Crisis in Color: Racial Separation in Texas During Reconstruction

CRISIS IN COLOR: Racial Separation in Texas During Reconstruction Barry A. Crouch and L. J. Schultz As Winthrop D. Jordan has shown in his recent work, the white man's attitude toward the black did not originate in this country in 1619. The seeds of racial bias were planted even earlier, when Englishman first encountered African. These early English concepts flourished in America, bolstering and shoring up the "peculiar institution," and finally becoming identified as an inseparable part of it.1 With this in mind, it hardly seems feasible that the Thirteenth Amendment would foster economic, social, or psychological conditions that would guarantee , or even encourage, mixing of the white and black races in the South. A purely legal prelude to civil and social equality simply would not erase the phenomenon of "white over black." The war was an intermission, not an alteration, of a situation which had existed since the sixteenth century. The forces for racial polarization did not follow easy subheadings of politics, social customs, and the psychological effect of the Civil War. The problem of determining the beginnings of racial separation is a continuing source of controversy among historians. Unquestionably, urban slavery, in both the North and South, gave rise to segregation, but the postwar period is open to interpretation. The major point of departure has been C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow, which places the establishment of segregation in the 1890's.2 Others, ignoring Woodward's caution, have followed him almost 1 Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Bhck: American Attitudes Toward the Negro , 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968); The Negro Versus Equality, 1762-1826 (Chicago , 1969). See too, Joel Williamson's review of White Over Bhck in American Schofor, XXXVIII (Spring, 1969), 339-41. One might also profit from Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America ( Dallas, 1963 ) ; William Stanton, The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes Totuard Race in America, 1815-59 (Chicago , 1960); John C. Greene, "The American Debate on the Negro's Place in Nature , 1780-1815," Journal of the History of Ideas, XV (June, 1954), 384-96. 2 Although Woodward does discuss social and psychological attitudes, his thesis is primarily economic. See The Strange Career of Jim Crow (2nd rev. ed.; New York, 1966); Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951), 205-12; and Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (Boston, 1966), in which he acknowledges his debt to Charles A. Beard. 37 38CIVIL WAR HISTORY blindly.3 In the last decade, studies by Leon F. Litwack, V. Jacque Voegeli, Richard C. Wade, Joel Williamson, and most recently Roger A. Fischer, have questioned Woodward's essentially legal argument.4 Racial barriers undoubtedly existed in Texas before and during the Civil War, but they emerged most clearly, not only psychologically but legally, immediately after the war. In 1865, there was no need for southern apologists versed in the defense of slavery. "Slavery" no longer existed, but the historical, biblical, scientific, economic, and sociological antebellum polemics were revived . Although the arguments had once served their purpose, the case had to be won anew. The institution had been stripped of its legal support, and the mind of the South bore an acute awareness that the old arguments were undergoing a severe test. Southerners, however, were perfectly confident that their inept black dependents would never rise to the occasion of accepting the responsibility of becoming a "freed man." To the southerner, Texans not excepted, the freedman was simply a poor "nigger," out of place politically, socially, and economically . In November, 1865, when many of the Negroes in Texas did not even know they were free, George W. Paschal expressed the new facts of life in a letter to the Southern Intelligencer: We have lost negro slavery; let us hope that, by prudence, we will have gained the liberty of conscience and the freedom of thought and speech for the white man, which have not been tolerated for a long time. In saying that the negro is free, and that he must be allowed all the rights of a freedman, let none understand me as meaning, that he is thereby...