An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865-1918

2. Reconstruction and the Fashioning of the New Proslavery Argument

2 Reconstruction and the Fashioning of the New Proslavery Argument I The old proslavery argument found a new home in the reconstructed South. While few postbellum writers publicly endorsed reenslavement, during Reconstruction many nevertheless revived the essential ingredients of the old proslavery argument. Harkening back to antebellum days, proslavery theorists relied on one old standby after another to defend southern slavery. Slavery's new apologists, for example, repeatedly denied charges that masters wantonly sold their blacks. Slave sales, they argued, resulted either from some serious fault in the bondsman or from the master's benign wish to reunite a slave family. Another weapon in the proslavery arsenal was the loyalty of the slaves themselves during the Civil War. If they had been mistreated, reasoned Cornelia P. Spencer of North Carolina, the slaves certainly would have rebelled or, at the very least, fled at the first opportunity. But they remained loyal servants almost until the end. And ifslavery so debased the blacks, asked the editor of the Raleigh Standard, how "in nine months time, [did] those formerly down-trodden, ruined barbarians, by some hocus pocus" become the social and political equals of the whites? The Reverend A. Toomer Porter, rector of Charleston's Church of the Holy Communion, put the question another way: Ifslavery was so thoroughly cruel and destructive, he asked in 1882, how, then, did the North judge the blacks worthy ofcitizenship so soon after their alleged brutalization?1 42 The Old Arguments Anew At the core of the new defenses of slavery lay the humane, uplifting treatment allegedly accorded the bondsmen. In 1867 Louisiana's Shreveport Southwestern defended slavery as "but the transition state through which all peoples pass from barbarism to a progressive civilization ." Two decades later, in The Negro: As He Was; As He Is; As He Will Be, proslavery ideologue H. S. Fulkerson lauded slavery as an "unquestioned good, physically and morally." Apologists for slavery pointed to the institution's broad educational benefits for the ignorant Africans. Every slave owner, they said, became in an important sense a teacher, a missionary, a ward. Slavery, averred a contributor to the Southern Review, served as a vital "preparatory school." Enrolled in the peculiar institution, the black race' 'attained the highest point of civilization , intelligence, and moral elevation ever reached by it in all its known history. " A contributor to the Land We Love praised the dynamic quality in slavery that left the bondsmen uniformly "happy, thriving, contented." In exchange for their masters' patriarchal care and protection , the slaves "cheerfully rendered a faithful service, obedience and affection." They "spent their days in healthful easy employment, their powers never overtasked, their nights under good shelters in healthful sleep, with plentiful supplys of food, with no thought of the past, no care for the morrow." According to this author, slavery was a system of "mild and beneficent restraint, which ... admitted full and free enjoyment, permitted no excesses full of remorse and bitter consequences.,,2 Another of slavery's defenders challenged Senator Charles Sumner's accusation that masters abused the blacks, both physically and psychologically . Citing census data, he insisted that rates of suicide, insanity, blindness, and physical deformity among slaves paled when compared with the rate of these problems in the North. "The fact is the negro was the best-fed, the best clothed, the best cared-for and least-worked laborer on the globe." This line of thought, invoking a comparative perspective, remained popular with white southerners well into the twentieth century. Writing to her brother living in New York in June, 1865, a North Carolinian praised slavery as "the most humane system of labor in the world." In her opinion the bondsmen actually worked fewer hours, on the average, than did European immigrants in the North. The editor of DeBow's Review shared this opinion. In 1867 he remained convinced that the slaves fared better than had other peasant classes worldwide. Slavery merged the best interests of labor and capital, making it attractive to blacks and whites alike. Writers identified certain Reconstruction and the New Proslavery Argument 43 benefits in slavery----<.:are for the elderly, guaranteed work year-roundthat were absent from the free labor system. Fulkerson underscored that in most cases the slaves received better treatment than did free laborers in the Gilded Age. Slaves never starved, he said, and they worried little about "lock-outs" by hostile capitalists.3 Much as during the antebellum period, after Appomattox white southerners again employed the Bible to buttress their argument that blacks fared better as slaves than as freedmen. As historian Charles R. Wilson has argued, southern preachers continued after Appomattox to praise slavery for teaching blacks lifelong lessons in morality, hard work, and religion. They pointed to the old ex-slaves as examples of "good" blacks and looked with fright at the devilish young blacks reared without slavery's restraints. Ministers employed the scriptures to support the point that emancipation was a backward step for blacks and whites alike. In his widely circulated pamphlet, The Negro: What Is His Ethnological Status? "Ariel" (Nashville publisher and clergyman Buckner H. Payne) maintained that God disapproved of any attempt to equalize the races. "Ariel" based his theory on the supposition "That the negro being created before Adam, consequently ... is a beast in God's nomenclature ." The author argued that calamities in the Bible were God's punishments for miscegenation between white descendants of Adam and Eve and blacks. Without souls and without immortality, reasoned "Ariel," blacks could not worship God. And because blacks were beasts, not men, God frowned on attempts to make them equal. To "elevate a beast to the level of a son of God," charged"Ariel," was tantamount to insulting the Creator. As a result, "The states or people that favor this equality and amalgamation of the white and black races, God will exterminate." Up to this time slaveholders had been chosen by God to prevent just this calamity. But with slavery's destruction, only two alternatives remained for the black man, concluded "Ariel": "You must send him back to Africa or re-enslave him.,,4 Some racial thinkers doubted that the freedmen possessed even the first option set forth by "Ariel." Writing in 1868, for instance, "A Minister" (D. G. Phillips of Louisville, Georgia) argued that because God had created blacks before the rest of mankind, and because the serpent who deceived Eve had been a Negro, blacks were doomed "to perpetual menial crouching slavery." Forever incapable of being the equals of whites, blacks would remain enslaved. Drawing upon the Bible, "facts," and "history," "A Minister" asserted that all attempts 44 The Old Arguments Anew at emancipation were futile. "Reader," he exhorted, "whether you be a pro or anti-slavery man," you must grasp the nakea truth: blacks must wallow in abject slavery or suffer extermination. While the black legally was no longer a chattel, the abolitionists had won but a temporary victory. According to the theologian, "to take him [the black] out of his condition of slave and force him into an unsought condition of manhood is to fight against God, and the consequences must be direful in the end.,,5 Reflecting on the origins of his argument, "A Minister" explained in 1868 that "My theory was not hatched by me. The 'ovum' was the property of Dr. [Samuel A.] Cartwright-the moulding alone mine. The theory is true-it will prevail.,,6 By mentioning Cartwright, "A Minister " linked his biblical defense of slavery to the ideas of one of the Old South's foremost scientific apologists for the peculiar institution. For years Cartwright, a Louisiana physician, had identified indigenous black diseases and immutable ethnological characteristics among the slaves. Blacks succumbed to "drapetomia" (running away) and "rascality " when mismanaged, said Dr. Cartwright. He referred to the Bible and to his years of medical practice among blacks to support his rationale for keeping blacks enslaved. Drawing heavily on the racist anthropology and pseudoscience of their day, Cartwright and the like-minded Dr. Josiah C. Nott declared that blacks were so radically inferior to whites that their destiny included only two alternatives: perpetual servitude to whites or extermination. The blend of biblical and scientific arguments for black inferiority lay at the core of many