Did the South Win the Civil War? Parts 1-5 of 10
Part One – Privilege and Insecurity
… the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. – W.E.B. Du Bois
…one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. – James Baldwin
On June 19th, 1865 – known later as Juneteenth – Union troops arrived in Texas with news that the Civil War was over and all black people were free. This was, however, over two months after the Confederate surrender, five months after the 13th amendment abolished slavery and 2 ½ years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Why did they take so long? Some say messengers were murdered. Others claim that plantation owners, who had moved thousands of slaves to Texas, withheld the news to keep the slaves working long as possible, or that federal troops allowed them a final cotton harvest. Even then, some planters resisted violently. The Federals didn’t completely suppress them until the following winter.
This pattern of disinformation became a model for the future, all the way up to the fake news and alternative facts of our current times, and it meshed with a national character that has always welcomed it. White people are not stupid. In their guts, they have always known the truth. But the myth of American innocence generally overcomes the body’s wisdom. So let’s consider: Did the South actually win the Civil War?
Of course, the Confederacy lost the actual war. Legalized slavery ended and the Union was saved. Of course, black people received equal rights and are now better off economically. We even had a black president. Yet all African Americans know that their rights and freedoms have been gained and then reversed before, and that this can happen again, as it is in 2025.
Consider the South’s objectives at the start of the war:
1 – Preservation of slavery
2 – Expansion of white supremacy
3 – Division of the working class through fear
4 – Expansion of American imperialism
5 – Erosion of federal authority and acceptance of “state’s rights”
6 – Free trade, or low tariffs on foreign manufactured goods
7 – The destruction of democracy
How could the South prosecute the war? How could a small class of millionaires motivate several hundred thousand men who had nothing material to gain from keeping slavery alive?
Indeed, the oligarchs were determined to preserve and expand slavery. It was enshrined into the first article of the Confederate Constitution, and all the insurrectionary states listed it as their first reason for rebelling. For its impact on our 21st century, however, we really need to understand what motivated poor whites, perhaps a third of the South’s population. Keri Leigh Merritt writes,
…they were surplus workers competing in a labor market with brutalized, unpaid enslaved people. After the forced migration of around 800,000 slaves from the Upper South to the Deep South in the 1830s and 1840s, job opportunities for poor whites were scarce.
These were men who couldn’t imagine having the resources to ever own slaves. So why did they fight? Certainly, most of them were draftees, and many deserted. But of those who remained, why did they defend this cause so savagely? This is a profound mystery, and we cannot understand the nation’s current situation without confronting it.
The answer is clear, even if it opens us to further mystery. By 1700, allegiance to the idea of whiteness had eliminated class competition and created a population of poor whites to intimidate slaves and suppress rebellion. Soon, America’s primary model for class distinction became relations between free whites and enslaved blacks, rather than between rich and poor. The new system, writes Theodore Allen, insisted on “the social distinction between the poorest member of the oppressor group and any member, however propertied, of the oppressed group.”
Long after the first slave patrols were formed and poor whites received their indoctrination into the realities of caste, they fought not to save slavery but to perpetuate white privilege.
Without their non-economic privileges and the projection of all evil onto Blacks, the concepts of whiteness and masculinity were meaningless. A hundred and sixty years after the end of the war, this legacy means that large numbers of relatively affluent people (most Trumpus supporters are not working class) actually believe that they have been persecuted by people who have far less money and influence than they do. But no matter how impoverished white Americans feel, they still receive subtle messages that divide them from those our mythology designates as impure. For generations, many of them have had nothing to call their own except this privilege and still support those who promise to maintain it.
In 1860, one oligarch acknowledged:
The color of the white man is now, in the South, a title of nobility in his relations with the negro…the poorest non-slaveholder may rejoice with the richest of his brethren of the white race, in the distinction of his color. He may be poor, it is true; but there is no point upon which he is so justly proud and sensitive as his privilege of caste; and there is nothing which he would resent with more fierce indignation than the attempt of the Abolitionist to...elevate the Negroes to an equality with himself and his family.
This shouldn’t obscure three facts. Northerners were also deeply racist; slavery supported their largest businesses; and it was deeply integrated with the global economy. But it can help us understand why the deep insecurity of Southern whites (and those in the western states they later populated) would be so easily manipulated throughout the decades that followed the war. It explains why whites from both North and South agreed to end Reconstruction with a narrative of a reunited America, and why they tolerated segregation for so long.
The South’s objective of preserving slavery failed, but only in a strictly legal sense. For decades, millions of African Americans remained on the land as virtual slaves working as sharecroppers, terrorized by the constant threat of violence.
Well before Trumpus, these same forces have been reasserting the old conditions. The myth of innocence is collapsing, and the search for scapegoats has intensified. Those conditions didn’t disappear in 1865. The mythological sources of white rage persist. In 2025, white males are more worried about the loss of their privileges, more anxious about their masculinity, more willing to blame others and angrier than ever.
