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Introduction
- Southern Illinois University Press
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Introduction The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery. -w. E. B. Du Bois' In 1959 historian Stanley M. Elkins published a masterful historiographical essay on black slavery, one that remains insightful and influential today. Commenting on postemancipation thought about slavery, Professor Elkins remarked that following Appomattox the peculiar institution held little interest for Americans. "Throughout a good part of the postwar generation," wrote Elkins, "a moratorium on that subject was observed everywhere with surprising unanimity. ,,2 Elkins assumed that after the close of the Civil War, whites and blacks alike quickly swept slavery's skeleton aside. In his view Americans simply expunged from their thinking an institution that for years had dominated the country 's politics, split the nation in two, and, finally, sparked America's bloodiest war. Although critics have identified major weaknesses in Elkins's work,3 no one has challenged this comment on the early historiography of slavery. Most historians have themselves ignored the broad role slavery played as idea and symbol in postbellum American thought.4 That is not to say, of course, that scholars have sidestepped such important questions as the dynamics of emancipation, the interplay of race and class during Reconstruction, the evolution of sharecropping, and the rise of segregation. Indeed, these topics continue to attract much of the best recent scholarship in the field of Southern history. But following Elkins's lead, students of Southern history, race relations, 4 An Old Creed for the New South and intellectual history imply-by their avoidance of the subject-that Americans after the Civil War virtually wiped slavery from their consciousness. Black slavery, though abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment, retained a key place in American racial thought from Reconstruction to World War I. Although the Civil War sounded the death knell for slavery, in the years following Appomattox there was no discernible loss of interest in the peculiar institution. Slavery, a subject that virtually turned the world of antebellum Americans upside down, remained a major topic of discussion for a broad spectrum of Americans, including ex-planters, former abolitionists, U.S. Army officers, historians, folklorists , novelists, physicians, and "race thinkers." Black slavery assumed a whole new significance after the war. Although its destruction was now codified firmly in law, years of abuse and institutionalized degradation of blacks left a profound legacy to American life and thought. The importance of slavery to late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury thinking has been vastly understated by modem scholars. Despite Elkins's assertion, in these years slavery held an unusual attraction for writers, north and south, black and white. Not since the late antebellum years had so much attention been devoted to it. A recent computer -based bibliography identified well over six hundred books and articles on slavery published in the years 1865-1889. More than two thousand slavery items, including theses and dissertations, appeared in the period 1890-1920.5 Interest in slavery took various forms. In the years 1867-1912, for example, the New York Times published articles on such diverse aspects of slavery as the uncertain legal status of a freedwoman, the Northwest Ordinance, and textbook treatments of the peculiar institution.6 Late in the period under consideration, other newspapers devoted surprisingly detailed coverage to the activities of elderly former bondsmen. Ex-slaves, especially the venerable black mammies and uncles, were honored by black colleges and Confederate veteran groups alike.7 Editorial after editorial endorsed the establishment of oldage homes and the awarding of pensions to indigent ex-slaves. Obituaries eulogized the passing of former slaves.8 During the age of Jim Crow, then, the American public seemed to have almost an insatiable curiosity about slavery and the bondsmen.9 What caused this unusual concern with the long-defunct, peculiar institution? Many influential writers, including J. L. M. Curry, Theodore Roosevelt, and William E. Dodd, identified black slavery with the [3.83.87.94] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:11 GMT) Introduction 5 broad racial, social, and economic issues of their own day. For them slavery served as a crucial metaphor, a comparative model for what they perceived as new forms of servitude. 1O Some employed the term slavery to condemn unequal power relationships, including those involved in the struggle between labor and capital, tariff protectionism, and American imperialism in the Caribbean and the Pacific. II Others used slavery metaphorically to describe the conflicting relationship between blacks and whites. In 1875, for example, northern writer Charles Nordhoff...