-
Chapter V: The Proslavery Argument in a World Without Slavery
- Louisiana State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
V / The Proslavery Argument in a World Without Slavery S OUTHERN whites were obsessed with race in the months after Appomattox . "Everybody talks about the negro at all hours of the day, and under all circumstances," reported a Boston journalist as he traveled through the South. "Let conversation begin where it will, it ends with Sambo." As an Ohio school teacher, arriving in Mississippi in late 1865 also discovered, in the hotels, railroads, and riverboats, wherever whites gathered, "the nigger is the everlasting theme & the general complaint is they won't work."' The public pronouncements of white southerners were usually sober calls for a good faith attempt to work with free labor, coupled with warnings that the success of such an "experiment" was entirely dependent upon the leeway given to white southerners in working through this difficult period of readjustment. Privately, the observations of white southerners, particularly those tied to the old slave plantation economy, was a melange of fear, uncertainty, and deep pessimism, leavened only occasionally by a grudging and guarded optimism. Underlying the assumptions of white southerners was their all-pervasive i. Sidney Andrews, The South Since the War at Shown by Fourteen Weeks of Travel and ObservationinGeorgia and theCarolina} (Boston, 1866),93;J. P.Bardwellto Rev.M. F.Strieby, November 20, 1865, in AMA, Mississippi, Reel i. A number of historians have attempted to weigh the complex and ambivalent response of whites to the emancipated slave, notably James L. Roark in Masters Without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War andReconstruction (New York, 1977). Leon Litwack, while attempting to shift the focus from white to black, also has much to sayabout the way in which whites responded to emancipation.See Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1979). 147 148 / When the War Was Over belief in the fixed and immutable racial inferiority of blacks. Few whites in the region felt the necessity of elaborating upon these racial convictions; they were simply accepted like the weather or the existence of God. Faced with the necessity of educating occupiers whom they believed hopelessly naive, however, southern journalists and political leaders returned again to the well-worn antebellum "evidence" that had buttressed their proslavery arguments. Only now it was black subserviencerather than outright slavery that was to be justified with religious rhetoric ("So long as the Scriptures remain true and God's word immutable, so long must the sons of Ham serve the sons ofJapeth"); with pseudoscientific evidence ("The cerebral formation of the negro is shown by chemical analysis to be inferior in every respect to that of the white man"), and the "manifest lessons of history " ("The negro and other inferior races have never, not even under the most favorable circumstances, been capable of self-government or of mastering the most primitive forces of civilization").2 When General O. O. Howard gave a lengthy speech to a gathering of freedmen in a New Orleans theater in Novemberof 1865, he warned of the hard times ahead, but he held out the ultimate promise of "racial advancement and development" through hard work, education, and the "moral uplift " of supportive whites. To this Josiah Nott replied with scorn in an article excerpted in more than twenty southern newspapers. Howard's faith in education and self-improvement was a "phantasmagoria," claimed the Mobile physician, "ethnologist," and prewar exponentof scientific racism. The cranial capacity of the Negro was "nine cubic inches less than that of the white man," argued Nott, and the implications were obvious. To talk about "improving the race" was "manifestly absurd." Under any conditions —well paid or ill paid, coddled or abused—the results were inevitable . The Negro could perform only the simplest, most basic physical tasks. What was equally critical, he had "no ambition of bettering his condition . He only cares to provide for his momentary wants." Shiftless, improvident , unreliable, he could not be made to observe the validity of a written or moral contract "further than is compatable with momentarycaprice ." What was perhaps most depressing was the fact that the intellectual capacity of the race was "fixed and immutable, having been the same for the past 5,000 years." To talk about "improving the race" was a logical contradiction.3 9. New Orleans Times, November 7, 1865; Josiah Nott, "The Problem of the Black Races," DR, and ser., (1866), a8i-8a. 3. New Orleans Times, November 7, 1865. See also Theodore Brantner Wilson's chapter, "Slavery and the Free Negro: The Emergenceof an...