In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

5Nursing the Embers Race and Politics during Reconstruction As the shock of defeat wore into a sense of angry resignation, white Southerners turned to more personal concerns—rebuilding their lives, farms, or businesses, adjusting to the deaths of loved ones and friends, coming to terms with emancipation and new relationships with African Americans . Although these issues of household economy and family relationship might seem personal or individual, collectively they had national salience. As whites rebuilt their lives, they rebuilt their communal identity as well. They had spent four years defining themselves in opposition to the North; now most realized that economic and social control, especially of the freedmen , could best be found by rejoining the Union, preferably on the same terms of political citizenship as before the war. But to demand the rights of political citizenship, specifically voting for white males, was not to reject all aspects of Confederate nationalism. Southern whites wanted to have their cake and eat it, too: they self-consciously held onto aspects of their Confederate past, in the process transforming Southern identity. The politics of Reconstruction were, of course, deeply racialized. White Southerners had lost not only their nation with the collapse of the Confederacy but their slaves as well. That loss had real material consequences for slaveholders as they struggled to rebuild economic lives without slave labor. The loss had more complex psychological resonances as well: slaveholders felt betrayed by their slaves, whom they believed were faithful; whites were deeply angry to see the freedmen living as free people, moving about, asserting their rights; and, finally, whites were frightened that their longprophesied ‘‘race war’’ might come to pass, that their former slaves might rise up in justifiable anger and exact revenge. If slavery, with its attendant associations of security and stability, had seemed essential to the Confederacy , what would replace it in the limbo of Reconstruction? If protection of slavery had been reason to leave the Union, what rationale might inspire reunion? The answer was white supremacy. White supremacy, whether im- plicitly or explicitly, drove much of the ways in which white Southerners negotiated the boundaries of identity during this period of flux.1 By far the greatest shock facing white Southerners, especially members of the elite, came with the end of slavery. Slavery had been the scaffolding upon which whites had constructed their hierarchical view of the world. For generations, whites had used the demons of ‘‘race war’’ and racial mixing, of whites victimized by the same sort of mistreatment they had meted out to their own slaves, as a means of controlling dissent. Fear mingled with venomous anger as well. Emancipation not only freed slaves from forced labor but freed them from the social strictures of false affection and deference as well. Suddenly the mask of paternalism dropped away, and whites were confronted with the reality that their faithful, loving ‘‘servants’’ did not care about them at all, felt no allegiance and no need to stay.2 Letters and diaries during the spring and summer of 1865 are filled with a mixture of self-pity and anger regarding the difficulties whites had in either persuading their slaves to work or finding replacements for those who left. Emma Mordecai’s slaves in Henrico County, Virginia, began asserting themselves right after Richmond fell into Union hands, and she found herself increasingly frustrated by their unwillingness to work or leave. ‘‘To have to submit to the Yankees is bad enough,’’ she complained in mid-April, ‘‘but to submit to negro children is a little worse. They will, I hope, get ready to go soon.’’ Her seeming willingness to have her slaves depart changed quickly a few weeks later, when she discovered them packing: ‘‘They will now begin to find out how easy their life as slaves has been, & to feel the slavery of their freedom.’’ Her bitter response was typical. A Texas woman whined about her challenges, lamenting, ‘‘My baby was sick and I scarcely able to walk and my negroes were all ready to leave me after all my kindnesses to them. It makes me have no kind feeling for them. I have been too indulgent and too kind and thereby the fault.’’ White Southerners continued to deny that blacks had any agency of their own.3 The diary of Staunton, Virginia, newspaper editor Joseph Waddell is full of references to emancipation during May and June 1865. He begins by expressing surprise at the number of African Americans who...

Share