Academics have traditionally portrayed the South as an exception to the grand story of American progress. But racism, police brutality, mass shootings, urban massacres, mass incarceration, reactionary politics, fundamentalist religion, environmental degradation, support for the military, fascination with firearms and a deep suspicion of outsiders are hardly unique to the region.
Were these American characteristics from the beginning, or did Southern values eventually come to predominate in large swarths of the country? Could Trumpus – or either of the Bushes, or Reagan, or Nixon – have won the Presidency without manipulating white fear of dark-skinned people?
Of the seven Southern objectives I’ve mentioned, the first six have been made possible by the seventh, the destruction of democracy. Although few Americans could vote in the early republic, one event – the 1794 invention of the cotton gin – changed everything.
With this machine that could do the work of 50 slaves, the wealthiest plantation owners realized that they could produce 50 times as much cotton (and profit), if only they had 50 times as much land to grow it on and 50 times as many people to pick it. They achieved the first objective by colluding on price-fixing to bankrupt and then buy out small farms and plantations. Within a few decades, a handful of fabulously wealthy families had seized complete control of the economic and political systems of each Southern state.
They fixed the second problem by importing slaves. The rise of cotton production in the Lower South, the switch from tobacco production to wheat in Virginia and the end of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 created a market for Virginia slavers, who bred more slaves and sold them southward to meet the increasing demand. Between 1790 and 1860, over a million slaves were sold from the Upper South to the Lower South. The result was that, by 1860, there were more millionaires living in the lower Mississippi Valley than anywhere else. Economic power translated to ruthless political power. Thom Hartmann writes:
...they brooked no opposition: White men who dared run or vote against them in elections were often assassinated or lynched; newspapers were seized and handed over to oligarchs ...elections became a mere charade. They even monitored the mail...Democracy in the South, by the 1850s, was completely dead. The Confederacy had become a police state. And then they reached out to try to end that pesky remnant of democracy in the North, as well.
Part Two – The Lost Cause and American Memory
Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. – Abraham Lincoln
The root of the White man’s hatred is terror, a bottomless and nameless terror, which focuses on this dread figure, an entity which lives only in his mind. – James Baldwin
In 1877, the Reconstruction period ended with a compromise that removed the last federal troops and enabled Democrats to gain political control of the South. Northerners, sick of the expensive effort to enforce equality, were willing to drop the issue entirely. In exchange, the Republican Rutherford Hayes became President.
Immediately after the war, Edward Pollard’s book The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the Confederates portrayed the “Old South” as a paradise of racial harmony untouched by the evils of industrial capitalism. It recast the struggle to perpetuate slavery as a noble defense of a traditional way of life led by gallant gentleman-officers in the “War of Northern Aggression”. Soon, whites everywhere began to share the “Lost Cause” myth.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy (founded in 1894) and the Sons of Confederate Veterans (1896), played central roles in publicly vindicating their parent’s wartime experiences. Historian Karen Cox insists that it was mostly women who shaped the South’s (and eventually the nation’s) memory of the war. They erected 700 monuments and built retirement homes for old soldiers and widows. But their most effective tool was the pro-Southern literature they forced into the region’s schools.
Textbooks such as 1908’s History of Virginia white-washed slavery: “...negroes proved a harmless and affectionate race, easily governed, and happy in their condition.” This nonsense prevailed in the textbook Virginia: History, Government, Geography, used in seventh-grade classrooms into the 1970s: “Life among the Negroes...was generally happy. The Negroes went about in a cheerful manner making a living for themselves and for those for whom they worked”. A high school text claimed:
He did not work as hard as the average free laborer since he did not have to worry about losing his job. In fact, the slave enjoyed what we might call collective security...his food was plentiful, his clothing adequate, his cabin warm, his health protected, his leisure carefree. He did not worry about hard times, unemployment, or old age.
It is estimated that seventy million students were enrolled in the South’s public schools between 1889 and 1969. All of them were subjected to this bogus history, since the UDC’s primary focus was on insuring that Southern schools used only those history books that defended slavery, praised the Ku Klux Klan and banned books that didn’t. But it also exerted great influence on Northern book publishers, who
…had decisions to make if they wanted to sell books to Southern schools. Go all in with Lost Cause dogma and sell the book only in the South? Or have two versions of the same book – one with watered-down history for the South, and another one with historical facts for everyone else? The latter was often the choice.
Bad history persists, writes Steve Hochstadt, because those in power can harass its critics. In the 1950s,
It was easy for the FBI and conservative organizations to pinpoint academics, journalists and film directors who dissented from the Lost Cause ideology. They could then be attacked for their associations with organizations that could be linked to Communists. These crimes of identification were made easier to concoct because of the leading role played by American leftists in the fight against racism during the long 20th century of Jim Crow.