postbellum defenses of slavery. Few northern or southern whites in 1865, or for that matter, in 1918, questioned the inherent racial differences between the Negro and the Caucasian. In their minds, developments in anthropometrics and biology confirmed, not challenged, racial stereotypes in America that dated back to the seventeenth century. Whites viewed blacks as a weak, backward people, untouched by what they vaguely termed AngloSaxon traditions of work and self-government. Most white Americans remained convinced that the black man possessed unique racial qualities that suited him to slavery. They prophesied that emancipation would destroy him and mire the nation in racial conflict. Enslavement had been the black's brightest hour.? II The impact of such fears was not lost on conservative northern Democrats , who unleashed bitter proslavery diatribes during Reconstruction. Reconstruction and the New Proslavery Argument 45 The Copperheads joined the humanitarian, religious, and pseudoscientific defenders of slavery to further their own political ends. They played upon racial ambivalence among white northerners, predicting that emancipation would breed "mongrelization" or race war. In July, 1865, for example, the racist Chicago Times railed against emancipation. "The whole country," complained the editor, "priests; newspapers; politicians , white, black, yellow; Fourth of July; Hail Columbia, and everything else-are 'going it' exclusively on account of the negro." As a result, all white Americans were becoming enslaved: "Our negro masters crack their whips over our legislators and our priests, and thus control our laws and our religion. They have established a tyranny over us worse than that of the Pisistratids.... The more we do for our sable masters, the more exacting are they in their demands." According to the editor, whites needed to rise up against "abolitionists, niggers and miscengenationists." Writing in 1868, the editor of New York's ultraconservative Old Guard openly commended slavery. The black, he wrote, "can only exist in one or the other condition-in his African savagery or under the care and guidance of his white master, and even an Abolition lunatic would call the latter preferable. " Slavery, explained another Copperhead, was the blacks' "normal condition, for [as slaves] they multiplied quite as fast as the white people." The bondsmen, "guided and cared for by their masters, were probably the healthiest and happiest four millions of human creatures that ever lived upon the earth. ,,8 The Copperheads depended heavily on religion and science to uphold their defenses of the peculiar institution. God's design, explained Dr. J. R. Hayes of the District of Columbia, was for the blacks to remain forever subordinate to the whites. Divine will positioned the blacks at the lowest rung on the human family ladder. "The negro's imperfect anatomical construction," wrote Hayes, "fixes him ... next in gradative series in mammals created just below him." Hayes not only found blacks deficient in "psychical or mental development," but he criticized their inferior odor, hair, "unctuous skin, ... prognathous skull, receding forehead, protruding jaw, thick lips, flat nose, expanded nostrils, crooked legs and flat feet." If God had intended the blacks to be free, he asked, "would millions of them have permitted another race to hold them in slavery ... and when freed, freed only as an incident of war?,,9 Far from viewing slavery as a sin, northern racists praised it as one of "the fundamental laws of organic life." By enslaving blacks, whites not only obeyed "natural law and industrial necessity ... irrevocable 46 The Old Arguments Anew as a law of gravitation." Blacks, northern conservatives wrote again and again, were as different from and inferior to whites as the different subgroups of animals within a species. According to one author, the laws of nature proved that "Wherever the negro occupies the relation of servitude to the white man, all is happiness and prosperity. Where he does not, all is social chaos and blight." Another remarked that the black man possessed unique racial qualities that kept him depraved and suited to slavery. The negro race has no history, no learning, no literature, no laws. For six thousand years he has been a savage. ... He has never invented anything, or advanced a single step in civilization when left to himself. He is sunk in the grossest superstitions, and is guilty of the most revolting practices. The only ones that have ever shown any advancement are those who have been brought to this country and placed under the control of Christian masters. In the midst of the passage of the Black Codes, a Copperhead looked back with affection to the old slave codes. He described them not only as essential for regulating the barbarous blacks, but "far more humane than that of the law revealed by Moses." Writing in 1866, the editor of Wisconsin's LaCrosse Democrat maintained that thanks to emancipation , the black man "is worse off to-day under the drippings of this New England mercy than under the care of his former master." And conservative northerners, like their fellow racists in Dixie, also predicted that emancipation in the South would breed just as catastrophic results as it had in Haiti and Jamaica. Emancipation, they agreed, was a cruel, unconstitutional trick by "the Mongrel Party." It let loose "the natural instincts of the negro," wrote a northerner in 1869, "and he has already commenced his march backward towards his own native barbarism. ,,10 Copperheads concluded that slavery, not freedom, was the natural condition for the black man. In their opinion, abolition was not only impracticable but impossible. 11 This theme merged the biblical theory of writers such as "Ariel" with the ethnological thrust of the North's most outspoken proslavery ideologue, Dr. John H. Van Evrie of New York. According to historian George Fredrickson, Van Evrie was in no sense a scientist, but rather a blatant antiblack propagandist, "perhaps the first professional racist in American history. ,,12 The very term slavery had meaning only for whites of Euro-American heritage, not Africans , said Dr. Van Evrie. Reversing the entire notion of slavery and Reconstruction and the New Proslavery Argument 47 freedom, Van Evrie and other Negrophobes purported that blacks experienced freedom only while enslaved. The first of six Anti-Abolition Tracts published by Van Evrie, Horton and Company in 1866 argued that "When they [blacks] live the life that they are designed for, they are free; when they do not, they are slaves." Black slavery was described simply as the set of laws established by God for what He deemed an inferior, servile race. Consequently, the "so-called slavery" or "imaginary slavery" of the South was not slavery at all. In reference to the black man, "slavery" was "a stupid misnomer." Slavery was the implementation of God's will that Caucasians "shall govern them [blacks] by specific rules and regulations, suited to their nature. ,,13 To such writers, reenslavement, or some other form of racial control, seemed the only solution to the race question. Blacks would perish, explained another Copperhead in 1869, "unless some lucky tum of the tide of fortune places them back again under the direction and control of their old masters, and only true friends." Adopting the proslavery idea so prevalent in the South, a northern observer in 1877 judged the conditions-housing, clothing, food, health-under slavery as preferable to those enjoyed by the freedman. According to George R. Stetson, as a slave' 'the Negro was a better member of society than he is today ... or perhaps, ever will be." Northern conservatives reported that emancipation had worsened race relations and ushered in social chaos. They predicted that abolition would result in either total racial amalgamation or race war. 14 III The Mason-Dixon line provided no dividing line for such sentiment. In the South, ideas of the blacks' natural qualifications for slavery appeared regularly during Reconstruction. The black man was uniquely equipped for perpetual bondage by nature, wrote South Carolina's G. Manigault in 1868. "Of all races," he explained, the black "alone accepts servitude as a decree of nature." His "natural docility ... a certain sluggishness of body and mind, a sense of inferiority" made him a perfect slave-"the most easily governed and most incapable of ruling of all people." Another writer argued that "Nature" demanded that blacks and whites live together only in the relation of slaves and masters. But with that relation no longer a reality, a new alternative- "some form of subordination of the inferior race" -had to be fashioned. 