Racism, Slavery And The Civil War
Outrage over the senseless murders of nine members of an African-American church in Charleston, S.C., has led to calls for the removal of the confederate battle flag from public buildings; statues commemorating southern heroes of the Civil War; and even the banning of classic movies such as Gone With the Wind that romanticize the antebellum South.
In short, some people want to eliminate all symbols of pride in the Confederacy.
But linking racism, which is a continuing problem in the United States, to slavery and the South is both misdirected and counterproductive.
I’m a Yankee transplant. I grew up in Michigan, although I’ve spent most of my adult life south of the Mason-Dixon line.
The high school I attended had 3,000 students; one was black, an exchange student from Africa. It was located in an industrial city with a number of auto factories and a sizable black population. But the blacks lived on the east side of the river, and my high school was on the west side.
No law forbade blacks from living on the west side, but they couldn’t. There was de facto segregation. No bank would loan money to a black to buy a home on the west side; no real estate agent would show them property there; and no property owner would sell to a black buyer.
The same applied to labor markets and social organizations.
I have always hated hypocrisy, and it seems to me that the North is full of it when it comes to race relations and the South. If you think northern cities are havens from racial prejudice and discrimination, you are sadly mistaken. My experience has been that race relations are better in the South than in the North, possibly because the South has had to face up to the issue and deal with it, while the North, like alcoholics who refuse to admit they have a problem, has been in denial and swept the issue under the rug.
The response of the residents of Charleston — black and white — following the tragic church shooting is a reflection of Southern progress. Would the reaction have been the same if the shooting had occurred in Chicago, Detroit, New York or Baltimore?
It’s a mistake to act as if the South invented slavery. Slavery has been with us since time immemorial. And it’s not completely correct to say that the Civil War was fought to end slavery. If anything, it was Christian morality and capitalism, with its reliance on labor markets where workers are hired and paid wages, that finally put an end to slavery.
Slavery was a major issue in the war — especially for the South, where plantation agriculture was the backbone of their economy. But the motives of the North were less clear. There were outspoken abolitionists who believed human equality extended to all races, especially among Quakers and evangelical Christians. But they were not very significant in the political arena.
Far more influential were those who wanted to ban slavery because they did not want to compete in the marketplace with cheap slave labor. This is similar to the situation that exists today, when there are those who want to close our borders to keep out cheap immigrant labor.
The motive of the North wasn’t based on an enlightened understanding of the dignity of mankind. When northern states outlawed slavery, the slaves were often not freed. Rather, their owners were given a year in which to sell them to someone in a state where slavery was legal.
When Abraham Lincoln ran for president in 1860, he didn’t oppose slavery in the South; he only opposed the expansion of slavery to states that might enter the union in the future. This was a critical issue because it threatened the delicate balance of power in the Senate between the industrial North and the agrarian South.
The North wanted high tariffs to protect its industries from European manufactured goods. But when the tariffs were imposed, the Europeans retaliated by imposing restrictions on U.S. exports, which were primarily agricultural products from the South. Thus, the South was punished for the North’s protectionism.
But regardless of the role slavery played as cause of the Civil War, it’s wrong to suggest that if the South had won, blacks would still be in chains today. Most economic historians agree that slavery was a doomed form of agricultural production destined to be replaced in a few decades by farm machinery, such as combines, harvesters and tractors that could perform the backbreaking work of plantation slaves much more quickly, efficiently and for less cost.
The war may have ended slavery, but it did not end racial discrimination and bigotry. The promise of freedom and (implied) equality for African-Americans turned out to be hollow. The emancipated slaves were free to go … but where? When they migrated north, they were not met by the open arms of abolitionists, but by hostility and opposition from white-only labor unions that relegated blacks to the most menial jobs and confined them to neighborhoods that soon became rat-infested slums full of drug dealers, prostitution and illegal gambling dens. Illegal activities flourished in these black ghettos because the police were more concerned with preventing crime from spreading to white neighborhoods than protecting life and property in black neighborhoods. This was not “the American Dream,” but it was often the black reality.
When the Civil War ended, Washington quickly turned its eyes to the West and forgot about reconstruction in the South. The military heroes of the supposedly enlightened North, like General George Custer, were busy driving Native Americans onto reservations so their land could be open for Northern settlers. (Confederate veterans were not eligible for homestead grants.) Meanwhile, the Jim Crow laws in the South became a distraction to fulfilling America’s “manifest destiny.” After all, the de-jour segregation of the South wasn’t all that much different from the de-facto segregation in the North.
In my opinion, it’s time we set aside the Hollywood stereotypes of fat, bigoted Southern sheriffs and beer-drinking rednecks with double-digit IQs and deal with the real racial issues in our nation. The Southerners I know are proud of their culture and the courageous fight the underdog Confederacy put up against “Northern Aggression.” None long for the return of slavery or thinks slavery was somehow morally justified.
I get razzed all the time for being a D@#& Yankee, even by my wife, but I don’t take it seriously. Let’s all celebrate our heritage and focus on what binds us together as Americans, and not dwell on issues from 150 years ago, when social beliefs and morality were vastly different from today.
Comments are closed.