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The Militant South, 1800-1861 PDF

335 Pages·2002·7.979 MB·English
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THE MILITANT SOUTH THE M I L I T A N T SOUTH 1 8 0 0 - 1 8 6 1 John Hope Franklin THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts (g) Copyright 1956 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College Second Printing, with a New Preface, 1970 Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 56-10160 SBN 674-57450-8 Printed in the United States of America MOZELLA For ANNE BUCK (In Memoriam) Preface to the Second Printing When I began to do research for The Militant South more than twenty years ago, I was searching for answers to the question of why the South invariably reacted violently to crisis situations. I had in mind, of course, her responses to her many difficulties during the two generations preceding the Civil War. I was not unmindful, however, of the possible illumination that such answers might provide for much later, even recent, periods in Southern history. I made reference to that possibility in the original preface. Meanwhile, I dis­ claimed for the South any monopoly on bellicosity; and the history of violence in the country as a whole makes it abun­ dantly clear how pervasive the tradition of violence has been. If America in general has been a land of violence, it was the South that institutionalized it and bestowed on it an aura of respectability. It was a part of the section’s social and cul­ tural heritage, sanctified by such time-honored institutions as the code duello, the militia muster, the military academy, the ring tournament, and the lynching party. Thus, it could hardly have been regarded as entirely uncivilized. And if one could find such institutions and practices in other parts of the country — as, indeed, one could — they could hardly be branded as peculiarly Southern. But the role of the South in developing, maintaining, and commending such activities has been a large one. Throughout their history, many Southerners have continued to invoke the rule of personal judgment as to what the law was, long after the raw frontier had passed their region by. In no other part of the country was it so necessary that every white man decide for himself whether and how the law applied to him as in the region where it was so important to make certain that the blacks should not enjoy equal pro­ tection of the laws. Long after the duels, the military academies, and the ring tournaments had become rather pleasant and innocuous relics of a distant past, the South’s fundamental attitude toward the law — especially where the former slaves were concerned — remained essentially what it had been before the Civil War. And an important manifestation of that attitude was the mil­ itant defiance of unpopular law, whether enacted by a legis­ lature or made by a judge. No other section of the country had viii PREFACE TO THE SECOND PRINTING ever responded so violently to legislation as the Southern whites responded to the laws passed by Congress and the state assemblies between 1867 and 1875. At no other time in the nation’s history was the judgment of the law based so much on who the lawmakers were rather than on what the laws were. And the antipathy toward the Reconstruction law­ makers and their supporters revitalized and made even more respectable the militance that had been a part of the ante­ bellum tradition. Keeping this tradition alive and making it a part of the apparatus for maintaining white supremacy became a way of life in the South. Indeed, as Ulrich B. Phillips pointed out, it became the “central theme of Southern history.” The man, white or black, who challenged what came to be regarded as the racial orthodoxy of the South learned by bitter experience what it cost to make the challenge. In 1898 it would cost Alex Manly, the Negro editor of Wilmington, North Caro­ lina, his career as an editor, and it would cost four hundred of his fellow blacks any semblance of legal rights, including the right to remain in their homes. In 1954 it would cost the United States Supreme Court most of the respect and prestige it enjoyed in the South, when numerous prominent white Southerners, including a hundred Southern Congressmen, denounced bitterly the highest tribunal in the country for declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional. In 1956 it would cost Nat “King” Cole bodily harm and untold indignities in Birmingham, presumably because of his virtu­ osity as a pianist and singer, even before an all-white audi­ ence. When they were unsuccessful in securing their rights under the Constitution, Negro Americans took a page from the white Southerners’ book and began to defy local segregation laws and discriminatory practices. In time, the militant de­ fiance of the law that was as old as the South itself became the watchword and practice of Southern blacks. Sit-ins and freedom rides and militant demonstrations were the answers that Negroes gave to the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citi­ zens Councils who were determined to maintain segregation at all costs. The South had reaped a whirlwind, resulting in a breakdown of respect for law among Negro Americans not unlike that which had traditionally characterized the atti­ tudes of Southern whites toward racial laws. PREFACE TO THE SECOND PRINTING ix If the white people of the South could be militant in the defiance of the law and if the most submerged element of the population could take the law into its own hands to redress ancient grievances, it is not surprising that others were in­ spired to do likewise. The White Citizens Councils and the Minute Men of the present day are determined to protect the nation — by violence, if necessary — from its own racial her­ etics and political subverters. The “higher law” adherents among the student and racial activists are equally determined to press the nation into an acceptance of their own objec­ tives — within the law if possible, outside the law if necessary. Meanwhile, a hundred groups, large and small, have taken up one cause or another, and their general posture can best be described as a fierce determination to achieve their ob­ jectives, with or without the sanction of the law. The climate has encouraged not only the hording of arms but a resort to their use. The result has been a general escalation of violence, tragically dramatized in the assassination, in recent years, of a President of the United States, a distinguished civil rights leader, and a United States Senator. Surely the South cannot be held responsible for these un­ happy consequences of militancy and violence. But when the nation, even on the frontier, was groping toward an existence under the rule of law, the South contributed heavily to the idea that law could be successfully defied. In making heroes out of those who, on the basis of personal judgment, de­ cided that a law should be disregarded or defied, it helped to preserve a tradition that lends respectability to the open flaunting of the law. The way in which that tradition de­ veloped and the manner in which it influenced later sectional and national history would seem to make the subject of this work germane to an effort to understand the condition of our society today. JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN September 1, 1969 Preface to the First Printing When the Union fell apart in 1861, it was not possible for anyone to answer all the questions that arose in the troubled minds of Americans regarding that catastrophe. In searching for an explanation of the tragic dissolution, thoughtful ob­ servers looked at the political and philosophical bases of the nation’s structure. They found that the controversial ques­ tion of the autonomy of the states and the concept of liberty that had evolved offered a partial answer to the question. They examined the economic order and realized that be­ tween a commercial-industrial section and one that was pre­ dominantly agricultural there was basis for conflict. They looked into the structure of society in the two sections and concluded that there were inherent conflicts between that committed to the view that universal freedom was the proper foundation for improving the social order and the other that insisted that its half-free, half-slave society needed only to be left alone. Questions of how and why the war came have continued to baffle the minds of men in the generations since 1861. A notable lack of agreement, except on the point of the almost hopeless complexity, and the remarkable accumulation of details regarding the course of events prior to 1861 have been the most impressive results. While considerable attention has been given to the social, cultural, and psychological conditions of the South before 1861, certain aspects are yet incomplete. In the ante-bellum period, large numbers of observers, including Southerners,

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