Mississippi’s public schools used Lost Cause textbooks exclusively until a federal court order forced them stop in 1980. But the situation persists in the 21st century.
Now, with millions of evangelicals consuming absurd visions of who they are and what they think they know, the great-great-granddaughters of the Confederacy continue to have their way. In 2015 the Georgia Board of Education agreed to rewrite history and keep their public school students (60% of whom are children of color) from learning that racism is a real, current problem created by longstanding structural inequality. This move reflected the pernicious influence of media such as Fox News, which had mentioned “critical race theory” 1,300 times in the previous 3 ½ months.
Jefferson Davis’ birthday is still a legal holiday in Alabama. Mississippi includes it in its Memorial Day celebration. In Texas, it is part of “Confederate Heroes Day”, while Florida, Kentucky and Tennessee note it but do not provide paid holidays.
Why is the UDC still so influential? Because they became the spiritual ancestors of all the right-wing women of the past forty years, from Phyliss Schlafly, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachman, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Kellyanne Conway, Nikki Haley, Kristi Noem and Marjory Taylor Greene to the majority of white women who voted three times for a vile misogynist and rapist whose policies hurt their own children. Even more than the white, working-class men we hear so much about, white women voted against many of their interests in favor of fear, privilege and hate. For them, it seems that the South should have won the war.
The end of Reconstruction and falsification of history are mythological issues. Generations of Northern and Southern whites consumed a new creation story that largely replaced those of the Pilgrims and the Founding Fathers: the nation had survived its greatest crisis and experienced a rebirth and unification that would express itself in imperial expansion and historical amnesia. In Rebirth of a Nation, Jackson Lear writes:
...postwar rhetoricians refashioned the regenerative nationalistic creed, placing it in the service of white supremacy at home and Anglo-Saxon empire abroad...Memorial Day orations became occasions for remembering the equal heroism of blue and gray and forgetting the black struggle for freedom.
It was no coincidence that cross-sectional nationalism arose in exactly those years that saw huge increases in immigration, unionization and labor strife – and the massive concentrations of wealth of the Gilded Age, which I wrote about here.
The myth of a reunited America with a shared national purpose, along with hugely popular Horatio Alger tales of enterprising young men who prospered on their own merit, was just what oligarchs of both North and South needed to distract the working classes. Within two generations, most white Americans remembered the war as one “between brothers.”
The issues that had caused the war faded away (except of course in the minds of people of color), but the long-term psychological wounds in the national character that led white men to erupt in regular expressions of genocidal violence did not. By the turn of the century, American troops (primarily Southerners) in the Philippines were massacring thousands of indigenous people, whom they referred to as “niggers”, precisely when lynching was at its height at home. Later, they would massacre Japanese prisoners, refer to Viet Nam as “Indian country” and denigrate Iraqis and Afghanis as “sand niggers”.
The process of forgetting began during Reconstruction. Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson granted amnesty to Confederate soldiers in 1868. Prior to that, he had already overturned General Sherman’s offer of “forty acres and a mule” and other programs for the recently emancipated Blacks. Christopher Petrella writes:
...emblematic of the logic of the U.S. racial state: provide civic inclusion for treasonous white confederates and continue a policy of civic exclusion for newly liberated Black children, women, and men. Johnson’s strategic re-birth of the nation – “a country for white men [and] a government for white men,” in his words – helped alleviate the crisis of whiteness generated by the Civil War and recenter its homogenizing supremacy.
There was some land distribution, and by 1910 25% of Southern black farmers (compared to 63% of white farmers) owned 15,000,000 acres, a number that would decrease to 2,000,000 acres by 1997, largely because of long-term racist policies in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But most poor Southerners, Black or White, could only work as sharecroppers on the large plantations.
In 2020 the agency continued to discriminate, granting loans to 37% of Black applicants and 71% of whites. In a grant program to help producers weather the coronavirus pandemic, farmers of color, comprising 5% of all U.S. farmers, received under 1% of the payments.
In 1872 Congress passed an amnesty act that returned their property and the right to hold office to all but the top Confederate leaders. A century later, the government restored full citizenship to Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. In 1978, President Carter proclaimed, “…Congress officially completes the long process of reconciliation” – thirty years before it apologized to Black people for slavery. Petrella concludes that “the idea of amnesty itself is only legible through a priori claims to civic belonging, a concept itself that is racialized as white.”
Because the nation failed to punish most Southern oligarchs, landholding and wealth-holding in the region never changed. Some of these rural areas are still dominated by their descendants.
This new creation myth was based on the acceptance of the South’s number two objective. For generations, most whites, North and South, agreed that blacks, though they had been granted legal equality, had not sufficiently evolved to vote, exercise political authority, or have their children schooled along with white children.
And this agreement in turn was based upon the fear of miscegenation. Racism remained the foundation of a political economy predicated upon perpetual fear, the constant threat of violence, division of the working class and further refinements of whiteness and white privilege. Mixing of the races was a threat because the myth of American innocence was based on two fundamental assumptions of purity: white = pure, and black = impure. One exception to the rule, of course, was the category of slaves conceived by white men through rape. Their children were not free.
