Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South

6. Citizenship and Racial Order in Post–Civil War Atlanta

6 Citizenship and Racial Order in Post–Civil War Atlanta William A. Link In 1866, residents of Atlanta celebrated the Fourth of July in a way that suggested basic tensions about the meaning of citizenship and freedom in the post–Civil War South. Few places in the Confederacy had experienced defeat with more devastating results than Atlanta, which was besieged and destroyed by William T. Sherman’s large army during the summer and fall of 1864. After capturing the city, Sherman expelled civilians and then left, burning much of the downtown district. During Reconstruction, Atlanta became a center of northern intervention but also a symbol of the new racial order. Before the Civil War, Atlantans, like other white southerners, had celebrated the Fourth with what an observer described as “a respect almost amounting to idolatry.” Only a year after the war ended in the spring of 1865, many whites expressed little interest in the holiday. “How changed things are!” one white exclaimed. Another Atlantan commented that if “a Southern gentleman gets drunk [on the Fourth], friends might think he is celebrating the day, and I wish to be above suspicion.” Freed slaves exhibited no such reluctance. They enthusiastically embraced the holiday, flaunting their love of Union with a festive parade in the city’s downtown district. The procession, dominated by black people, offered a statement about how the world was turned upside down. The parade was led by an “African, mounted on a magnificent white charger,” wrote a white reporter , and was followed by a marching band, the parade’s grand marshal, and members of local African American voluntary groups. The marchers clashed with a group of white firemen, also parading, and with a local group of celebrating northern troops. The public presence of Atlanta Citizenship and Racial Order in Post–Civil War Atlanta · 135 blacks dismayed the editor of the Daily Intelligencer, who commented how painfully the celebration contrasted with past Fourths and how a “deep sense of regret” was “keenly felt in witnessing the retrograde movements being made by civilization in our midst.”1 Atlanta’s Fourth of July celebration indicated the conflicting feelings surrounding the meaning of citizenship in the aftermath of the Civil War. Confederate defeat, for whites, meant emasculation. A few miles east of Atlanta, white diarist Thomas Maguire recorded in May 1865 that “the times are out of joint. . . . I fear we will have bad times, but we must take them as they come.” “What a country we have at the present time! We have nothing that we can call our own. The vile Yankees take everything they please and go where they please. We are a powerless people, but by no means a conquered people. I have lost hope of yet gaining our independence.”2 In Atlanta and in the counties surrounding it, whites operated under older, untenable assumptions about citizenship. When Atlanta residents met weeks after Confederate surrender, in June 1865, they urged a “speedy restoration of all political and national relations, the restoration of mutual confidence and friendship, the uninterrupted intercourse of trade and commerce with every section.” White Atlantans wanted to restore “our old position in the list of states, the sovereign and sole conservators of an unbroken and imperishable Union.” But restoration meant, for them, the reconstruction of white supremacy. Whites did not intend to “deprive the freedman of the results of his labor,” the group explained, noting that “the late slaves of the South had the sympathy of all intelligent, Christian , moral Southern men.” They unequivocally opposed enfranchising freedmen, repudiating “every effort to stir up strife among those who had differed upon questions which had produced the late war.” They instead recommended “a forgetfulness of the past.”3 During the months after the end of the war, the pages of the Daily Intelligencer—the city’s leading newspaper—were filled with characterizations of the racial qualities of black people that supposedly made them unsuited for citizenship. The newspaper described freedpeople as living in “idleness, vice and profligacy”—a self-inflicted condition, it believed, as former slaves had deserted the happy homes and kindness their masters offered. The freedpeople’s “persistent idleness,” the Intelligencer concluded , meant that “a life of freedom” was a “curse.” “Nothing short of the strong arm of the law,” it concluded, could “ameliorate their condition.”4 136 · William A. Link “Freedman he may be,” the Intelligencer later observed, “but he will still retain...