48 The Old Arguments Anew Blacks, explained Georgian J. R. Ralls in 1877, would only prosper in some slavelike status. A servile disposition ... seems to be an inherent and firmly fixed trait in the negro character. He cannot ... enjoy anything like rational liberty. When not in a state of slavery, under the task-master, who subdues his will and controls his physical man, he is led by the stronger impulses of his nature in pursuit of something that will exercise dominion over him. It matters but little with him what may be the form or character of the servitude he renders, so long as he has something that will accept the homage that instinct ... prompts him to bestow. The new system of racial control would have to coerce the freedmen to work, all the while providing them the protection and maintenance of slavery.15 White southerners not only believed that blacks made natural slaves, but amassed evidence of black behavior and physical deterioration that convinced them the ex-bondsmen could not survive as freedmen. During Reconstruction and up to World War I, whites continually observed changes in blacks that persuaded them that emancipation unsuited the freedmen. Repeatedly they defended the peculiar institution by citing the alleged retrogression of emancipated blacks toward savagery. They delighted in citing the history of Liberia and emancipation in the Caribbean as examples of the deterioration of blacks freed from white control. Left to themselves, the blacks reportedly refused to work, succumbed to gross immorality and, in the case of Haiti, massacred first the whites and then the mulattoes. 16 Writing in 1866, for example, Dr. Josiah C. Nott, still espousing scientific apologies for slavery, informed General O. O. Howard of the Freedmen's Bureau that the nightmarish history of emancipation in Haiti and Jamaica portended an equally dismal future for the South's freedmen. As a subordinate the black reached his full potential. But as a freeman, absent from white guidance, he lapsed into barbarism. "History," Nott argued, "proves ... that a superior and inferior race cannot live together practically on any other terms than that of master and slave, and that the inferior race ... must be expelled or exterminated." The Alabama physician and exslaveholder added that whenever the black "is removed from the controlling influence of the superior race, and is left to his own interests, he soon sinks into savagism.,,17 Reconstruction and the New Proslavery Argument 49 Whites interpreted the deficiencies of free blacks as a function of their overall deterioration. Georgia physician W. T. Grant praised slavery because it alone guarded the black" against a relapse into his original condition of black ignorance and unmitigated barbarism." The black was "truly bettered in being enslaved," argued Grant, because contact with whites tempered his "native ferocity and grossness." But alas, without the guardianship of slavery, blacks reportedly were on the road to destruction as a race; in the opinion of editor H. Rives Pollard, they would move "backward into the barbarism of the Bushman, and the fiendishness that belongs to tribes that hide in the African jungles." According to these writers, emancipation signaled not only the end of progress for blacks, but their physical demise as well. IS Even before Appomattox, reports began to circulate throughout the South of widespread suffering, disease, and death among the freed blacks, especially those congregating in the cities. Emancipation, whites concluded, must mean the eventual elimination of the race. Early in 1865, for example, Mary Jones, wife of the Reverend Charles CoIcock Jones of Georgia, predicted that freeing the slaves would result in "their extermination. All history ... proves them incapable of self-government ; they perish when brought in conflict with the intellectual superiority of the Caucasian race." Later in the year, during the blacks' first summer of freedom, rumors spread that they were indeed dying en masse. 19 Throughout these years whites compiled medical information that, to them, proved that blacks fared better as bondsmen than as freedmen. Since the blacks' emancipation, their infant mortality rate reportedly had skyrocketed, and the adults supposedly were dying off as well. Many authors concluded that freedom was anything but a boon for the black man. It represented, in fact, the black's one-way ticket to racial extinction. Without the guardianship offered by slavery, blacks soon would follow the path of the American Indian. For years after emancipation, laymen and physicians alike agreed that blacks suffered diseases as freedmen that were unknown to their race as slaves. Insanity, venereal disease, feticide, drunkenness, and other maladies threatened, they said, the very future of the freedman.20 Such statements confirmed Dr. Notl's 1866 pessimistic prognosis that, removed from the medical care of their former masters, most blacks would succumb to illness and die. For years he had linked the physical well-being of blacks to slavery. Incorporating Lamarckian and Darwinian theories of racial evolution, Nott remained convinced that free so The Old Arguments Anew blacks first would stagnate, then retrograde, and finally die off. Blacks would remain "what God made them," Nott lectured General Howard, "and your [Freedmen's] Bureau can no more unmake, or thwart the laws of nature than it can pluck the sun from the heavens." Endorsing Nott's predictions, the editor of Charlotte's Church Intelligencer branded the emancipation edict the "death-warrant of the negro race." The numerous ailments thought endemic to free blacks convinced a contributor to the Richmond Examiner' 'that the negro is not equal to the burdens of freedom." That blacks could not withstand the physical demands of emancipation, he said, "shows that the negroes are not of that 'perdurable stuff' of which freedmen should be made." Removed from the care of the whites, blacks were expiring quickly. "As children need parents," gibed the correspondent, "so do negroes need masters .,,21 The freedman's supposed declining birth rate, coupled with his alleged increasing death rate, led another writer to conclude "that the negro thrives in servitude and dies out in freedom." As a freedman he would "dwindle and die out," falling hopelessly by the wayside in the struggle for existence.22 Whites claimed to have found abundant evidence that blacks retrogressed without slavery's stewardship. They noted repeatedly the freedmen 's degraded physical state and their frightful day-to-day living conditions and behavior. Denied white support, blacks reportedly suffered from inadequate food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. Late in 1865, for example, Alabama planter Henry Watson, Jr., recounted the tragedy of ex-slave Anthony, his sick wife, and seven children. The freed family was tottering on the brink of starvation. Because Anthony was now a freedman, explained Watson, he was "bound to clothe, feed, support, lodge, warm and pay medical bills for his wife and children. His wages are not worth to me the support of his family now that I shall not be remunerated hereafter by the labor of his children.... He talks very seriously about his condition, says he is worse than ever before ... that all the black people are worse off than when slaves." "What was the negro before the war?" asked ex-Governor Zebulon B. Vance of North Carolina in 1869. "A simple, happy, and affectionate bondsman. What is he now? Fast merging into a ragged, starving, dangerous vagabond. ,,23 Southern whites blamed emancipation for unleashing negative qualities in blacks that reportedly had been controlled by enslavement. No longer held in check by the slaveholder's precept and example, free Reconstruction and the New Proslavery Argument 51 blacks reveled in sin, neglected their households, and mistreated their children. Black families, complained the editor of the Southern Cultivator , were disintegrating without the guardianship previously offered by the slave masters. Commenting on the state of affairs in Alabama late in 1866, William F. Samford remarked that" 'Civilization' is 'marching two steps backwards' like the truant boy went to school, 'to one forward' in our 'Africa' down here. The negroes here spend their time in going to 'funerals,' religious howlings, promiscuous sexual intercourse, thieving and 'conjuring.' " From Thomasville, Georgia, a clergyman complained, "My observation convinces me that freedom has had a decidedly injurious influence upon the moral character of the blacks." On the one hand, the freedmen "are ever envious of the superiority of the whites and clamorous for equality while using every means to appropriate their property." For their part, the whites "are inspired with contempt for the blacks and constantly irritated and