Another category included free people of color, especially in New Orleans. By the early 18th century, due to the idea of “hypodescent”, a child’s race was determined by the mother. Later, mixed-race children of white mothers in the Upper South were born free.
But the white psyche was so obsessed with racial purity that other laws defined Blacks as persons with any African ancestry. With the “one-drop rule”, used exclusively in America, even “octoroons,” who had seven white great-grandparents out of eight, were considered black. It remained legal in several states well into the 20th century. Before it was outlawed in the Loving v. Virginia decision of 1967, it was invoked to prevent interracial marriages. In the 1930s, Germany copied American racial and Eugenics laws. But even for some Nazis, writes James Q. Whitman, “American race law looked too racist”.
Part Three: Religion
The past is never dead. It’s not even past. – William Faulkner
Eleven A.M. Sunday morning…the most segregated hour in this nation. – Martin Luther King
Religion in the South evolved as another tool to legitimize white supremacy.
How did Puritanism continue to grow there long after it had been transformed into the capitalist impulse in the North? In the 18th century, as free land became scarce in the east, most immigrants, including thousands of Scots-Irish Presbyterians, headed toward southern and western frontier areas. There, they fought savage Indian wars long after indigenous people in the North had been eliminated or subdued.
Later, in the Deep South these poor Whites existed side-by-side with millions of Blacks. One can imagine that they felt guilt, conscious or not, for participating in the systematic dehumanization of the slaves. They learned to live with these moral contradictions by projecting their own worst intentions upon both Red and Black people. This meant that rural Southerners, far more than Northerners, were obsessed with evil. Meanwhile, travelling country preachers, always in competition with one another, were evolving highly emotional styles to gather converts, styles that eventually absorbed African influences from the slaves themselves. Here is the central contradiction of Southern religion, as Michael Ventura has written: its hatred of the body is conveyed in religious forms that excite the body.
From the first, there was no mind-body split in the practice of African Christianism, though the doctrine was just as fundamentalist, just as Puritan. The style...as we know it today, white and black, came straight out of African churches…This is the bind the South has been in for at least a century and a half. A religion of denial worshipped with a religious practice that is anything but denial – the church sending out two contradictory signals...one to the body and one to the mind…A doctrine that denied the body, preached by a practice that excited the body, would eventually drive the body into fulfilling itself elsewhere…The style of a Jimmy Swaggart (who, by the way, is Jerry Lee Lewis’ cousin) would contradict every word he preached, and both he and his listeners would be ensnared in that contradiction, and this would be the source of the terrible tension that drives their unchecked paranoias.
The Bible occupied a prominent place on the frontier. With few educated clergy around, people interpreted it literally. It was venerated more than it was read and read more than it was understood. It was often the only book in the house (still a common situation in many American homes). The result was a dogmatism and anti-intellectualism and a disdain for Northern liberals.
The three major protestant churches split into northern and southern factions (Presbyterians in 1837, Methodists in 1844, Baptists in 1845). The segregation of the clergy into pro- and anti-slavery camps ended meaningful dialogue, leaving Southern preachers to talk to Southern audiences without any dissenters. For them, to attack slavery was to attack the word of God.
While urban Northerners transmuted their Puritan self-abnegation into the deferred gratification required to amass wealth, rural Southerners built up their fear of the Other to such a fever pitch that the Devil – and their own sense of sinfulness – were constant presences. Belief in predestination died out, but Original Sin remained. This meant fear of judgment, repressed sexuality, an older sense of deferred gratification (not to wealth but to the next life), and the projection of their self-hatred onto the Black scapegoat. When the Ku Klux Klan re-appeared during and after World War One, among its four million members were 30,000 Protestant ministers.
Belief in Original Sin meant longing for release from this life. Ironically, focus on the other world meant dismissal of this one and contempt for political participation. As a result, many fundamentalists refrained from voting until the 1970s, when politicians manipulated the fear of predatory Black men to swing the South from Democrat to Republican.
The fact that conservatives – and too often, liberals – regularly admonish progressives for speaking about race indicates the terrifying truth that the subject is taboo. Anthropology teaches us that what is taboo is sacred. Like the Hebrew god Yahweh, this secret is too holy to be named.
Race (as white privilege, as identification in terms of the “Other”, as the prison-industrial complex, as the underpinning of our entire economy and all of our politics, and as the fear of retribution) is the great unspoken – and therefore sacred – basis of white American identity.
These attitudes are essentially religious, even if we now articulate them in secular terms. We no longer speak of original sin – not because we have matured as a culture, but because we no longer need to. This brutal theology is lodged in our American bones. Underneath the clichés lies our Puritan contempt for the poor, still as severe as it was in the 17th century, along with our association of dark skin with poverty.
