Restricting Black Mobility as a Key Function of Racial Control in Post-Emancipation Societies

Reconstruction is still with us. Recent events such as the NAACP’s travel advisory warning black Americans to be cautious in Missouri and the events that erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, have clearly shown that the United States has yet to face reconstruction over 150 years after the Civil War outlawed race-based slavery.” For historians, “Reconstruction” refers to the United States in the years following the Civil War. What if, however, the term “reconstruction” were to be unhooked from that specific time period and instead used to describe a society in flux after the end of slavery? It could then mean something less temporally specific but more thematically unified—the period of confusion and chaos that followed in the wake of American emancipation. It would go from a capital R time period to a lower-case r descriptor of promises of freedom yet to be fulfilled throughout the United States. Instead of focusing on both regions from 1866 to 1877, then, studies of reconstruction would start in the northern states in the early to mid-1800s as gradual emancipation slowly took hold and in the southern states after slavery abruptly ended in the wake of the Civil War. Northern reconstruction, from this angle, began before southern reconstruction and was complicated by the continued existence of slavery in half of the country. In this broad sense, reconstruction continues today. The racism that developed and grew alongside slavery has yet to die away.¹

Without necessarily using the term “reconstruction,” many important works on the antebellum North examine this phenomenon. The very efforts of former slaves to make their way after generations of bondage inspired the efforts of their white neighbors to control them. Works that fall into the category of “whiteness studies” have long done this from a theoretical perspective, and studies of such topics as Northern support for African colonization, the abolition and women’s movements, and social histories of the lives of free blacks have created, intentionally or not, the foundation for a better understanding of the reconstructing North.

Segregation and white vigilantism during reconstruction in North and South focused on restricting black mobility. Most recently, historians have begun to pay closer attention to the role of mobility during this period of northern reconstruction, a time of quasi-freedom that followed northern emancipation but overlapped southern slavery. These studies present a complex picture of a nation in which northern blacks were no longer constricted by legal bondage but faced the constant efforts of whites to curtail their newfound freedom as much as possible. At the same time southern blacks, some of whom were free but most of whom remained enslaved, longed for, and sometimes found, the right moment to head North and claim even the limited freedom available there. The picture that emerges reveals similarities between the post-emancipation societies of the North and the South in varying degrees of chaos, racism, and attempts at social control.

Three recent works that deal, directly or indirectly, with black mobility in the northern reconstruction of the early to mid-1800s collectively illustrate this process. Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Underground Railroad, is about more than slavery and the clandestine movement involved in escaping bondage. It also encourages readers to blur temporal lines and consider the question asked by whites after emancipation: what to do with the freedpersons.² Though technically set in the South and Midwest before the Civil War, Whitehead includes scenes that clearly draw from a later period of US history by having his main character travel to Upper South states that have emancipated their slaves and are in the process of deciding what to do...