
Melish's perceptive book, "Disowning Slavery," argues that the North didn't simply forget that it ever had slaves. She makes a forceful case for a deliberate re-writing of the region's past, in the early 1800s. By the 1850s, Melish writes, "New England had become a region whose history had been re-visioned by whites as a triumphant narrative of free, white labor." And she adds that this "narrative of a historically free, white New England also advanced antebellum New England nationalism by supporting the region's claims to a superior moral identity that could be contrasted effectively with the 'Jacobinism' of a slave-holding, 'negroized' South." The demonizing adjective is one she borrows from Daniel Webster, who used it in the Webster-Hayne debate of 1830.
http://www.slavenorth.com/denial.htm
NORTHERN PROFITS from SLAVERY
The effects of the New England slave trade were momentous. It was one of the foundations of New England's economic structure; it created a wealthy class of slave-trading merchants, while the profits derived from this commerce stimulated cultural development and philanthropy. --Lorenzo Johnston Greene, "The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776," p.319.
Whether it was officially encouraged, as in New York and New Jersey, or not, as in Pennsylvania, the slave trade flourished in colonial Northern ports. But New England was by far the leading slave merchant of the American colonies.
list of the leading slave merchants is almost identical with a list of the region's prominent families: the Fanueils, Royalls, and Cabots of Massachusetts; the Wantons, Browns, and Champlins of Rhode Island; the Whipples of New Hampshire; the Eastons of Connecticut; Willing & Morris of Philadelphia. To this day, it's difficult to find an old North institution of any antiquity that isn't tainted by slavery. Ezra Stiles imported slaves while president of Yale. Six slave merchants served as mayor of Philadelphia. Even a liberal bastion like Brown University has the shameful blot on its escutcheon. It is named for the Brown brothers, Nicholas, John, Joseph, and Moses, manufacturers and traders who shipped salt, lumber, meat -- and slaves. And like many business families of the time, the Browns had indirect connections to slavery via rum distilling. John Brown, who paid half the cost of the college's first library, became the first Rhode Islander prosecuted under the federal Slave Trade Act of 1794 and had to forfeit his slave ship. Historical evidence also indicates that slaves were used at the family's candle factory in Providence, its ironworks in Scituate, and to build Brown's University Hall.[4]
Even after slavery was outlawed in the North, ships out of New England continued to carry thousands of Africans to the American South. Some 156,000 slaves were brought to the United States in the period 1801-08, almost all of them on ships that sailed from New England ports that had recently outlawed slavery. Rhode Island slavers alone imported an average of 6,400 Africans annually into the U.S. in the years 1805 and 1806. The financial base of New England's antebellum manufacturing boom was money it had made in shipping. And that shipping money was largely acquired directly or indirectly from slavery, whether by importing Africans to the Americas, transporting slave-grown cotton to England, or hauling Pennsylvania wheat and Rhode Island rum to the slave-labor colonies of the Caribbean.
Northerners profited from slavery in many ways, right up to the eve of the Civil War. The decline of slavery in the upper South is well documented, as is the sale of slaves from Virginia and Maryland to the cotton plantations of the Deep South. But someone had to get them there, and the U.S. coastal trade was firmly in Northern hands. William Lloyd Garrison made his first mark as an anti-slavery man by printing attacks on New England merchants who shipped slaves from Baltimore to New Orleans.
Long after the U.S. slave trade officially ended, the more extensive movement of Africans to Brazil and Cuba continued. The U.S. Navy never was assiduous in hunting down slave traders. http://www.slavenorth.com/profits.htm
Footnote: A new book on America's death camp:
Lets start with the author. His research is exacting, methodical, and painstaking. He brought zero bias to the enterprise and the result is a stunning achievement that is both scholarly and readable. Douglas, the "accidental" prison camp began as a training camp for IL. volunteers. Donalson and Island #10 changed that. The long war no one expected combined with artic cold, primitive medical care and the barbarity of the captors created in the authors own words "a death camp." Stanton's and Grant's policy of halting the prisoner exchange behind the pretense of Fort Pillow accelerated the suffering. In the latest edition Levy found the long lost hospital records at the National Archives which prove conclusively that casualties were deliberately under reported. Prisoners were tortured, brutality was tolerated and corruption was widespread. The handling of the dead rivals stories of Nazi Germany. The largest mass grave in the Western Hemisphere is filled with....the bodies of Camp Douglas dead, 4200 known and 1800 unknown. No one should be allowed to speak of Andersonville until they have absorbed the horror of Douglas.
Posted at 04:34 am by Psychomike
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