Indeed, surveys still show that Americans of all social classes believe that losers are corrupt, that their condition is their own fault. To fail economically (regardless of the causes) is not simple failure but – in America – moral failure. The mind of the literalist condemns this moral corruption to future generations. Why else would this society condemn a quarter of its children to poverty because their parents can’t find work?
With most white, older Americans content to have their cake (government services) without paying much for it (taxes going toward lazy “welfare cheats”), many of us are still willing to collude with the great secret. “Original sin” is religious terminology, and so is “secret.” Slavery existed in Virginia before the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts. This fact has been called America’s original sin. Ever since, every single white person who has ever set foot on this continent has benefitted from the privileges conferred by this secret. It is a holy secret because we still will not name it.
The division of humanity’s innately diverse nature into the false dichotomy of Christ and Devil, played out on American soil, where whites encountered their dark projections in dark African bodies. Everyone understood the symbolic connection between tree and cross. Orlando Patterson writes that into the 20th century, “The cross – Christianity’s central symbol of Christ’s sacrificial death – became identified with the crucifixion of the Negro.”
We ask in our own innocence, didn’t they notice the irony? Recall that clergymen presided over many lynchings. Photographs – often printed as postcards – show crowds of well-dressed adults and children grinning at the camera while black men roast over bonfires. These images, like those of the Holocaust (“burnt offering”) and the genocide of the Palestinians, always elicit disbelief. How can people become so fully dehumanized as to enjoy such horror? Who are the real victims?
The Southern Baptist Convention is now the second largest denomination (after Catholics) in the nation, with some 15 million members in 48,000 congregations. In the 1960s it defended white supremacy and didn’t formally apologize for its racism until 1995.
Regardless, a third of Americans describe themselves as fundamentalists or evangelicals and believe that all other religions serve Satan. Half of us deny evolution. There are 1,600 Christian radio stations and 250 Christian TV stations. Fundamentalists control the Republican Party. To ingratiate himself among them, almost every President from Jimmy Carter onward has claimed to be reborn or fundamentalist. The extremist Rick Warren gave the invocation at Obama’s inauguration. Even Trumpus grew up attending Norman Vincent Peale’s church. Seven states still ban non-believers from holding office.
By the advent of Trumpus, however, white fundamentalists had been identified with the far right for so long that even his indiscretions, his brutal misogyny and ignorance of Christian principles did not impede his popularity. The bottom line was and is race; his invitation to exclusion and violence was all they needed to hear. His 2020 percentage of their vote actually increased over his 2016 numbers.
I stress white fundamentalists to counter the simplistic notion that Trumpus and the right wing have attracted the “fundamentalist vote.” The fact that Black fundamentalists rejected him at the same rates as all other African Americans is a clear reminder that the issue is not religion but race.
Without the vast influence of these people (and their tax-exempt political organizations), the world political landscape, from the population explosion to global warming to the wars on drugs and terror to the tens of millions of refugees they have engendered would look completely different. Their resistance to birth control has condemned millions to death by poverty.
For 50 years, their literalistic visions of apocalypse have determined American policy in the Middle East. Frank Schaeffer, a former televangelist, writes that for them, “The ‘purpose’ of the Jews is to be there to be killed after the Second Coming. Christian Zionists love Israel the way oncologists love cancer.” Their susceptibility to a very long series of con men allows for an extraordinary capacity to hold vast contradictions. When they (certainly, most of them were Southerners) attacked the Capitol on January 6th, 2020, some carried Israeli flags while others wore “Camp Auschwitz” t-shirts.
Muslim extremism might not exist as a major force at all without Christian-American support for Israel. Three generations of anti-communist repression has ensured that the only significant, nationalist resistance to the American empire has been by Muslim fundamentalists, who (ironically, like their American counterparts) were not politically active until the 1970s, when Catholics essentially invented the abortion issue and other elements of the Culture Wars.
Anti-intellectualism and the resulting openness to conspiracies eventually infected the national mind. It’s easy enough to find examples of how ignorant Americans are of history and science, but this 2015 poll result stands out: partially because only 18% of 1,100 liberal arts colleges and universities require graduates to have even a single survey course in American history or government, half of us, including a third of college graduates, don’t know when the Civil War took place.
Part Four: Violence and Intimidation
If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they never would have become so dependent on what they call “the Negro problem”. This problem, which they invented to safeguard their purity, has made of them criminals and monsters, and it is destroying them; and this not from anything Blacks may or may not be doing but because of the role a guilty and constricted white imagination has assigned to the Blacks. – James Baldwin
Capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life. – Senator Orrin Hatch
Southern oligarchs believed that perpetuating slavery meant extending it into the western territories and states. After the war, new versions of this goal appeared. The first was keeping the newly freed Blacks in virtual servitude in the South. The second was influencing conditions in the West.
