Empires in World History by Jane Burbank

Author:Jane Burbank
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Land and Liberty the American Way

Slavery had led to the near dissolution of the union; war to put it back together pushed the leaders of the ultimately victorious side to open the doors of citizenship. Slavery was prohibited throughout the United States by the Thirteenth Amendment ratified in December 1865, after having been rejected by the House of Representatives the year before. That black slaves would fight and die for their freedom had helped bring freedom about. But what kind of freedom? The four million ex-slaves expected the wherewithal to support their independence, while former owners were determined to hold onto their labor force. Some southern states adopted “Black Codes” to force ex-slaves to accept plantation labor on the planters’ terms, but these laws were voided by the federal Civil Rights Act of 1866.

The main question as with so much else in the American empire was land. Some antislavery politicians had suggested redistributing the fields of slaveholding rebels—providing “40 acres and a mule” to each ex-slave—but such talk came to naught. While the U.S. government was busy expropriating Indians, it was unwilling to do the same to slave owners whose property was considered private. As General Robert V. Richardson put it in 1865, “The emancipated slaves own nothing, because nothing but freedom has been given them.”

Ex-slaves thought they should get something more, and many struggled to get a measure of economic independence and to participate in politics during the brief window when the federal government enforced the laws sufficiently for them to do so. Planters fought back with terror—the Ku Klux Klan—by invoking property law, and by other means, fair and foul. Under the eyes of the federal military, “Reconstruction” governments, with black participation, took office in ex-Confederate states, and some achieved a credible if modest record of reform in an area recently ruled by a planter oligarchy.

But Reconstruction was subject to the faltering will of northern voters, the use of terror and manipulation of racial anxieties by whites in southern states, and the widespread bias in American politics in favor of property owners. When federal enforcement of constitutional and legal positions faltered in the mid-1870s, it became clear that southern elites would gain decisive control over a subordinate labor force. In much of the cotton-growing South, the eventual fate of ex-slaves was to become sharecroppers on lands retained by former slave owners.

If the differentiated treatment of populations—Indians, Mexicans, blacks, plantation owners, loyal and disloyal—was a familiarly imperial way to run a polity, the war was a step toward a more unified, more national United States. During the war, the president and the federal government acquired new powers. A national banking system and standard currency, national taxation, and national conscription were outcomes of the conflict. After the war the states that had rebelled were run as occupied territories under military command. Nowhere was the new power of Washington clearer than in the postwar amendments to the Constitution that outlawed slavery and declared that citizens’ rights could not be denied on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

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