provoked by their bad conduct. ,,24 Whites agreed that black religion became more emotional, more savage without the restraints and direction imposed by slavery and the master class. The freedmen consumed liquor at a rate unknown during slavery. And not only were blacks more licentious and sensual than before, but now they were even prone to rape white women. So said the white South.25 During the postwar generations whites remained convinced that the entire community of free blacks had succumbed to crime. Writing in Guilford County, North Carolina, the Reverend John Paris praised slavery 's gentle control mechanisms. Slavery "watched over, and guarded against misconduct" by the blacks, Paris said. Since emancipation, however, crime had increased twenty times. An 1868 contributor to the Land We Love calculated an even higher increase of black misbehavior. As freedmen the blacks "commit more crimes every week than the aggregate crimes among them during the two hundred years of slavery . ,,26 Theft ranked foremost in the whites' catalogue of black wrongdoing .27 Alabama planter John Horry Dent blasted emancipation for inciting blacks to steal from their employers. In his opinion, their wages only whetted the Negroes' "taste for money ... and their want for money keeps ahead of their earnings, hence they resort to stealing to procure money. " Writing in the 1870s, South Carolina merchant/planter Charles Manigault attributed the high frequency of black theft to Yankee education. "They took special care," noted Manigault, "while corrupting the Negroes to teach them how to steal at which the Negroes 52 The Old Arguments Anew soon became great adepts." Theft, however, represented the mere tip of the iceberg to southern whites. While it could perhaps shrug off the loss of a few chickens as the product of "Negro character," the ruling class could never quite cope with what it termed the severe upheaval of racial etiquette and black behavior.28 Whites blamed emancipation for driving a wedge between the exmasters and their former slaves. They longed for the paternalism and the give-and-take that reportedly had existed between patriarchal masters and devoted servants during slavery days. They expressed their longing for the mutual love and respect that marked race relations under the old regime. John B. Baldwin, Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, expressed this point most clearly in 1866: I do not like the negro as well free as I did as a slave, for the reason that there is now between us an antagonism of interest to some extent, while, before his interest and mine were identical. Then, I was always thinking of how I could fix him comfortably. Now I find myself driving a hard bargain with him for wages; and I find that sort of feeling suggested directly by motives of interest coming in between the employer and the employed. Slavery, wrote Charles Manigault, developed "mutual family interests & kind personal feelings" between blacks and whites. The latter sorely missed the role of teacher, guardian, and friend. The blacks "are free now," moaned Manigault, "their heads & hearts are turned against us their former protectors & friends. They have now become lazy, improvident , & won't work efficiently. ,,29 While some whites no doubt missed reciprocal relationships with slaves, most chafed under the loss of social and economic control over what they deemed a barbaric, backward race in their midst. Without the discipline provided by slavery, they envisioned chaos and disorder. Many considered this the bitterest fruit of abolition.30 They pointed to the behavior of the freedmen as evidence not only of slavery's righteousness , but its absolute necessity for maintaining order in a biracial society. Whites insisted that emancipation unleased negative qualities in blacks that had been kept under wraps by enslavement. The blacks, wrote H. Rives Pollard of the Richmond Southern Opinion, "temporarily crazed and blinded by their sudden transition from slavery to liberty," had begun a reign of riot, ruin, anarchy, and death. Whites identified every manner of disrespectful black deportment-by omission Reconstruction and the New Proslavery Argument 53 and commission-all through the South. Violating prior racial etiquette, the blacks were labeled as surly, insolent, annoying, impertinent, impudent , indifferent, ungrateful, and, according to an author in the Land We Love, "puffed up." Whereas slavery had transformed Africans into a respectable and productive peasant class, free status allegedly converted them into a race of dirty, ignorant, brutal savages. A troubled, unhappy people, the freedmen reportedly lied, cheated, and broke their marriage vows. Sexual promiscuity and infidelity spread rampant. Daniel Heyward, owner of a large rice plantation on the Savannah River, summed up the prevailing image of the slave among postemancipation white southerners. The freedmen, he concluded, had gone "bad," had lost the positive traits that slavery had provided them. The mass of free blacks unmistakably were "lapsing, rapidly back to their ancestral state of savage life in Africa. ,,31 IV As if these personal characteristics were not direful enough, whites also uniformly condemned both the quality and quantity of free black labor. Because emancipation had been too sudden, they said, blacks were unprepared to make a smooth transition into a free labor system.32 Whites also argued that the freedmen failed to grasp the full meaning of emancipation. The ex-bondsmen would have to work harder than ever before. In Halifax County, North Carolina, Catherine Edmondston described the freedmen as wandering about in a daze, having no conception of their need to earn a living. Emancipation, she wrote, "is a terrible cruelty to them, this unexpected, unsolicited gift of freedom . . . . Their old moorings ... rudely & suddenly cut loose, ... they drift without a rudder into the unknown sea of freedom. God help such philanthropy. " In Talladega County, Alabama, a planter reported that confusion reigned among the ex-bondsmen: "they ... do not understand the importance of plenty of food, believe it will come whenever the appetite calls for it." According to North Carolina lawyer David Schenck, blacks misunderstood the very basis of freedom. "Every fool negro," complained Schenck in June, 1865, "thinks freedom consists in leaving his master and being idle as long as possible." The worst part of it, however, was that "while they are going through this preliminary enjoyment and finding out the realities of their dependence the crops are suffering. ,,33 54 The Old Arguments Anew Whites concluded that, without compulsion, the blacks would continue not to labor. Writing from Paris in December, 1867, former Confederate diplomat John Slidell regretted that "even under the most favorable circumstances, we cannot expect from" the freedmen "anything like restrained & continuous industry, when left to factors uncontrolled , their natural instincts." Slidell and others believed that their former bondsmen truly were lost without slavery, confusing free status with freedom from work.34 Almost every white southerner who expressed an opinion on the subject reasoned that blacks simply were too childlike, too inexperienced to comprehend the obligations of freedom. How, for example, could an ex-slave be expected to understand labor contracts? Although the government altered the black's legal status, Charles C. Jones, Jr., explained, the former bondsman would remain forever "ignorant of the operation of any law other than the will of his master." Whites commonly charged that freedom left the black man indolent, slothful to a fault. One writer observed, "When free, laziness is his master." Improvident and wasteful, the free black reportedly was transformed by emancipation into a totally unreliable and unmanageable worker. The black's apparent stubbornness and apathy toward his work convinced most whites that the experiment of free black labor was destined to fail miserably. By the summer of 1865, numerous planters began recording their impressions of how poorly the freedmen worked. With few exceptions they predicted an utter debacle. Again and again whites compared free labor unfavorably with the old slave system. Dr. J. R. Sparkman complained that freedpeople worked far less efficiently in South Carolina's rice and grain fields than slaves. In 1860, he explained , the Georgetown District produced a surplus of approximately one million bushels of grain. In 1866 its yield came to 150,000 bushels less than was required for home consumption. Much land lay idle because the freedmen refused to labor at tasks more than six hours per day. And black women now refused to perform field labor at all. As Sparkman and other whites were painfully aware, whereas the cast of characters remained essentially the same, the postwar agricultural world differed in important ways from that of the Old South.35 Immediately after the war, white planters and farmers devised new labor arrangements more or less satisfactory to themselves and to the freedmen. 