An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865-1918

3. Antislavery Thought from Reconstruction to Reconciliation

3 Antislavery Thought from Reconstruction to Reconciliation I The adamant refusal of white southerners to accept abolition did not go unnoticed in the North. Proslavery propaganda only fueled the resurgence of northern antislavery thought during Reconstruction. Criticisms of slavery and the new forms of quasi-slavery appeared regularly throughout the North in these years. I Just as Appomattox had failed to silence proslavery theorists, abolitionists and other opponents of slavery kept alive their denunciations of the institution up through the 1890s and well into the new century. At that time a group of neoabolitionist historians and writers emerged to integrate antislavery ideas with the tenets of turn-of-the-century national reconciliation and "scientific" history. True, postwar criticisms of slavery lacked the moral intensity and immediacy of the earlier antislavery crusade. Most white northerners , no less imbued with antiblack phobias than their southern brethren, worried little over the human dimensions of neoslavery. They ignored the blatant discrimination of the Black Codes, peonage laws, and later, the legalized degradation so much a part of southern black life in the Age of Jim Crow. Yet some genuinely wished to remove the spirit of slavery from American life once and for all. These neoabolitionists realized just how strong a hold slavery had on southern white racial thought after emancipation. They renewed the slavery crusade to transform the ex-slaves into freedmen in spirit as well as in name. 70 The Old Arguments Anew With slavery removed as a legal institution, the tone as well as the argument of abolitionist rhetoric took on new meaning. As James M. McPherson has suggested, postwar abolitionist missionaries sustained their old interest in slavery. But they adopted a new formula in approaching slavery and the ex-slaves, one that fitted the special needs of blacks in the postemancipation age. Although by 1890 a majority of southern blacks had been born under freedom, their northern friends continued to charge "that the oppressive legacy of bondage still weighed heavily on the older generation and through them on their children." Perceiving the blacks "from a paternalistic, neo-Puritan perspective," they sympathized with them as "benighted, crippled" victims of southern repression. According to McPherson, "most abolitionists considered the freedmen potentially equal to whites but believed that slavery had dwarfed their intellects, degraded their morals, and crippled their ambition ." In their opinion, slavery infantilized and emasculated the blacks. Throughout the postbellum decades, northern teachers, preachers, military men, and politicians did their part to expose slavery's horrors and underscore its vile bequest to blacks.2 During Reconstruction, neoabolitionists seldom missed an opportunity to inform northerners of the degraded condition of the freedmen. But in doing so they reinforced many of the racist images espoused by the new proslavery school. White abolitionists emphasized the deep, seemingly indelible scars left on black people by the peculiar institution. Whereas the new proslavery writers blamed emancipation for the blacks' apparent primitive religion, immorality, thievery, carelessness, and poor agricultural work habits, the new antislavery school attributed such behavior to slavery's malevolent influences. In 1869, for instance, Parker Pillsbury, once a militant disciple of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, identified a single cause for all the woes of the freedmen and the South. "Slavery was the one sole cause," he said, "of the terrible devastation and desolation under which the South reels to-day, and from which it cannot recover in a hundred years under any policy. " Fourteen years later Pillsbury renewed his assault on "the desperate and deadly ... monster," slavery. He called it "the sublimest scourge and curse that ever afflicted the human race." Slavery degraded and brutalized the blacks, wrote Pillsbury. It kept them ignorant and subjected the bondsmen to severe punishments and indiscriminate murder. Slaves lived in "torture-chambers" and were surrounded by the institution's "reeking, shrieking alters, and ghastly paraphernalia of whips, fetters, Antislavery Thought from Reconstruction to Reconciliation 71 blood-hounds and red-hot branding irons." Pillsbury concluded that slavery "was wholesale, legalized, sanctified concubinage, or adultery, from first to last. ,,3 Other abolitionists, old and new, employed the essential strategy "of telling the worst" about life among the freedmen "and blaming it on slavery." In their opinion, "slavery was even worse than abolitionists had realized; its vices persisted into freedom and would require long, hard work to overcome.,,4 Numerous northerners wrote of the deep imprint slavery left on the ways black and white southerners viewed their worlds. In 1877...