Apocalypse and the Millennium in the American Civil War Era

9. A Sharecropper’s Millennium: Land and the Perils of Forgiveness in Post–Civil War South Carolina

175 9 A SHARECROPPER’S MILLENNIUM Land and the Perils of Forgiveness in Post–Civil War South Carolina Scott Nesbit F rancis L. Cardozo read the hand of God on the Lowcountry landscape. “Providence,”he told his fellow delegates in South Carolina’s 1868 Constitutional Convention, “has not only smiled upon every effort for abolishing ” the “hideous form” of plantation slavery. Providence also “has given unmistakable signs of disapprobation” wherever large plantation holdings continued, by “blasting the cotton crops in that part of the country.” Providence seemed to be reshaping the state’s agricultural and cadastral map before his eyes, replacing staple production with fields of grain and replacing extensive plantations “of no service to the owner or anybody else” with a “system of small farms, by which not only my race, but the poor whites and ninetynine hundredths of the other thousands will be benefitted.” Cardozo called upon his colleagues to participate in this divine work by allowing large debts taken out during the war to be collected, action that could force hundreds of large, indebted planters into forfeiture.1 By invoking a providential reading of the present and recent past, Cardozo was placing the convention’s actions in the middle of what historian Laurie Maffly-Kipp has called “an eschatological saga,” a narrative that interprets the community’s past, present, and future together by invoking the unfolding of God’s judgment and millennial kingdom in the world. Historians have debated the meanings of these narratives and how African Americans employed them in the political contexts of Reconstruction. Maffly-Kipp has emphasized the extent to which black millennial innovations created “collective stories” that placed the black past and destiny in world-historical context. Timothy Fulop has suggested that these black millennial stories developed in three ways: a 176 Scott Nesbit cultural millennialism that emphasized the role of the United States as a redeemer nation, a millennial Ethiopianism that posited a pan-African future, and a progressive millennialism that emphasized the role of the church, missions , and reform in giving birth to the millennium on earth. Matthew Harper has recently distinguished between two biblical narratives in the political and religious thought of North Carolina blacks: the Jubilee, a narrative imploring southern blacks to remain on the land, and the Exodus, a narrative that fit with the vibrant emigrationist politics of the post-Reconstruction period.This historiography has brought to light the constant pull in black thought between envisioning a South where blacks might find their own land and displacing their hopes for land elsewhere. Yet black hopes for a southern millennium in many accounts remain simply hopes, central to black religious thought yet peripheral to Reconstruction political debates and disconnected from mechanisms for enacting political and economic change.2 Black Christians put the millennium at the center of the debate on land policy. As historians Michael Walzer and Eddie Glaude Jr. have argued, by the close of the Civil War African Americans had produced a long tradition of millennial political thought dependent upon the Exodus narratives. Freedpeople participated in the Exodus story in what ways they could. Some appealed to federal authorities for the right to work their own land independent of whites. If these appeals failed, some had little recourse within the Reconstruction political system. Yet blacks in South Carolina were not simply dependent on congressional action for land redistribution; they held political control of state legislative bodies that had the power to enact redistributive policies.Black politicians debated how they would reshape the southern landscape in providential and millennial terms. In doing so, they confronted the ways in which black millennial narratives—whether cultural,Ethiopian,or progressive,and whether narrated as the Jubilee or an Exodus—played out in space, especially in debates over lowcountry landholding patterns and in how (and whether) blacks should live in proximity to former slaveholders.3 Though many black Carolinians could see God’s hand in their past, present , and future, they offered conflicting solutions to the spatial problem of living and laboring near powerful whites.The problem was complex and one that many believed must be solved in order to enact God’s kingdom after slavery. Black and white southerners still called each other neighbors. Continued proximity in emancipation called for new ways of relating. Emancipation, many black Christians believed, had replaced hierarchical bonds of subservience with 177 A Sharecropper’s Millennium new relations.Some blacks and a number of...