"We Will Be Satisfied with Nothing Less": The African American Struggle for Equal Rights in the North During Reconstruction

230 Pages·2011·0.658 MB·English

by  Hugh Davis

“We Will Be Satisfied With Nothing Less”

“We Will Be Satisfied With
Nothing Less”
The African American Struggle for Equal
Rights in the North during Reconstruction
Hugh Davis

Cornell University Press
Ithaca and London
Copyright © 2011 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or
parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in
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First published 2011 by Cornell University Press
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Davis, Hugh, 1941–
We will be satisfied with nothing less : the African American struggle
for equal rights in the North during Reconstruction / Hugh Davis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8014-5009-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. African Americans—History—1863–1877. 2. African Americans—
Civil rights—History—19th century. 3. Equality before the law—
United States—History—19th century. 4. Reconstruction (U.S. history,
1865–1877) I. Title.
E185.2.D38 2011
973.8—dc23 2011020008
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acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed
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Cloth printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Jean

Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Prologue 1
1. Launching the Equal Rights Movement 6
2. Toward the Fifteenth Amendment 40
3. The Crusade for Equal Access to Public Schools, 1864–1870 72
4. The Equal Rights Struggle in the 1870s 97
5. The Republican Retreat from Reconstruction 133
Epilogue 149
Notes 151
Bibliography 183
Index 203

Preface
My decision to write this book was prompted in part by the fact that the
most important general accounts of Reconstruction published since 1960
have focused almost entirely on the South. Studies by Eric Foner, John
Hope Franklin, Kenneth M. Stampp, Robert Cruden, Rembert W. Patrick,
Allen W. Trelease, and W. R. Brock have provided valuable insights into
the broad social, economic, and political changes that occurred in south-
ern life and how southern blacks helped to shape the contours of change
during the Reconstruction era.1 Yet these works have largely ignored the
northern racial climate and especially African Americans’ struggle for
equal rights throughout the North. For example, Foner’s Reconstruction,
which remains the best treatment of this period, does not even mention
the role of northern blacks in the crusade for full citizenship rights. Like-
wise, Franklin’s Reconstruction after the Civil War and Stampp’s The Era of
Reconstruction, 1865–1877, which dominated the field of Reconstruction
studies until the appearance of Foner’s book in 1988, briefly note that most
northern states had long maintained discriminatory laws against African
x Preface
Americans but make only passing reference to northern blacks’ agitation
for black manhood suffrage and desegregation of the public schools fol-
lowing the Civil War.2
A few scholars have recently argued that, because the historical lit-
erature on the modern civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth cen-
tury has likewise tended to focus on the southern crusade against the Jim
Crow system, it fails to reflect the national scope of racial inequality or the
geographical breadth of the challenges to it. In his Sweet Land of Liberty,
Thomas Sugrue notes that most studies continue to concentrate on the epic
struggle in the South and turn northward only in the mid-late 1960s, when
the urban riots erupted and the black power movement emerged. Sugrue,
as well as Robert O. Self and Matthew J. Countryman, in their studies of
the civil rights cause in Oakland and Philadelphia, respectively, call for
historical accounts that recognize the important role that northern activists
played in what was truly a national movement. While acknowledging that
the southern cause richly deserves attention, they insist that to concentrate
so heavily on the southern movement as the paradigmatic post–World
War II black struggle is a serious distortion.3
Much as Sugrue, Self, and Countryman have argued that the narra-
tive of the mid-twentieth century civil rights cause needs to be reframed,
I believe that historians must similarly expand the geographical reach of
their studies of Reconstruction to include, in a substantive manner, north-
ern racism and the northern black struggle to eradicate racial segrega-
tion and inequality. In her 2009 work on race and reconstruction in the
Upper Midwest, Leslie A. Schwalm has articulated this conviction that
the Reconstruction-era black quest for equal rights—and Reconstruction
itself—was in fact national in scope. Because so little attention has been
devoted to Reconstruction in the North and so much of the historical lit-
erature that has taken northern society into account has concentrated on
how northern whites viewed and participated in the reconstruction of the
South, Schwalm argues, the history of how black freedom and citizenship
were understood and defended in the post–Civil War years is still only
partially chronicled.4
Recent studies by Andrew Deimer and David Quigley have further
clarified my understanding that the northern black equal rights movement
must be placed in a broader national context.5 While warning that one
should not push the parallel between Reconstruction Philadelphia and the