36 In many cases these were supervised by Freedmen's Bureau agents. The labor contracts varied widely throughout the South-from region to region, county to county, and even from farm to farm. And Reconstruction and the New Proslavery Argument 55 regardless of locale, these arrangements also changed over time, as blacks and whites dickered over terms. Soon after Appomattox, various forms of sharecropping, share wages, and tenantry systems sprang up like patchwork quilts all across the South. Much experimentation resulted as whites sought to reach prewar levels ofagricultural productivity and as blacks endeavored to establish themselves as free men in practice as well as name. Three questions dominated the negotiations between white employers and their black employees. How much control would the ex-master hold over the ex-slave? Which, if any, of the factors of production would the blacks possess? And how would the blacks be compensated for their work? Whites watched closely as the blacks tested their freedom. The freedmen desperately sought land and, ultimately denied "forty acres and a mule," fashioned their rights and responsibilities as best they could as hired laborers. Throughout the postwar decades southern whites idealized the agricultural performance of the slaves and held nothing but contempt for the work of the freedmen.37 Whites blamed the poor quality of free black laborers on the loss of control over the former bondsmen. In June, 1865, for example, Edmund Ruffin, Jr., complained that U.S. military forces in Virginia would not allow whites to whip the freedmen: "hence they [the freedmen] are utterly lazy and negligent." Unwilling to grant the blacks a chance to prove themselves worthy of freedom, Ruffin and others concluded all too quickly that the freedmen were worthless and untrustworthy. White yeomen must replace them as the South's work force, they said. "The negro will never work to any profit for himself or anyone else except as a slave," wrote North Carolinian A. M. McPheeters in June, 1865. Most agreed that the blacks refused to obey orders, required constant supervision, worked inefficiently, and labored far below their former level as slaves.38 Specific complaints punctuate the correspondence and diaries of planters throughout the South. In southwest Tennessee, for example, businessman /farmer John H. Bills jotted down his daily dissatisfactions with freed laborers. He found them "lazy in the extreme," "idle & disipated [sic]," often "pretending to work & really doing nothing." They seemed to revel in their freedom-dancing and drinking in excess. Bills, who owned one hundred slaves in 1860, objected in principle to the ownership of blacks. But in practice, Bills remained convinced that slavery was "the best state" for the black. Emancipation transformed once industrious bondsmen into ineffectual and lethargic paupers-"a trifling S6 The Old Arguments Anew set of lazy devils who will never make a living without Masters to make them work." Two and one-half years of freedom had proven them "wholly improvident and unsuited for their situation." According to Bills, "freedom is anything but a blessing to most of them. " Like Bills, South Carolinian Robert I. Gage doubted the willingness ofthe freedman to labor. "The nigger wont work," wrote Gage in 1866, and "will be a free nigger as free niggers always have been." He advocated colonization as the only true solution to the "Negro problem. ,,39 For Mississippian Everard Green Baker, emancipation posed a management problem. How, he asked, could one organize free blacks to work most effectively? The planter complained that the blacks refused to enter the fields early or to work on Saturday evenings. And they demanded long dinner breaks. Gone was the steady, docile, disciplined labor of the slave. James Mallory, a farmer from Talladega, Alabama, complained that his cotton production had fallen after slavery because the free black hands he employed were unfaithful laborers, having' 'but little pride or ambition" in their work. Late in 1865, North Carolinian Catherine Edmondston sized up the condition of the freedmen. Most waxed indifferent, she said, shunning work in favor of dissipation. True, there were exceptions to the rule. Former slaves Owen and Dolly alone remained "faithful, cheerful, industrious & grateful." Refusing wages, they sought "only to live & to be treated for the future as they have hitherto lived & been treated." Mrs. Edmondston contrasted the two contented ex-bondsmen with Henry, their former slave foreman, who, like most emancipated blacks, "became moody, disappointed & grasping." The Edmondstons fired him because he refused to act in a subservient manner. Catherine considered Henry an unfortunate victim of freedom-"poor fellow," she wrote, "made worthless by emancipation!',40 In Alabama, John Horry Dent agreed with Mrs. Edmondston: management of a plantation with free black labor was more trouble than it was worth. The ex-slaves were, in his opinion, ungrateful, dissatisfied, "surly and disrespectful. " They labored sloppily and frequently abused farm animals and equipment. The blacks, fumed Dent, considered "their remaining" on his plantation "an obligation on their parts confered, which should allow them privileges." In the midst of Dent's February, 1866 planting the freedmen exhibited what he diagnosed as symptoms of insubordination. They left work at will, fought among themselves, carried firearms, and argued with the black driver he employed. Most Reconstruction and the New Proslavery Argument 57 important, Dent failed to convince the blacks to take a personal interest in the crop. Repeatedly, Dent complained, the freedmen broke their contracts.41 The former slaves balked at laboring in gangs, working under white supervision, and being told when and how to cultivate the crop. And they refused to perform nonfield, "slave work"-fixing fences, chopping wood, clearing ditches, tending swine. Dent objected to the blacks' after-hours socializing, especially their leaving his plantation to visit friends or relatives on neighboring farms. "It is now evident," remarked the planter in April, 1866, that "few of the negroes know how to appreciate their freedom." Most considered freedom "liberty to do as they please." Dent judged that because the blacks held little interest in his crop, it took fifteen freedmen to complete the same amount of work performed previously by ten slaves. Free black labor, then, was both too unreliable and too costly. It would remain so, predicted Dent, until the blacks "could be bound to service in such a way they could not break their contracts." Disgusted by free blacks and convinced "that large plantations & freed men ... are incompatible," Dent late in 1866 sold his Alabama lands. He purchased a small farm in Georgia with hopes of employing white men only, thereby never again having to wrangle with free blacks.42 v Like Dent, many white southern farmers and planters would have preferred to cashier the freedmen as their region's agricultural work force. In their opinion, the ex-slaves overestimated freedom's privileges and undervalued its responsibilities. No longer able to impose their will on the black, whites came to view their former bondsmen as antagonists. When they could no longer make blacks extensions of themselves, exslaveholders sought to oust black people from their world. But whites desperately needed black agricultural laborers, and thus were forced by necessity as well as habit to live and labor among them and to employ them. Anxious to maintain control over the large black population in their midst, white southerners moved quickly to institute new legal means and modes of white supremacy and caste hegemony over their former bondsmen. The Black Codes, vagrancy laws, enticement statutes , apprenticeship arrangements, game and stock laws, lien laws, sharecropping, farm tenantry, peonage-these became the surrogates S8 The Old Arguments Anew of chattel slavery. When all else failed, whites resorted to violence to keep the freedmen in a state of dependence.43 Over the next twenty-five years, white southerners wrote often-in private correspondence, periodicals, religious journals, books, and newspapers-about slavery and the horrors of emancipation. Throughout the postwar years they focused minutely on slavery. The topic provided them with an ideological legacy, a crucial metaphor for the racial control they frantically sought to impose on blacks. Not only