Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History

7 Colors

7 Colors I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and rolling hills lie like passioned women wanton with harvest. And there in the King’s Highway sat and sits a figure veiled and bowed, by which the traveller’s footsteps hasten as they go. On the tainted air broods fear. Three centuries’ thought has been the raising and unveiling of that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and the deed. The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line. —W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk From the time the first African stepped onto the shores of North America, probably early in the sixteenth century with Spanish explorers, the status of blacks posed a dilemma for European transplants. The relationship between black and white (and red during the relatively brief time that Indians composed a sizeable proportion of the southern population) was always a work in progress. Whites clearly viewed blacks as inferior, but then the English perceived the Irish as less than human. Most Africans arrived in North America in chains, a state of being not calculated to elicit feelings of equality on the part of whites. Slavery, in fact, demanded that whites rationalize the holding of human property, a condition that contradicted both the Enlightenment sentiment of the late eighteenth century and the growth of evangelical Protestantism in the early nineteenth century. Slavery also denied the basis of the American nation, that all men are created equal and that government is derived from the consent of the governed. 187 188 Still Fighting the Civil War The rationalization went something like this: slavery is a civilizing force; without slavery Africans would revert to the barbarism from which they came; under slavery, the African received the Christian religion, which saved his soul and ensured his place in heaven; and slavery allowed white southerners to enjoy unprecedented economic and personal freedom. The status of the slave was conveniently and irrevocably linked to the status of the white, and one could not enjoy a superior status in southern society without the subjugation of the other. The master, though, did not exercise absolute power. Slavery involved some tacit negotiation between master and slave; abject cruelty did not generate a positive work ethic. The most efficient plantations were those that balanced terror with paternalism: use the whip sparingly but strategically, reward bondsmen with time off, permit them to sell homegrown produce at the local market and keep the profits, and bestow gifts at holidays and other special occasions. The master’s ability to sell the slave loomed as the slave’s greatest terror. The domestic slave trade broke hearts and families; a slave could expect to be sold at least once during his lifetime. Circumstances such as a sudden economic reverse, the division of an estate among heirs, or migration to another state undermined even the best-intentioned master’s resolve never to sunder families. Especially rebellious slaves, runaways, and chronic malingerers could also expect to be sold. The threat of the auction block weighed more heavily on Africans than the threat of the lash. No anguish was more heartrending than that of a mother whose child was sold away from her. ‘‘Oh, my heart was too full!’’ recalled Charity Bowery on being told that her boy, Richard, was sold. ‘‘[My mistress] had sent me away on an errand, because she didn’t want to be troubled with our cries. I hadn’t any chance to see my poor boy. I shall never see my poor boy. I shall never see him again in this world. My heart felt as if it was under a great load.’’1 At the end of the Civil War, Union soldiers in the occupied South told of roads clogged with former slaves streaming in both directions. Observers initially attributed the migration to a wanderlust born of slavery’s confinement ; in fact, the travelers were simply looking for their lost families, for children sold away unexpectedly, for fathers, mothers, husbands, and wives taken to the Deep South to work on plantations or in towns and maybe to start new families, or grieve forever for the ones they had left behind. As heartbreaking as such occurrences were—and they were more common than not—slaves could do little overtly to combat the system. They recog- Colors...