Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South

10. White Supremacy and the Question of Black Citizenship in the Post-Emancipation South

10 White Supremacy and the Question of Black Citizenship in the Post-Emancipation South Daryl Michael Scott With the Reconstruction Acts and the ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the legal ambiguity surrounding the national citizenship of free persons of African descent vanished, and for the first time most of those who had lived in the antebellum South could aver that they were now legally citizens of their states and the American nation. This triumph of civic or liberal nationalism did not please everyone, especially Southerners (whites born or assimilated into southern culture).1 After all, this revolution in American citizenship took place in the wake of military defeat and with the possibility of further federal action. Southerners watched from the political sidelines in dismay and sometimes fear as the general government and state conventions also granted voting rights to the new citizens. Virtually no Southerners thought that they had granted blacks state citizenship, which they viewed as a necessary condition for federal citizenship.2 If the war had brought home to Southerners that their states would not be sovereign, the Radical Reconstruction amendments, in their estimation, stripped them of home rule. Despite white supremacy campaigns that excluded blacks from the political community and extracted the marrow from their citizenship, scholars have nonetheless tended to treat the new fundamental laws as an accomplished, if imperfect , fact rather than a dead letter in the American South. As a consequence, the history of the post-emancipation South has been written from the perspective of federal pronouncements rather than onthe -ground realities. Their official badges of citizenship notwithstanding, persons of African descent struggled for generations against ethnoracial 224 · Daryl Michael Scott nationalism. Recognizing a gap, scholars have often referred to blacks as second-class citizens, a status unknown under the law. This compromised language underwrites the nearly universally held view of America as the quintessential example of civic nationalism and distorts global understandings of the history of nationalism.3 When white supremacy is explored as an ideology as well as a condition, its ethnoracial nationalism becomes clear and the central claim of American exceptionalism is shown to be its most enduring myth.4 I Over the last two generations, historians have espied black nationalism everywhere and white nationalism virtually nowhere.5 From liberals to Marxists, historians have portrayed slaves and mainstream leaders such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois as black nationalists along with Marcus Garvey and the Nation of Islam.6 Steven Hahn has explored both black and white agrarian movements in the South and found racial nationalism only among the former—even though the rural blacks he studied aimed at inclusion in the American political community.7 In most studies of nationalism, such movements for political inclusion, despite group solidarity, would be treated as expressions of civic nationalism . The American scholarly community has treated black nationalism as sui genus, which largely explains why it has been a cipher in the broader discourse on nationalism. The usual core definition of nationalism— movements for and maintenance of political sovereignty over a territory, or at least self-rule in a multinational state—is applied to neither blacks nor whites. When this widely accepted definition is applied, white nationalism has been bountiful in America and black nationalism has been relatively minor. American historiography is inside out. Ethnoracial nationalism differs from its civic counterpart in making racial or ethnic identity the basis for belonging to the nation.8 For ethnoracial nationalists, a nation must be racially if not ethnically homogeneous , and while the presence of racial or ethnic aliens might be tolerated in the homeland, they cannot be part of the political community. As long as few blacks were free, America’s view of itself as a people based on ideals remained largely undisturbed. Yet, the growing free black population in the North and the abolitionist movement brought the question to the fore. With the rise of the movement to colonize free blacks, integral White Supremacy and the Question of Black Citizenship in the Post-Emancipation South · 225 nationalism, attenuated as it was, appeared in the United States generations before it arrived in Europe. Leading statesmen such as Thomas Jefferson , Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln envisioned an America free of blacks.9 Prior to the war, civic nationalism prevailed only in a few states in the Northeast, and no major political party, especially the Republicans, championed the idea of...