The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice by Wendell Berry

Author:Wendell Berry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shoemaker & Company
Published: 2022-06-14T23:09:52+00:00

The antislavery people of the North could not have wished to free the slaves into no more than sharecropping and wage work in subservience to white landlords. But who was going to assume responsibility for so many people newly set free in circumstances so unkind and so unsettled? Here it is necessary to remember that the black people of the South were not entirely destitute and helpless. They knew the country. They knew how to work, how to make do and get by. They knew how to hunt and fish and to use the wild provender of the woods and fields. And they had other great cultural resources that they had laid up for themselves. But as they themselves thought, like the landless poor white farmers they needed a way to acquire small farms for themselves. With or without farms of their own, they needed (like their white counterparts) to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. They needed economic power, such as an asking price for their work or their crops. They needed to be helped into viable economic, social, and political citizenship.

So much help obviously was not forthcoming from the white people of the South, and so it was attempted for a while by the people of the North. This was Reconstruction. There is no need here to go into the details of that project, which would require a better historian than I am. For my purposes here, I need only to notice that Reconstruction was carried out mainly by people of goodwill, that it had the proper (and legal) purpose of giving substance and meaning to emancipation, that it lasted about a dozen years, and that it failed.

It failed because it was another project of the North to be enacted in the South. The two sections were still divided and at cross-purposes, as they had been in the war and long before it. The people of the North and the people of the South were still strangers to each other, and they did not like each other. People who think of the Civil War as a conflict purely of good against evil seem much inclined to think that after the war the South should have recognized the justice of its defeat, repented of the sins of racism and slavery, accepted correction, and done the right thing by the free black people. This certainly is reasonable, but it is psychologically uncouth. It probably shows a deficiency of self-­knowledge, for it overlooks some fundamentals of human nature: People who are at home in their own country do not like to be invaded; people do not like to be beaten, especially when their defeat involves the deaths of kin and friends; people do not like to be visited by outsiders who have come to improve their politics and correct their morals. If my neighbor became my sworn enemy because of my sinful behavior, wounded me severely, burnt my house and barns, drove off my livestock, stole my horses and my crops, and

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