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As Winthrop D. Jordan has shown in his recent work, the white man’s attitude toward the black did not originate in this country in 1619. The seeds of racial bias were planted even earlier, when Englishman first encountered African. These early English concepts flourished in America, bolstering and shoring up the “peculiar institution,” and finally becoming identified as an inseparable part of it.1 With this in mind, it hardly seems feasible that the Thirteenth Amendment would foster economic , social, or psychological conditions that would guarantee, or even encourage, mixing of the white and black races in the South. A purely legal prelude to civil and social equality simply would not erase the phenomenon of “white over black.” The war was an intermission during, not an alteration of, a situation that had existed since the sixteenth century . The forces for racial polarization are not easily categorized under subheadings of politics, social customs, and the psychological effect of the Civil War. The problem of determining the beginnings of racial separation is a continuing source of controversy among historians. Unquestionably, urban slavery, in both the North and South, gave rise to segregation, but the postwar period is open to interpretation. The major point of departure has been C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow, which places the establishment of segregation in the 1890s.2 Others, ignoring Woodward’s caution, have followed him almost blindly.3 In the last decade, studies by Leon F. Litwack, V. Jacque Voegeli, Richard C. Wade, Joel Williamson, and most recently Roger A. Fischer, have questioned Woodward’s essentially legal argument.4 Racial barriers undoubtedly existed in Texas before and during the Civil War, but they emerged most clearly, not only psychologically but also legally, immediately afterward. In 1865, there was no need for southern apologists versed in the defense of slavery. “Slavery” no longer existed, but the historical, biblical, Six CRISIS IN COLOR Racial Separation in Texas during Reconstruction barry a. crouch and l. j. schultz Crisis in Color 119 scientific, economic, and sociological antebellum polemics were revived. Although the arguments had once served their purpose, the case had to be won anew. The institution had been stripped of its legal support, and the mind of the South bore an acute awareness that the old arguments were undergoing a severe test. Southerners, however, were perfectly confident that their inept black dependents would never rise to the occasion of accepting the responsibility of becoming a “freed man.” To southerners, Texans not excepted, the freedman was simply a poor “nigger,” out of place politically , socially, and economically. In November 1865, when many of the Negroes in Texas did not even know they were free, George W. Paschal expressed the new facts of life in a letter to the Southern Intelligencer: We have lost negro slavery; let us hope that, by prudence, we will have gained the liberty of conscience and the freedom of thought and speech for the white man, which have not been tolerated for a long time. . . . In saying that the negro is free, and that he must be allowed all the rights of a freedman, let none understand me as meaning, that he is thereby entitled to social equality and political equality at the polls. . . . All men who have ever observed the working of society know that even social equality depends upon so many natural and artificial laws that it can not be said to absolutely exist in any community. Everyone must take his social position according to the circumstances of his case. These depend less upon political laws than upon the developments of mind, moral deportment, avocation and taste.5 Paschal then pointed out that suffrage was not an inherent part of liberty. The black man in his new role was to be pitied—and indeed he was. From the halls of Congress to the editorial pages of southern newspapers echoed the statement that he had been better off in his prewar servitude. The charge rang true, and it served as a prologue to the redefinition of the Negro’s role in postwar southern society. The Black Codes were the supposed underwriters of the new freedom. One historian contends that the South looked at the postwar codes “as vital protection for their women and children, the only practical method of inducing the freed Negro to support himself, and a generous softening of prewar legal controls of the free Negro.”6 A brief glance at any of...

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