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2 racism as opportunity in the reconstruction era In 1861, at the beginning of the Civil War, Harriet Jacobs published an autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The book recounted her unusual experience of slavery; in particular, her ability, as a literate, lightskinned slave with free relatives in town, to resist the sexual advances of her master, Dr. James Norcom, and to seek protection from a local white lawyer (with whom she had two children) before escaping. Sheltered by white as well as black neighbors, Jacobs ended up in a tiny attic crawl space in her grandmother’s house, where she hid for seven years. Born a slave in 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina, Jacobs was well treated until the Norcoms inherited her in 1824. In hiding, Jacobs su√ered most from immobility and exposure to the elements through the thin roof. Her health permanently damaged, she fled to the North in 1842 but remained threatened by the prospect of recapture by Norcom, who pursued her (especially after the Fugitive Slave Law passed in 1850). Jacobs settled in Rochester, New York, where she lived with the Quaker feminist Amy Post and wrote in the antislavery reading room just above the newspaper o≈ces of Frederick Douglass. When her book appeared, with an endorsement from Lydia Maria Child, its abolitionist audience was distracted by war.∞ Jacobs became a relief worker among contraband slaves and remained politically active until her death in 1897. Jacobs’s narrative provides a valuable introduction to race relations in the Reconstruction era, o√ering an acute sociological portrait of the American slavery system and its long-term e√ects on whites and blacks, North and South. Namelessness, invisibility, and constant degradation were racism :: 45 means of conferring upon slaves a condition of ‘‘social death.’’≤ The masterslave bond, as Jacobs describes it, is parasitical as well as perversely intimate: the slave institutionalized as marginal is essential to the social structure that denies her humanity. The disturbing violence of Incidents helps to explain the barriers to real emancipation in the post–Civil War era.≥ As the national horror ‘‘hidden in plain sight,’’ slavery was equally the province of the southerners who controlled it and the northerners who tolerated it. What united them was a virulent belief in black inferiority. Yet Jacobs’s narrative conveys another profound truth: that despite its design, American slavery could not extinguish the humanity of black people . Female slaves strove to mother their o√spring, though masters treated them as commodities or as impediments to the nurture of their own white children. The flagrant abuse of slaves convinced witnesses like Jacobs of the institution’s self-destructiveness. Against such uneconomical barbarism, she portrayed the black pursuit of freedom as a fulfillment of progressive Enlightenment ideals. Jacobs’s own live burial in her ‘‘loophole of retreat’’ is a deliberate embrace of death that issues in her rebirth. While Jacobs ends her narrative free, she remains, like the nation as a whole, haunted by the institution that defined her existence well beyond its o≈cial end. In an essay on Reconstruction for a British audience, ‘‘The Economics of Negro Emancipation in the United States,’’ W. E. B. Du Bois details the measures designed to exploit and extend some of slavery’s most pernicious e√ects. Black subordination at work was systematized to ensure ‘‘a backward step in the organization of labor such as no modern nation would dare to take in the broad daylight of present economic thought.’’ Disenfranchisement, imprisonment for debt and for breaking a contract, the neglect of black education, Jim Crow laws stipulating segregation in public, and the most vicious practice of all, lynching, supported the contradiction of a medieval caste system in a capitalist state.∂ The following pages explore a range of writings—fiction, social treatises, political pamphlets—on the status of black Americans during and after Reconstruction. Popular pseudoscience (by analysts like Frederick Ho√man and William Benjamin Smith) rationalizing blacks’ subordination and anticipating their imminent demise represented one extreme. This was countered by the writings of black leaders and northerners sympathetic to the cause (e.g., Ida B. Wells and Albion Tourgée) who appealed to the liberalminded with graphic depictions of the su√ering and injustice that threatened to make slavery universal in the postslavery era. Had blacks been emancipated, asked Frederick Douglass, only to exchange their enslavement ‘‘to individuals’’ for enslavement to ‘‘the community at large?’’∑ Wells [18.225.117.183] Project MUSE (2024...

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