After 1865, the idea of “free” was no longer one of the primary definitions of whiteness. Those who had previously been defined by the characteristics of “not-white” and “non-free” were suddenly free, and this change set off yet another in a long historical process of heightened white fragility. So the ideas of white supremacy and white privilege required new thinking.
This included limiting the freedom to escape the hellish conditions that persisted in the South, even as Blacks briefly held some power. Some of these laws outlawed the selling or leasing of land to Blacks and prevented them from buying liquor or carrying weapons. Extreme poverty, combined with these legal restrictions prevented most Blacks from moving west and kept them de facto slaves in the South. In the Southwest, similar systems targeted Latinos.
Over time, the Homestead Acts gave away 160 million acres of public land (nearly 10% of the nations’ total area), which were theoretically open to everyone. But homesteading became a privilege of whiteness, an example of what I have called affirmative action for whites. Thousands of ex-Confederates moved west and received free land, federal protection from angry natives and access to railroads for their crops.
Although most Southern states completely undermined federal Reconstruction efforts to promote landowning as the blacks’ ticket to economic freedom and equality, there was a much smaller, briefer and poorly administered program of homesteading on poor land, mostly in Florida, for Blacks. About a thousand families (a sixth of those who had applied) received land. And in 1879, nearly 40,000 “Exodusters” settled in Kansas and Oklahoma, creating many Freedman’s towns.
But that was one percent of the South’s Black population. Since the vast majority of the 1.6 million homesteading families were white, it is no wonder that our mythic picture of the hardy “pioneers” is lily-white.
A century and a half later, their 45 million descendants compose much of the population of the states west of the Mississippi River. No wonder these states tend to be aligned politically with the far right. No wonder Oregon entered the Union in 1859 (even before the war) with an exclusion clause in its constitution banning all Black People that was not repealed until 1927. Each of these states, despite their small populations, sends as many Senators to Washington as does California. In this regard, the Confederacy certainly won the war.
With the end of Reconstruction, Northerners gradually forgot the ex-slaves, consigning them to the reign of terror that would last another century. Sociologist Orlando Patterson writes:
After the trauma of Appomattox, the Southern community had to be restored in the most extreme compact of blood, and its God propitiated...the Northern victors, having created the problem, then presented the solution by soon abandoning the domestic enemy, whom they had simply made masterless and vulnerable, to their humiliated ex-masters...every participant in these heinous rituals of human sacrifice must have felt the deepest and most gratifying sense of expiation and atonement.
In 1892, as the nation celebrated the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the New World, at least 240 blacks were lynched. By 1896 legal segregation was in place throughout the South. Thirty states enforced anti-miscegenation laws, sixteen of them lasting until 1967.
The 1865 Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery generally, but it left an enormous opening by permitting it as a punishment for crime. In 1866, as a way to appease Southern landowners, the federal government turned a blind eye when Southern states used this clause to establish the infamous “Black Codes” that restricted black freedoms and restored slavery in everything but name. This provoked the North to send federal troops and institute martial law. But once the troops withdrew, the South quickly reinstated the codes.
These codes defined blacks almost solely as agricultural workers and included vagrancy laws that allowed jobless blacks to be arrested for loitering. Local authorities hired hundreds of thugs as police officers who arrested blacks for minor infractions. When the victims could not pay the stiff fines, they were committed to long periods of involuntary labor, often on the same plantations they’d recently left. The state essentially conspired with Big Business. Historian Alex Lichtenstein notes that
…only in the South did the state entirely give up its control to the contractor; and only in the South did the physical “penitentiary” become virtually synonymous with the various private enterprises in which convicts labored.
Louisiana forbade Black men to preach to Black congregations without special permission. In South Carolina, if the parent of a Black child was considered vagrant, the judicial system allowed government agencies to “apprentice” the child to an “employer” until they reached adulthood.
Perhaps as many as 800,000 Black men were condemned to conditions so brutal that 25% of them died while serving their sentences. Cui Bono? Follow the money. The convict lease system was harsh, racist – and lucrative. In 1898, for example, it supplied 73% of the entire revenue of the state of Alabama, which didn’t outlaw it until 1928.
The Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist organizations ensured that these conditions would last for decades. Estimates of the violence vary greatly, but one source states that in Louisiana alone over 2,000 people were killed or wounded prior to the 1868 Presidential election. Glen Ford writes:
After crushing Black Reconstruction, the southern states invented, from the bottom up, the world’s first totally racially regimented society. U.S. “Jim Crow” inspired Adolph Hitler’s vision for nation-building under Aryan supremacy, as documented in James Whitman’s book, Hitler’s American Model.
Reconstruction’s end led to disenfranchisement, segregation, mass incarceration and thousands of lynchings and unpunished police murders. We cannot minimize its long term, epistemic trauma. Nor can we minimize the long term effect on the entire nation of a solid block of segregationist Senators who soon had veto power on most federal legislation.
