Discovering Black Vermont: African American Farmers in Hinesburgh, 1790–1890

6 | The Post–Civil War Years

o chapter six The Post–Civil War Years All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions . . . spring narratives. —Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities After the Civil War, an exhausted nation began the task of reconstructing the destroyed South. Gaining suffrage for those recently freed became a priority of both blacks and northern whites. Historian Mia Bay claims that much of the Northerners’ eagerness for civil rights was based on their desire for blacks to stay in the South and grow cotton for Northern mills. Passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and military rule in the South was meant to stabilize the economy and ensure there would be enough Southern farm workers and raw materials from the South to stimulate further Northern industrialization. The struggles of Reconstruction and the whites’ need to return to some semblance of normalcy “ultimately exhausted their very limited enthusiasm for black civil rights.”¹ Whites seized on new pseudoscientific data, such as longer arm measurements of black soldiers, as yet another sign of black inferiority, and fears of race mixing again took center stage. Frederick Douglass’s hopes that people of color would “rise in one bound” to equality with whites through service in the war were dashed. Even the bravery of black soldiers was forgotten and reinterpreted by northern General Jacob Cox to mean that they were “most easily ruled.”² As the myths about black intellectual inferiority persisted, blacks returned to their argument that the whole idea of outward appearances signaling intellect was “born of absurdities” and that if there was such a thing as a racial defect, it was white behavior, specifically their inhumane treatment of people of color. Bay claims that blacks’ “intellectual resistance to racism’s relentless ideological assault was in many ways as Post–Civil War Years o 139 historic and difficult as the protest actions against slavery.”³ Perhaps it was more difficult after the war, because their hopes had been so high after emancipation and the constitutional amendments granting equal rights. They must have been desperately asking themselves how their hopes for justice and equality could be dashed yet again. In the post–Civil War years, as in the post–Revolutionary War period , conservative forces doused the fire of real reform and the hopedfor transformations in power structures. The Reconstruction era began with high hopes by abolitionists, white and black alike, as new ideas for equal rights and racial justice abounded. But meaningful reform was short-lived as whites from the North and the South colluded to ensure that blacks did not gain a foothold in the halls of power. As in the post-Revolutionary period, people in power washed away all memory of problematic truths as they reinterpreted the reasons for the war and invented new racial ideologies. Historian Eric Foner claims, “The war was ‘remembered’ not as the crisis of a nation divided by antagonistic labor systems and political and social ideologies, but as a tragic conflict within the American family, whose bloodshed was in many ways meaningless but that accomplished the essential task of solidifying a united nation.”4 White soldiers from both sides were reimagined as fighting for the noble principles of either union (the North) or self-determination (the South). The war’s legacy lay in the valor of the soldiers, “not in any ideological causes or purposes.”5 As such, the dreams of a socially transformed nation with racial justice and equality were abandoned in the rush to reunite whites from the North and South to rebuild the economy . As Frederick Douglass said, liberty and justice for blacks was doomed from “the hour that the loyal north began to shake hands over the bloody chasm.”6 The lives of the residents of the Hill illustrate the lowering expectations of people of color in the aftermath of the war. Bottom of the Hill: Descendents of Hannah and Prince Peters The Peters’s descendants, who made their living largely by working their acreage and becoming servants and farm laborers for local white families, survived longer on the Hill than those of the Clarks, many of whom continued the farming tradition elsewhere. Hannah and Prince’s children and grandchildren were present to see the Hill receive a new 140 o Discovering Black Vermont name after the war: Lincoln Hill.7 Josephus Peters, who had been born and raised on the Hill...