did it enable them to order their world; it allowed them to cling desperately to vestiges of their lost civilization. In these years no subject, except that of their beloved Lost Cause, captured the attention of white southerners as did slavery.44 Again and again writers went on record contrasting the evils of emancipation with the beneficences of slavery. Proslavery ideologues relentlessly defended the institution from ongoing neoabolitionist attacks, arguing that in spite of emancipation, blacks still required white control. So heavily did white southerners dwell on the subject that in 1865 North Carolina journalist Joseph S. Cannon implored them to wipe it from their consciousness. The South, Cannon informed readers of the Raleigh Standard, must look forward, not backward , on the race question. He reminded southerners of what they already knew but wanted to forget: "Slavery ... is dead forever. Not a few refuse to realize it. They think it may be resuscitated, or that necessity will at least compel the negro to a kind of serfdom or peonage, that will be a very good substitute for actual slavery. Their desire fathers the expectation." Such hopes, warned the editor, were now mere pipe dreams. The slavery question was settled. Preoccupation with renewing it would only lead to more trouble. "Slavery in name and fact, substance and shadow, principal and substitute, is destroyed, exterminated, annihilated , rubbed out, washed out, and positively, unconditionally, eternally gone." All, white and black, must accept abolition and get to work. Whites no longer could expect to be waited upon, explained Cannon. "Just throwaway all the slave furniture ... pull down the bells and wait on yourselves. ,,45 But few whites listened to such appeals. During and after Reconstruction , slavery as a subject of inquiry and as an idea continued to play a vital role in American racial thought. Though no longer a legal entity, slavery and forms of neoslavery nevertheless helped determine the politics of Reconstruction. Southern white intransigence on slavery spirited the Radical Republicans forward in fashioning the constitutional Reconstruction and the New Proslavery Argument S9 amendments and civil rights legislation of these years. Much can be learned by examining the ways in which whites and blacks perceived slavery after the institution's demise. As sectional tensions gradually lessened, whites in all parts of the country welcomed the myth of slavery as a benign institution. The comical portrait of the happy slave became standard fare in late nineteenth-century literature, folklore, theater, and caricature. Although proslavery and antislavery forces continued to battle over the old questions throughout and following Reconstruction, the American public generally accepted a new consensus on slavery. Proslavery thought ultimately carried the day. Ironically, by the end of Reconstruction, white southerners had gamered in peace what had eluded them in war: the triumph of the old proslavery argument. The patriarchal , proslavery image of the slave popularized by novelist John Esten Cooke in 1876 appealed to whites in the North as well as in the South. Celebrating slavery in colonial Virginia, Cooke wrote that not only was the Virginia slave "well fed, and rarely overtaxed," but his master generally provided him with a garden patch to grow his own crops. The bondsman, wrote Cooke, "was a merry, jovial musical being," who, "when his day's work was over, played his banjo in front of his cabin, and laughed and jested and danced by the light of the moon." House servants, he said, "were looked upon very much as members of the family, whose joys and sorrows were their own too." According to Cooke, the blacks "were slaves in nothing but the word. ,,46 Influenced by white racism-itself a key force of sectional reconciliation -few late nineteenth-century Americans assessed blame for slavery . Most described slavery as a mild, patriarchal institution, more a school than a system of coerced labor. "We make no apology whatsoever for slavery," argued the Reverend John Paris in 1877. The North Carolinian followed this remark with twenty-five handwritten pages eulogizing slavery's virtues and damning the horrors of emancipation. Responsibility for the peculiar institution was now placed on northerners as well as southerners. "It was not the crime of the South," argued the Reverend C. K. Marshall of Mississippi in 1880, "it was the crime of America; it was the fearful crime of England. It was the terrible and inexcusable transgression of the Achan of a sinister, impious and Goddefying civilization.,,47 In 1876 the New Orleans Daily Picayune informed white southerners that they could keep their heads high on all sectional matters, including the slavery question. Yes, "The New South" had abandoned slavery 60 The Old Arguments Anew and was loyal to the Union, exclaimed the editor. But, he added, "We forget nothing. We apologize for nothing. We simply take things as we find them, and make the best of them." Five years later the Atlanta Constitution summarized the various strains of proslavery thought that echoed in the post-Reconstruction American mind. In its humane aspect and in the results that have followed, the system of slavery as it existed in the south never had and can never have its parallel in the history of the world. So far as the negro is concerned, it was the only field in which the seed of civilization could be sown. It was as necessary to his moral, mental and physical disenthralment as the primary school is to the child. It was the prerequisite of freedom and citizenship. The institution of slavery had existed for almost two hundred and fifty years, and after the war white southerners found it virtually impossible to view blacks as anything but slaves. It required a major transformation of thought to alter this assumption. Few made the adjustment smoothly or comfortably. Most never made it at all.48 NOTES l. Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas Diary, May, 1865, p. 20, Duke University ; Spencer to Eliza, March 10, 1866, Letter Book vol. 1, Cornelia Spencer Papers, North Carolina Division of Archives and History; "A Plea for the Negro," Raleigh Daily Standard, January 23, 1866; Porter quoted in J. L. Tucker, The Relations o/the Church to the Colored Race (Jackson, MS, 1882), 48. 2. Shreveport Southwestern quoted in Southern Cultivator, 25 (February, 1867): 41; Fulkerson, The Negro: As He Was; As He Is; As He Will Be (Vicksburg , 1887), 17; anon., "The African in the United States," Southern Review, 14 (January, 1874): 130, 156; anon., "Roanoke Valley," Land We Love, 2 (January, 1867): 181-182. 3. Anon., "Mistaken Sympathy, or Mistaken Figures," Land We Love, 1 (September, 1866): 351-355, 356; Eliza B. Tillinghast to David Ray Tillinghast, June 6, 1865, Tillinghast Family Papers, Duke University; "Memories of the War," DeBow's Review, a.w.s., 3 (March, 1867): 226; Robert 1. Gage to sister, January 31, 1868, James M. Gage Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Fulkerson, The Negro, 23. 4. Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion o/the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens, 1980),68-69, 102-104, 106-109; "Ariel," The Negro: What Is His Ethnological Status? (Cincinnati, 1867),45,48,46,48. An anonymous south- Reconstruction and the New Proslavery Argument 61 emer, "Optician," attacked "Ariel," denying that the slaveholders viewed the blacks as beasts and treated them inhumanely. See Speculum for Looking into the Pamphlet Entitled "The Negro" (Charleston, 1867), 6, 20. 5. "A Minister," Nachash: What Is It? or, An Answer to the Question, "Who and What Is the Negro?" Drawn from Revelation (Augusta, 1868),42, 43,44. 6. D. G. Phillips to W. R. Hemphill, December 31,1868, Hemphill Family Papers, Duke University. 7. See William Stanton, The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815-1859 (Chicago, 1960), vii, 160; John S. Haller, Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859-1900 (Urbana, 1971), passim; George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind (New York, 1971), 55, 57, 60, 87, 277; William Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century: Problems of Form, Function, and Transformation (New York, 1971), 89, 91. 8. See Forrest G. Wood, Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction (Berkeley, 1970); editorial, "Negroes, Dog-Days, and White Slavery," Chicago Times, July 7, 1865; anon., " 'American Slaveholders': The Founders of American Liberty," Old Guard, 6 (November, 1868): 837; "The Problem of the Races," ibid., 5 (May, 1867): 382-383. 9. Hayes, Negrophobia "On the Brain," in White Men (Washington, 1869), 12, 14, 16, 17,25,31. 