Why is America is the only developed nation with no right to healthcare? Early opposition to a national healthcare system came from southern politicians who were so opposed to blacks benefiting from white people’s tax dollars that they were willing to prevent their own constituents from receiving healthcare. They were influenced by insurance executive Frederick Hoffman, whose 1896 book, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro was a best-seller. He taught that blacks were so physically and intellectually inferior that if they were simply deprived of healthcare the entire race would die out in a few generations and the “race problem” would disappear. He addressed Congress and was hailed as a pioneer in the field of “scientific racism.” By the 1920s, his insurance company was moving into the health insurance field, which brought an added incentive to lobby against any sort of a national healthcare plan.
Fast forward briefly to 2021: Southern Republicans were leading the attempts to pass nearly 400 voter suppression bills in 48 states. The Dixiecrat influence on Congress is much older than we commonly suppose. Michael Kazin writes:
When lawmakers from the South favored a bill, such as the Federal Reserve Act or the 16th Amendment allowing Congress to impose an income tax, it passed. When they opposed a bill, such as the one proposed by Republicans in the late 1880s that would have enabled federal officials to supervise the conduct of elections all across the country, they nearly always managed to kill it…By the early 20th century, most Republicans had essentially given up the battle to secure the right to vote that the 15th Amendment had guaranteed to black men – a right that the Democrats, who ruled every Southern state, had gradually stripped away.
The effort to maintain segregation and white supremacy has always carried with it the threat of violence. And it has – far more often than we’d like to think – overflowed into literal, mass violence, including over 4,000 lynchings and countless massacres of Native, Latino and Chinese Americans.
I first posted this on the hundredth anniversary of the Tulsa massacre. Joe Biden had just spoken about remembering history.
What he didn’t mention, however, is that Tulsa was part of a very widespread pattern. Between 1863 and 1923, there were nearly two dozen events in which white mobs killed large numbers of blacks and destroyed or stole their accumulated wealth. Two of the worst massacres occurred only shortly after the end of the war, in Memphis and New Orleans.
Epistemic traumas are the emotional consequences; long-term losses of equity comprise the economic after-effects. The Tulsa victims’ insurance claims and lawsuits were rejected. Total claimed losses were $1.8 million ($27 million in 2021). Had those losses grown for 100 years at 6% compound interest, the lost wealth would total $600 million.
This is one of many factors that have contributed to the vast gap in multi-generational poverty between Blacks and Whites. In the 20th century there were dozens of large scale “race riots”, mostly in midwestern and northern cities, all of which, until the urban uprisings of the 1960s, were White-on-Black violence. All these events resulted in far more deaths and injuries to Blacks than to whites, and the massive economic losses they incurred have had long-term impact on the fact that today white families have ten times the assets as black families, even when they make the same salaries.
These events followed a much older pattern. There were at least 46 White-on-Black massacres in Northern cities between 1824 and 1841. Whites in nearly every northern state adopted measures to prohibit or restrict equal rights and the further migration of Black people into their jurisdictions.
When we consider American violence and the related issue of gun control, the South has won most of the battles if not the war. Seventeenth century laws prevented slaves from possessing guns. Each white man, however, was required to own a gun and serve on the slave patrols, which greatly influenced the formation of police departments throughout the colonies. This was a critical transition. The color line became an instrument of class domination, as working-class whites, first in the South and eventually throughout America, identified with the ruling class on the basis of race, rather than with nonwhite workers on a class basis.
After independence, argues Carol Anderson, the Second Amendment was designed not so much to protect the right to bear arms as to keep them from Blacks. Its writers didn’t trust federal control of their militias. So they crafted the amendment’s language to ensure that slavers could quickly crush any rebellions without appealing to centralized authority.
By contrast, the right to bear arms, so precious to conservatives, has been repeatedly denied to Blacks, both slaves and freemen, from 1800 to the experience of the Black Panthers in the 1960s, when the NRA briefly supported gun control.
…the second a Black person exercises this right, the second they pick up a gun to protect themselves (or the second that they don’t), their life – as surely as Philando Castile’s, Tamir Rice’s, Alton Sterling’s – may be snatched away in that single, fatal second.
Part Five: Systemic Violence
…this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it…It is the innocence which constitutes the crime. – James Baldwin
Being black has taught him how to allow white people their innocence…like taking care of babies…whom you cannot punish, because they’re babies. Eventually you direct that anger at yourself – it has nowhere else to go. – Hilton Als
To realize how much Southern values are American values, we must see these tragedies in the proper perspective. Every 28 hours, a police officer, a security guard or a vigilante shoots a person of color to death. Over 40% of these murders follow incidents of racial profiling, and 80% of the victims are unarmed.
