Jim Crow Citizenship: Liberalism and the Southern Defense of Racial Hierarchy by Marek D. Steedman

Author:Marek D. Steedman [Steedman, Marek D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, African American & Black, History & Theory, American Government, American, Physical, Civics & Citizenship, Political Ideologies, Social Science, African American & Black Studies, Political Science, Anthropology, History, Conservatism & Liberalism, General, Race & Ethnic Relations
ISBN: 9781136815584
Google: nHtaBwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17551591
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Liberalism and Racial Hierarchy: A Preliminary Assessment

By emphasizing the equal status of parties to private contracts, “freedom of contract” implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, cut against the traditional understanding of domestic relations as hierarchical statuses. As applied to labor, “freedom of contract” did not so much challenge the connection between independence and citizenship as undermine the assumption that wage labor entailed dependence. The separation of production and reproduction, of employment from the household, relocated wage laborers firmly outside the personal authority of masters, simultaneously narrowing the importance and scope of household authority and altering its relation to claims to full citizenship. In the antebellum North, even marital relations, it had seemed, might be best described as contracts between formal equals. Legal theorists quickly insisted, after the War, that marriages were in fact civil statuses. Nevertheless, even here the assignment of rights to subordinate parties within domestic relations displaced notions of dependence that had characterized such statuses in earlier periods. The cumulative effect was what Weber terms a “disintegration” of the household and of household authority.84 This made it harder to conceive of laborers as potentially or actually acting at the polls as mere tools of their masters, and undermined the familiar association of independence with household authority.

My aim, over the course of the previous two chapters, has been to connect these developments, along with the general sense of social crisis in late nineteenth century America, with race in the South. More particularly, I have sought to show why these developments generated a racial crisis in the South in the last decade of the century. My argument has been, first, to connect racial hierarchy in the South to a larger understanding of mastery: one premised on control of dependents, to be sure, but one in which dependence itself was partially understood in racial terms. The next step was to show that contractual understandings of domestic relations undermined racial hierarchies by undermining the social conditions that tied dependence to labor and labor to household authority. Put differently, contractual freedom underwrote the reconceptualization of “free servants” as free laborers and affirmed (if only in theory) individual rights to marriage. Free black citizens who challenged the terms on which they worked for others, and could walk away if dissatisfied; who married and established households with other citizens, of any race; who exercised civil and political rights on the same basis as any other citizen, were the logical outcome of these shifts. This was the nightmare scenario of those who aspired to the status of masters. During Reconstruction these possibilities were seen and acted on by freedpeople, but were successfully contained by concerted violence on the part of white elites and the fact that the “logjam” of slavery had been only recently, and then partially broken. The associations of labor and race with dependency, and the boundaries of the household, remained firm enough. The late nineteenth century disintegration of the household loosened these final barriers to rapid social change, however, precipitating what I am calling a second crisis of mastery.

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