10. Anon, " 'Abolition of Slavery' Forever Impossible," Old Guard, 3 (April, 1865): 176; "The Negro in America," ibid., 4 (December 1866): 729; John H. Van Evrie, White Supremacy and Negro Subordination (New York, 1867) passim; Abolition Is National Death (New York, 1866), 8-12, 18; The Six Species ofMen (New York, 1866),6, 12, 15; Harlow S. Orton, The History and Development of Races (Madison, 1869), 18; Free Negroism; or, Results ofEmancipation (New York, 1866), 27; "Slavery under the Mosaic, the Roman, and the American Code," Old Guard, 3 (July, 1865): 323; Marcus M. Pomeroy, Soliloquies of the Bondholder (New York, 1866), 22; Reconstruction Speech of Hon. James Brooks, of New York in the House of Representatives (Washington , 1867),4; A White Man's Government: Speech ofHon. AndrewJ. Rogers ofNew Jersey Delivered in the House of Representatives (Washington, 1868), 11; anon., "White Supremacy and Negro Subordination," Old Guard, 3 (May, 1865): 199; anon., "Religious Inequality of Human Races," Old Guard, 7 (February, 1869): 85. 11. " 'Abolition of Slavery' Forever Impossible," 176, 181; anon., "Mongrelism ," The Democratic Almanac for 1867 (n.p., n.d.), 50-52; anon., "The Basis of American Civilization," Old Guard, 5 (August, 1867): 625, 631; "The Problem of the Races," 382-383. 12. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, 92. 62 The Old Arguments Anew 13. Anon., Abolition Is National Death, 7,8, 12; "The Negro in America," 732; anon., "Different Laws for Different Races," Old Guard,S (January, 1867): 66. 14. Anon., "Northern Delusions about Negroes," Old Guard, 7 (May 1869): 330; Stetson, The Southern Negro As He Is (Boston, 1877), 15, 16; G. F., "Moral and Intellectual Characteristics of Savage Races," Old Guard, 6 (May, 1868): 375; C. H. H., "The Condition of the South," ibid. (March, 1868): 224, 226; anon., "The Effects of the Abolition Policy, As Far As Developed," Old Guard, 6 (December, 1868): 925. 15. Manigault, "The Decay of Religion in the South," Land We Love,S (July, 1868): 209, 214, 213; anon., "Negro Agrarianism," DeBow's Review, a.w.s., 5 (February, 1868): 136; anon., "Blunders of the Confederate Government ," ibid. (May, 1868): 475; editorial, "The Negro Knows No Law," Southern Opinion, March 14, 1868; C. M. Vaiden, "The Labor Question," Southern Cultivator, 28 (April, 1870): 109; J. C. Delavigne, "The Troubles in the South," Southern Magazine, 16 (May, 1875): 518; J. L. Tucker, The Relations of the Church to the Colored Race,S, 12; Ralls, The Negro Problem (Atlanta, 1877), 21. 16. Robert Toombs to Alexander Stephens, December 12, 1865, in Ulrich B. Phillips, ed., The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens , and Howell Cobb (Washington, 1911), 675; Henry Flanders, Observations on Reconstruction (Philadelphia, 1866),23-25; G. 1. Crafts to William Porcher Miles, April 13, 1867, William Porcher Miles Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; G. Manigault, "The Future of Young Africa," Land We Love,S (October, 1868): 523-529; "Beauties of Negro Civilization," Southern Opinion, February I, 1868; Charles Manigault, "Respecting Slavery," unpublished manuscript [1873?], Manigault Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 17. Nott, The Negro Race: Its Ethnology and History (Mobile, 1866), 9, 22. See also Stanton, The Leopard's Spots, 80-81, 149, 158-159, 160. 18. Grant, "The Southern Negro," Scott's Monthly Magazine, 2 (November, 1866): 856, 857; Lon Taylor to S. F. Patterson, February 12, 1866, Lindsay Patterson Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; anon, "The Negro Problem," DeBow's Review, a.w.s., 5, (March 1869): 250; editorial, "Shall We Have a Negro War?" Southern Opinion , September 26, 1868; Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas Diary, July 30, 1870. 19. Journal entry, January 7, 1865, in Robert M. Myers, ed., The Children ofPride (New Haven, 1972), 1244; Eliza B. Tillinghast to David Ray Tillinghast , June 3, 1865, Tillinghast Family Papers; Marcel, "Feeling of the South Carolinians," Nation, 1 (August 24, 1865): 237-239; A. M. McPheeters to R. L. Patterson, June 10, 1865, R. L. Patterson Papers, North Carolina Division of Archives and History. Reconstruction and the New Proslavery Argument 63 20. See, for example, anon., "The Labor Question," Southern Cultivator, 24 (April, 1866): 87; E. T. Winkler, "The Negroes in the Gulf States," International Review, 1 (September, 1874): 584; A. R. Kilpatrick, "Original Correspondence," Richmond and Louisville Medical Journal, 14 (November, 1872): 606-623; E. T. Easley, "The Sanitary Condition of the Negro," AmericanMedical Weekly, 3 (July 31,1875): 49-51; "Early Syphilis in the Negro," MarylandMedicallournal, 1(August, 1877): 135-146;F. Tipton, "The Negro Problem from a Medical Standpoint," New York Medical Journal, 43 (May, 1886): 569-572; Eugene R. Corson, "The Future of the Colored Race in the United States from an Ethnic and Medical Standpoint," New York Medical Times, 15 (October, 1887): 193-200; Horace W. Conrad, "The Health of the Negroes in the South," Sanitarian, 18 (1887): 502-510; James Mcintosh, "The Future of the Negro Race," Transactions of the South Carolina Medical Association , (1891): 183-188; Robert Reyburn, "Type of Disease among the Freed People (Mixed Negro Races) of the United States," Medical News, 63 (December 2, 1893): 623-627; J. F. Miller, "The Effects of Emancipation upon the Mental and Physical Health of the Negro ofthe South," North Carolina Medical Journal, 38 (November 20, 1896): 285-294; E. A. Yates, "Effect of Emancipation upon the Mental and Physical Health of the Negro," North Carolina Christian Advocate, 42 (January 6, 1897): 2; J. T. Walton, "The Comparative Mortality of the White and Colored Races in the South," Charlotte Medical Journal, 10 (1897): 291-294; John Herbert Claiborne, "The Negro," Virginia Medical Semi-Monthly, 5 (April 13, 1900): 3-6; J. Allison Hodges, "The Effect of Freedom upon the Physical and Psychological Development of the Negro," Richmond Journal of Practice, 14 (June, 1900): 161-17l. 21. Nott, The Negro Race: Its Ethnology and History, 12, 26, 19; "The Problem of the Negro Race," Charlotte Church Intelligencer, 6 (June 21, 1866): 90; anon., "Easily the Negro Dies," Land We Love, 1 (July, 1866): 233. For a similar statement, see John Y. Lind to R. R. Hemphill, November 27, 1869, Hemphill Family Papers. 22. Anon., "The Enterprise and Energy of the South," Land We Love, 2 (February, 1867): 280. On blacks' birth and death rates, see "Editorial," Land We Love, 2 (January, 1867): 225; H. H. Goodloe, "The Negro Problem," Southern Magazine, 14 (April, 1874): 375. 23. Henry Watson, Jf., to Julia, December 16, 1865, Henry Watson, Jf., Papers, Duke University; Vance, "All about It," Land We Love, 6 (March, 1869): 367. 24. R., "My Experience with the Freedmen," Southern Cultivator, 24 (July, 1866): 162; "Editor's Note," ibid.; George Petrie, ed., "William F. Samford, Statesman and Man of Letters," Transactions ofthe Alabama Historical Society, 1899-1903,4 (1904): 479; Josephus Anderson to Howell Cobb, September 8, 1866, in Phillips, ed., The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb, 682. 64 The Old Arguments Anew 25. John Paris, "The Moral and Religious Status of the African Race in the Southern States," unpublished manuscript [1877?], John Paris Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; I. A. Maxwell , "Will the Negro Relapse into Barbarism?" DeBow's Review, a.w.s., 3 (February, 1867): 182-183; Charles Nordhoff, The Cotton States in the Spring and Summer of 1875 (New York, 1876), 105; "Editorial," Land We Love, 6 (February, 1869): 345. 26. Paris, "The Moral and Religious Status of the African Race in the Southern States"; anon., "The Haversack," Land We Love, 6 (November, 1868): 83. 27. See, for example, Nimrod Porter Diary and Notes, August 5, 16, 1865, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; A. M. Wallace to William A. Graham, September 18, 1865, in Max R. Williams , ed., The Papers ofAlexander Graham, Volume IV, 1864-1865 (Raleigh, 1976),363; A. H. Spence to W. R. Hemphill, May 6,1867, Hemphill Family Papers; J. C. Delavigne, "The Troubles in the South," Southern Magazine, 16 (May, 1875): 514; Daniel Heyward quoted in Charles Manigault, "Respecting Slavery." 28. John H. Dent Plantation Journal, February, 1866, vol. 6, p. 145, Troy State University, Troy, Alabama; Manigault, "Some Things Relating to Our Family Affairs but Not to Go in Our Will," unpublished manuscript [1873?], Manigault Family Papers. 29. John W. Norwood to Thomas Ruffin, May 8, 1865 in J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, ed., The Papers of Thomas Ruffin, 4 vols. (Raleigh, 1920), 3:451; Eliza B. Tillinghast to David Ray Tillinghast, June 3, 1865, Tillinghast Family Papers; N. S. Dodge, "A Charleston Vendue in 1842," Galaxy, 7 (January, 1869): 119-123; Baldwin testimony, February 10,1866, in Report ofthe Joint Committee on Reconstruction, 39th Congress, 1st session, House of Representatives Report 30 (Washington, 1866), 109; Manigault, "Respecting Slavery." 