The violence has not decreased in the past several years, despite the fact that many of the shootings have been documented online. What’s going on? My essay Hands Up, Don’t Shoot: The Sacrifice of American Dionysus investigates this question from a mythological perspective. The human sacrifice of lynching must be a public spectacle, or it has no value:
...police, knowing how rarely they are held accountable, want you to see the evidence. In the age of cell phone images and instant publicity through social media, police killings have become public affairs…Does this pattern have a function? Historically, when a community needs to resolve some fundamental social transition, human sacrifice often becomes its method. American Southern whites faced precisely such a period of acute liminal transition after the Civil War, and they performed regular rituals of human sacrifice well into the 1930s…The community achieved temporary unity and restored innocence by focusing its shadow upon the Other (usually accused of having the Dionysian qualities of sexuality or irrational violence) where all could safely view it. However, as in all addictive conditions, the need to be cleansed of the unacceptable feelings always continues to build up, and so does the need to sacrifice a scapegoat.
American society has given police the privilege to carry out these rituals – approximately five times a week, on the streets, brazenly, proudly, especially before videotaping witnesses, with little interference from the legal system. The George Floyd verdict was a rare exception in which the cop stared directly at the camera for nearly nine minutes as he choked his victim. Officer Derek Chauvin gazed at the Black woman recording the murder as if to say, “This could happen to you, too.”
The image is a direct descendant of the photos of lynchings (some of were printed as post cards) in which large crowds of well-dressed whites stare proudly at cameras.
Certainly, our current age – with women and gays continuing to question traditional notions of masculinity; with men rapidly losing both jobs and their authority in the family; with immigrants questioning our notions of who is a member of the Polis; with technology driving change faster than we can assimilate it; as we awake from the American dream to discover the nightmare – certainly our age qualifies as one of fundamental transition. Hence the search for scapegoats.
Around 2015 activists replaced “Hands up, don’t shoot” with “Black lives matter!” Why? Because the earlier chant was ironic; it was intended (like the old chants of the Civil Rights movement) to shame police – and the nation – into moral action. But in this dark time, we have become shameless. And without irony we ask, Do Black Lives Really Matter?
We are talking about advanced capitalism in a world of austerity and lowered expectations; a nation in which, even before the advent of AI, the population greatly exceeded the available jobs. Even without calculating the impact of immigration, we have literally millions of essentially useless people. Due primarily to the exporting of jobs to the Third World, they have no marketable skills in what has essentially become a high-tech service economy and – because of a failed education system – will never have those skills. Perhaps “failed” is the wrong word, since many critics argue that schooling has long been deliberately intended to dumb us down.
Economically speaking, such people have value only in being consumers or cannon fodder. As for the first, unemployed persons hardly qualify as consumers. As for the second, since the Empire now outsources most of its mayhem to unmanned drones, “contractors” (mercenaries) and Third-World dictators, even the cannon fodder option has been reduced. So millions of people, primarily people of color, have become, quite simply, expendable.
Capitalism no longer needs them as it needed their grandparents who worked the factory jobs that once sustained a middle class. From that point of view, it makes no difference whatsoever if people starve on the streets. But they can still fill our prisons. They are the raw material, the natural resource (exactly like oil or slave-produced cotton) without which our massive and lucrative prison-industrial complex could not exist. Among the two million persons in federal and state prisons are 80,000 people in solitary confinement. They are controlled by over 360,000 “correctional” officers. Cui bono? The 30,000 members of the prison guards’ union is one of California’s largest.
Ironically, once poor people are committed to those hellholes, they do work, at absurdly low wages for over 4,000 businesses, either through production or through services. Junk calls you received today probably originated in penitentiaries.
A final context in which Black lives have mattered involves the corruption of science. From James Sims’ gynecological experiments on unanesthetized slave women to the 40-year Tuskegee study of untreated syphilis in Black men to the Guatemalan STD Study of the 1940s to Cold War irradiation studies on cancer patients to medical studies conducted on untreated natives of the Marshall Islands after nuclear tests, American scientists have used people of color as guinea pigs for two centuries. The fact that German and Japanese scientists also conducted such crimes does not exonerate these Americans.
Mythology adds a dark dimension to our analysis. Considering the myths that govern our thinking at the deepest levels and provide a sense of identity in fast-changing times, it is difficult not to conclude that Black (and Brown and Red) lives do matter – but only to serve as the Other. America as it exists today will always need a dark, demonized Other to measure its own lightness by. In religious terms, to convince themselves that they are still among the elect, white people need to know, to see – on video – exactly who is not worthy of being saved, and that they are being punished. The simple truth is that, to remain “America,” this nation requires a population of suffering – deservedly suffering, as whites prefer – Others within the borders just as it needs an identifiably evil population of terrorist Others outside the borders.
It remains a marker of white innocence and denial that, despite this well-documented history of white-on-black violence, despite the fact that white men commit the vast majority of mass murders, despite the fact that blacks and whites commit crimes at similar rates, when psychologists ask people to imagine a violent criminal, 95% of us picture a Black man.
Parts 6-10 of this essay will be posted soon.