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Surviving abolitionists who had hoped to eliminate both slavery and racial prejudice and also to provide free blacks with civil rights must have found the 1890s a depressing decade.1 Even the words that once signified deep moral and racial commitments were losing old meanings. Century ’s editor hailed civil service reformers as modern abolitionists who had created a new emancipation proclamation freeing “political slaves.” The comparison diminished the meaning and achievements of emancipation.2 Black slavery was gone, it was true. But without land, many black sharecroppers were trapped in a cycle of debt and poverty that made a mockery of their freedom. Starting with Mississippi in 1890, southern states ended any possibility of interracial political coalitions by systematically stripping African American men of the political rights that some abolitionists had once argued could never be taken from them. Charles Levermore, writing for New England Magazine, found “infractions” of black voting rights “immoral ” but could only wonder what “we, the kinsmen and friends of John Brown, Wendell Phillips, and William Lloyd Garrison” could “say to those who spurn such laws.” With the blessing of the Supreme Court’s 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, a system of legal segregation was being put in place throughout the South. Although violence against freed people was nothing new, it reached a new level of ferociousness. In 1892 alone, 155 blacks were lynched. Protesting against racial violence that year, the American Missionary argued that every man deserved a fair trial and legal protection against the rage of a vindictive mob. The outrages in the South were “a disgrace to our civilization and a crime against nineteenth century enlightenment.” The entire nation should be concerned, the magazine suggested, especially since newspapers had provided the public with ample information about the problem.3 Some northerners clearly were distressed. In 1894, Faneuil Hall, once the scene of so many abolitionist gatherings, now hosted a large meeting with William Lloyd Garrison Jr. as one of the principal speakers. It resulted in the founding of the Massachusetts Anti-Lynching Society. A few years reminiscences฀of฀the฀1890s c h a p t e r 5The Remembrance Is Like a Dream later, a particularly gruesome Georgia lynching witnessed by thousands of people sparked other mass protest meetings in the North. But these efforts had little impact on the South. As the editor of Century observed, southern lawlessness demonstrated that southern law gave way to southern public opinion.4 While many northerners denounced the violence, they were hardly prepared to intervene once again in southern racial affairs. Of course, abolitionists had always argued that race prejudice was a northern as well as a southern phenomenon. In 1892, the proposed bill that would have used federal power to protect black voting rights failed, and the discussion of black political rights at the level of national politics would not be resumed for decades. As the article “When Slavery Went out of Politics,” published in Scribner’s in 1895, pointed out, the period of intense political debate over the treatment of freed people had ended, and these concerns had “gradually faded from the view of the politicians.” The Republican Party platform the following year neglected to include its usual support for the use of military force to defend black suffrage, thus clarifying the point that the party had little interest in southern blacks. Determined to defeat William Jennings Bryan, the presidential candidate of both the Populists and the Democrats, Republicans appealed to the South by embracing reconciliation and depicting the Civil War as a disaster. In the last years of the decade, the debate over imperialism revealed widespread racist assumptions with both imperialists and anti-imperialists indulging in antiblack rhetoric to justify their positions.5 Taking advantage of favorable postage rates and the expansion of advertising , the monthly magazines, especially Century, Harper’s, and Scribner’s, played an important role in reinforcing views of black inferiority and in justifying southern racial policy in the 1890s. Century, defining its mission as leading public opinion rather than reflecting it, took pride in presenting a national rather than a sectional perspective. Its fiction and nonfiction pieces presented a range of views about black people and the southern question. The editor, Richard Watson Gilder (or his chosen essayists), attacked lynching in several “Topics of the Times” columns, while a number of letter writers praised blacks’ progress and their interest in education and supported higher education for blacks. Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s account of his black troops during the...

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