30. James Mallory Diary, January 4, 1871, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; William H. Meadow, "A Fact from the History of the War," New York Metropolitan Record, May 20, 1866, in John Houston Bills Diary, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; anon., "The Africans' Evil Genius Pursues the Victim ," Southern Opinion, September 7, 1867; anon., "Shall We Have a Negro War?" ibid., September 26, 1868; Charles Manigault, "Some Things Relating to Our Family Affairs." 31. Editorial, "The Cause and Duty of the South," Southern Opinion, June 15,1867; Robert D. Graham to William A. Graham, July 22,1865, in Williams, ed., The Papers of William Alexander Graham, 329; Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas Diary, July 22, 1865, May 7, 1869; James Mallory Diary, May 29, 1868; Samuel A. Agnew Diary, December 5, 1865, Southern Historical Col- Reconstruction and the New Proslavery Argument 65 lection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Cheveux Gris, "A Peculiar People," Southern Magazine, 13 (July, 1873): 173; Delavigne, "The Troubles in the South," 515; G. Manigault, "The Future of Young Africa," Land We Love, 5 (October, 1868): 528; Heyward quoted in Charles Manigault, "Respecting Slavery." 32. Tucker, The Relations of the Church to the Colored Race, 2; Dent Plantation Journal, vol. 7, p. 3; Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas Diary, December 3, 1865; anon., "Memories of the War," DeBow's Review, a.w.s., 3 (March, 1867): 228; anon., "Education of the Freedmen," ibid. (February, 1867): 196; Cheveux Gris, "The Negro in His Religious Aspect," Southern Magazine, 17 (October, 1875): 502; Paris, "The Moral and Religious Status of the African Race." 33. Journal entry of May 13, 1865, in Beth G. Crabtree and James W. Patton, eds., "Journal ofa Secesh Lady": The Diary ofCatherine Ann Devereux Edmondston, 1860-1866 (Raleigh, 1979),711; James Mallory Diary, June 24, 1865; David Schenck Diary, June 7, 1865, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 34. Kenneth Raynor to William Elder, September 20, 1865, in Raleigh Daily North Carolina Standard, November 1, 1865; Samuel A. Agnew Diary, November 8, December 12, 1865; editorial, "The Problem of the Negro Race," Charlotte Church 1ntelligencer, 6 (May 10, 1866): 66; G. Manigault, "The Future of Young Africa," 525, 528; Slidell to Edward G. W. Butler, December 2, 1867, Edward G. W. Butler Papers, Duke University. 35. Anon, "Mistaken Sympathy, or Mistaken Figures," Land We Love, 1 (September, 1866): 356; editorial, "Worshipping the Ebony Idol," Southern Opinion, June 29, 1867; Jones to Mrs. Mary Jones, July 28, 1866, in Myers, ed., Children of Pride, 1338; G. Manigault, "The Future of Young Africa," 523-529; Delavigne, "The Troubles in the South," 514-515; G. Manigault, "The Decay of Religion in the South," 214; David Schenck Diary, July 24, 1865; Heyward in "Respecting Slavery"; Cheveux Gris, "A Peculiar People," 173; Henry Watson, Jr., to James A. Wemyes, January 26, 1866, Watson Papers; Report of James Ellis, July 14, 1867, in George D. Humphrey, "The Failure of the Mississippi Freedmen's Bureau in Black Labor Relations, 18651867 ," Journal of Mississippi History, 36 (February, 1983): 36; Sparkman, "Results ofEmancipation," Land We Love, 4 (November, 1867): 24-26; anon., "Northern and Southern Labor Compared," Southern Cultivator, 28 (June, 1870): 173. 36. See Oscar Zeichner, "The Transition from Slave to Free Agricultural Labor in the Southern States," Agricultural History, 13 (January, 1939): 2232 . For sample contracts, see Smith College Studies in History, 1 (April, 1916): 152-154; Rosser H. Taylor, "Post-Bellum Southern Rental Contracts," Agricultural History, 17 (April, 1943): 121-128; Arney R. Childs, ed., Planters 66 The Old Arguments Anew and Business Men: The Guignard Family of South Carolina. 1795-1930 (Columbia , 1957), 106-108; Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge, 1977), 58-59,91, 124; Robert Higgs, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy. 1865-1914 (Cambridge, 1977), 43-44, 46, 50; John David Smith, "More than Slaves, Less Than Freedmen: The 'Share Wages' Labor System during Reconstruction," Civil War History, 26 (September, 1980): 256266 . 37. See, for example, William Porcher Miles Diary, December 8, 9, 31, 1872, Miles Papers; Jonathan W. Heacock to Sarah Bunting, October 13, 1867, Sarah W. Bunting Papers, Duke University; anon., "Education of the Freedmen ," DeBow's Review a.w.s., 3 (February, 1867): 195; Nordhoff, The Cotton States in the Spring and Summer of 1876,99; BellI. Wiley, "Vicissitudes of Early Reconstruction Farming in the Lower Mississippi Valley," Journal of Southern History, 3 (November, 1937): 451-452. 38. Edmund Ruffin, Jr., to Thomas Ruffin, June 9, 1865, in Hamilton, ed., The Papers of Thomas Ruffin, 3:457; J. M. Pelot to Julia Pelot, June 10, 16, 1866, Lalla Pelot Papers, Duke University; A. M. McPheeters to R. L. Patterson , June 10, 1865, Patterson Papers; J. D. Collins to John A. Cobb, July 31, 1865, in Phillips, ed., The Correspondence of Robert Toombs. Alexander H. Stephens. and Howell Cobb, 666; Samuel A. Agnew Diary, September 19, November 9, 1865; David Schenck Diary, June 14, 1865; Mrs. Eva B. Jones to Mrs. Mary Jones, June 27, 1865, in Myers, ed., Children of Pride, 1276; anon., "Letter from Mississippi," New Orleans Daily Picayune,December 2, 1865. 39. Bills Diary, March 18, June 15, July 30, December 26,1867, August 7, September 6, 1865, January 1, 1866; Gage to "My Dear Patterson," January I, 1866, Gage Papers. 40. Everard Green Baker Diary and Plantation Notes, September 5, 1865, October21, 1866, July 17, 1867, June 13, 1871, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; James Mallory Diary, January 16, September 12, December 18, 1866; Journal entries of December 29,31, 1865 in Crabtree and Patton, eds., "Journal of a Secesh Lady," 722-723, 724. 41. Dent Plantation Journal, April 20, 1866, vol. 6, p. 171. 42. Ibid., April 18, 1866, vol. 7 pp. 3, 5, 7, 22, 65. See Ray Mathis, John Horry Dent: South Carolina Aristocrat on the Alabama Frontier (University, AL, 1979),216-218. For similarcriticisms, see S. W., "The Labor Question, " Southern Cultivator, 26 (May 1868): 133. 43. See Steven Hahn, "Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging: Common Rights and Class Relations in the Postbellum South," Radical History Review, 26 (1982): 44-45, 48, 51; Jay Mandie, The Roots of Black Poverty (Durham, 1978), chapters 1-3; John Q. Anderson, ed., Brokenburn: The Journal ofKate Stone. 1861-1868 (Baton Rouge, 1955), 356, 368. Reconstruction and the New Proslavery Argument 67 44. The literature on the Lost Cause virtually ignores the slavery theme. See, for example, Susan S. Durant, "The Gently Furled Banner: The Development of the Myth of the Lost Cause, 1865-1900" (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1972),298; Rollin G. Osterweiss, The Myth ofthe Lost Cause, (Hamden, CT, 1973); Timothy C. Jacobson, "Tradition and Change in the New South, 1865-1910" (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1974), 27; Thomas L. Connelly and Barbara L. Bellows, God and General Longstreet: The Lost Cause and the Southern Mind (Baton Rouge, 1982); Gaines M. Foster, "Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, History, and the Culture of the New South, 1865-1913" (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1982),44-47,296,331,415. 45. Raleigh Daily Standard, August 5, 1865. For a similar view, see "To the Planters and Farmers of North Carolina," Tarboro (NC) Reconstructed Farmer, 1 (May, 1869): 18-19. 46. Cooke, "Virginia in the Revolution," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 53 (June, 1876): 2-3. On the development of proslavery images in the periodical literature of these years, see Arnold H. C. Pennekamp, "The Treatment of the Negro in the Literary Magazines of the South during the Reconstruction Period from 1865 to 1880" (M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina, 1936), and Rayburn S. Moore, "Southern Writers and Northern Literary Magazines, 18651890 " (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1956). 47. Paris, "The Moral and Religious Status of the African Race in the Southern States"; Marshall, The Exodus: Its Effect upon the People ofthe South (Washington, 1880), 8. 48. Editorial, "The New South," New Orleans Daily Picayune, May 12, 1876; editorial, "The Future of the Negro in the South," Atlanta Constitution, February 2, 188l. ...