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

4. The Nationalist Historians and the Continuance of the Abolitionist Tradition

4 The Nationalist Historians and the Continuance of the Abolitionist Tradition As the first three chapters have argued, during the post-Civil War decades black slavery remained a salient metaphor for the ways in which white Americans, especially southerners, viewed race relations. Whites could not free themselves from viewing blacks as slavelike figures. They longed for the better days "before the war" when the inferior, subordinate status of the black man was codified both de jure and de facto. Black slavery cropped up repeatedly as a comparative model in late nineteenth-century discussions of southern black labor and racial control. It ran like a leitmotif through postbellum conversations on the "Negro problem." Planters and politicians, reformers and racists, focused on slavery. To be sure, few whites, even the most rabid Negrophobes , imagined that reenslavement was feasible. Yet slavery served as a constant, a touchstone for white southerners as they pondered such solutions to the race question as colonization or mass deportation.! Though emancipation had ended slavery as a legal entity once and for all, slavery as an idea lingered in American racial thought from Appomattox to Versailles. In the 1890s white southerners put theory into practice, reestablishing hegemony over blacks in their region by legal, political, and terrorist means. The Jim Crow legislation of these years provided whites with what Alan F. Westin described as "a paler substitute for the chattel ownership" denied them by the Thirteenth Amendment. Outraged by the new forms of racial oppression under which blacks lived and labored, Supreme Court Justice John Marshall 104 The Formative Period of American Slave Historiography Harlan in 1896 condemned segregation as itself a form of quasi-slavery. A decade later he argued that proscriptions on black laborers reinstituted "the badges and incidents of slavery.,,2 Slavery as a metaphor represented more than a romantic look backward for southern apologists, or a pole from which northern critics could wave the bloody shirt. Antebellum slavery symbolized a tried and true mode of racial control. The assertiveness of postwar blacks-their unflagging demands for land, schools, the ballot, participation in politics, equal treatment---{;onvinced white conservatives of the necessity of keeping their former bondsmen in their place. Many white southerners remained convinced that some variant of the old institution held the key to racial order in the New South. I It was within this context that slavery assumed another important role in American thought in these years. In the late nineteenth century slavery gradually emerged as a leading topic of historical inquiry. Few topics received as much attention from professional as well as amateur historians . Writing in 1880, an anonymous reviewer in the Nation observed that now "Slavery takes its tum with other fossil remains in adorning our cabinets of curiosity and of science, and in being studied under the microscope." The avalanche of scholarship on slavery caused another reviewer in 1901 to remark how "unusually fertile" had been the last decade of the century in works about slavery. Ten years later, so much had been written on the subject that William T. Laprade, America's first student of slave historiography, marveled at the preoccupation among historians with the topic. "Of making many books on American slavery there does not seem to be any prospect of an end in the immediate future," he explained. Laprade went on to note, however, that in spite of "the perennial interest which seems to attach to the subject ... some of the most fundamental questions with regard to slavery in America stilI await authoritative answers.,,3 Who were these pioneer students of the peculiar institution? And why did they choose to study slavery? The earliest historians to examine slavery belonged to what Stanley M. Elkins has termed the Nationalist school of historians of slavery. This group of historians, composed of both amateurs and German-trained Ph.D. 's, first appeared in 1876 with the publication of Hermann Eduard von Holst's Constitutional and Po- The Nationalist Historians and the Abolitionist Tradition 105 litical History ofthe United States. In subsequent years the histories of Holst, James Schouler, John Bach McMaster, James Ford Rhodes, and Albert Bushnell Hart contributed important neoabolitionist interpretations of slavery. Among American historians, Rhodes became recognized as the first real authority on slavery. Consequently his background and his contribution on the peculiar institution deserve the most detailed assessment. Though professing objectivity and scholarly rigor, Rhodes and these other historians actually disseminated a partisan, antislavery...