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114 4 Ethnic and Racial Nationalism Race and ethnicity were another key framework in which southern whites, freedpeople, and Irish Americans sought a collective identity and struggled for political self-determination. The race question—the place of newly emancipated black men and women in American civic and social life—lay at the heart of Reconstruction. It provided the main rationale for the emergence of the Union Leagues and Ku Klux Klan in the South. Ethnicity also became an increasing concern in the period after the Civil War. The enormous influx of foreign immigrants during the antebellum period continued in the Civil War years as the Irish came to the eastern seaboard and Chinese immigrants streamed into California. If the Civil War provided visible evidence of the commitment of Irish immigrants to the Union cause, events like the New York City Draft Riots of 1863 raised serious questions in the minds of some white Americans about the integration of Irish Americans into the political life of the nation. The Chinese immigrants who came to California during the Gold Rush continued to be welcomed as railroad laborers, yet by 1870 became the targets of an ultimately successful exclusionary movement backed by white organized labor. The salience of race and ethnicity in American life after the Civil War is also evident with Native Americans . In the rapidly expanding West, hostilities between white settlers and Plains Indians increasingly occupied the attention of a government and an army already burdened with the process of Reconstruction in the South. Race and ethnicity even surfaced in postwar foreign affairs. Expansion into the Caribbean and Pacific were raising questions about the assimilation of nonwhites into American society.1 1. David Herbert Donald does a nice job of fitting the Chinese exclusionary movement into the context of Reconstruction. Liberty and Union (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1978), 201–202. See also Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti- Ethnic and Racial Nationalism 115 Fenians, southern whites, and African Americans in the South clearly saw themselves in ethnic or racial terms. Fenian leader John O’Neil believed there were “nationalities with marked and ineffaceable characteristics, distinguishing them from those by which they were surrounded.” The Irish Nationalist maintained that “the Irish race, after centuries of foreign rule, is still a distinct people.” A black newspaper editor in Georgia spoke of the “Anglo-African,” while another in New Orleans described his people as “a race so ancient, so well connected, and so intimately associated with the leading events in universal history.” Southern whites spoke naturally about a biracial South. For these reasons , it might be reasonable to look for manifestations of ethnic nationalism among southern whites, freedpeople, and Irish American Fenians. According to social scientists, ethnic nationalism is often manifested by an awareness of the separate origins and distinctive characteristics of a given people. The construction of a functional history, similar to what historian Eric Hobsbawm has termed the “invention of tradition,” also helps in the creation of nationalist identity based in ethnic terms. These criteria provide useful points of entry for studying these three groups.2 Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971), and Frederick Randolph, “Chinamen in Yankeedom: Anti-Unionism in Massachusetts in 1870,” American Historical Review 53 (October 1947): 1–29. On the acquisition of Cuba, see Allan Nevins, Hamilton Fish: An Inner History of the Grant Administration (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1936), chapter 9. In an essay that should be better known to historians, C. Vann Woodward suggests the value of looking at Native Americans in the context of the Reconstruction South (see New York Review of Books, May 12, 1988, 24). 2. Proceedings of the Senate and House of Representatives of the Fenian Brotherhood, in Joint Convention, at Philadelphia, PA, November 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 & 29, 1868 (New York: D. W. Lee, 1868), 12; Irish Nationalist, January, 23, 1873; Colored American, September 19, 1868; Free South, February 15, 1868. See also Irish Citizen, October 19, 1867. For some examples of southern white thinking on race, to be explored in much greater detail in the rest of this chapter, see the Arkansas State Gazette, November 25, 1865, and the Raleigh Sentinel, March 27, 1867. According to one student of nationalism, “The faithful must be given a history; they must be endowed with a foundation charter; their identity and destiny must be fixed; and their decline from past grandeur and present fortunes must be explained ” (Anthony D. Smith, “The...

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