Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia

Epilogue: The Voice of the People

epilogue The Voice of the People What lessons can we draw from the defeat of the Readjusters in 1883? Certainly the potency of race as a political issue cannot be denied. As one Richmond party leader concluded in December of that year, ‘‘There is no doubt that every issue was absorbed in the one issue, [the] Race issue.’’1 But as this quotation makes clear, race was never experienced independently of other social relationships. It was always in flux, always connected with the articulation of other social categories. As I have tried to show throughout this book, the implications of race become clear only when they are anchored in specific political, cultural, and economic circumstances. Whether in the post office, on the sidewalk , or in the schoolroom, white and black Virginians worked out the meaning of ‘‘race’’ in local encounters. Grounding racial rhetoric in everyday experience ought to help us avoid treating race as the most transcendent of all social categories. In many ways, the master narrative of postemancipation southern history is true: the cry of ‘‘Nigger!’’ was (and is) always a potent cry in the South. But recognizing this tells us nothing about how race functioned politically in the postwar South. The power of racial rhetoric and the divisiveness of racial politics derived from the everyday experiences of individual white and black southerners, not from any essential political meaning of ‘‘race.’’ Of course, to say this is also to say that the example of Readjuster Virginia cannot be paradigmatic; it cannot (nor can anywhere else) stand as ‘‘the most southern place on earth.’’2 Every southern state had its experience of black-white political coalition after emancipation, and each community can in some sense be said to have inscribed its own particular history of racism. But 155 the problems that a history of the Readjusters confronts are common problems throughout the South, and the methodology I have adopted to approach those problems is in that sense generalizable. By embedding politics within the lived experience of people, by viewingVirginia politics from within its broader culture, I have tried to get at the sense of possibility, of movement, that people on the ground sensed in the late-nineteenth-century South. At the same time, however , I have been conscious of the limits of possibility in postemancipation Virginia, particularly when a new departure required individuals to challenge so much of what supported their own sense of who they were and who they expected to become. In this sense, then, this book is not only about the chronological and cultural space before Jim Crow: it is also about the origins and meaning of Jim Crow. The possibilities for interracial democracy in Virginia seem to have constricted suddenly in 1883. In many ways, the political history of the state for the next twenty years confirms this view. Yet at the time, few Virginians spoke of the coalition loss in catastrophic or celebratory terms. Certainly no one viewed it as permanent. African American Readjusters regarded the electoral defeat as a momentary setback, not the end of an era. The popular vote was close, and ten black Readjuster Republicans won election to the General Assembly.3 Prodded by William Mahone, the U.S. Senate launched an investigation of the contested election. Surveying the damage, R. A. Paul remained optimistic that Virginia blacks would be able to keep afloat ‘‘the bark of equal rights amidst the raging elements of an adverse world.’’4 Virginia’s Democrats appear to have agreed with Paul. In the months that followed, the Democrats implemented the lessons that they had learned from the 1883 campaign and election. Above all, the actions they took in 1884 reveal their apprehension that ideology— specifically, white supremacy—would be insufficient to safeguard the Democratic victory. In an effort to strip the coalition of the compelling social and political issues that sustained it, the Democrats adopted the Readjuster platform. In tacit recognition that the coalition program had become the status quo, the former funders accepted the Riddleberger debt settlement law.5 Nor did the Democrats attempt to repeal other progressive legislation passed during the four years of Readjuster rule. They did not tamper with school appropriations, they did not raise the taxes of farmers or workers, and they made no at156 e p i l o g u e tempt to reestablish the whipping post. Their early experience...