EPILOGUE
The Legacy of National Citizenship in the Era of the Civil War and Reconstruction
Americans confronted anew during the 1860s the issues of who comprised “the people,” as well as what citizenship meant, and they did so in the course of the hard-fought triumph of the Founders’ ideals of liberty and freedom over the paradox of slavery. From the smoke of the Civil War battlefields, and equally hazy antebellum understandings of what national citizenship meant, Americans began to clarify citizenship doctrine and practice in ways still with us today. Citizenship as a concept became primarily national in character. It contained certain civil, political, and economic rights to be safeguarded principally by the federal government, not the states, and which applied to all citizens regardless of whether they were black or naturalized. At the same time Americans acknowledged the nation’s power to define and protect its citizens at home and abroad, they affirmed the consensual nature of citizenship by defending the expatriation right individuals have to opt out of their birth citizenship without their native country’s permission and choose a new allegiance.
African Americans and Irish Americans energetically helped to shape the more modern and better-defined understanding of national citizenship that Americans fashioned after the Civil War. The experience of defending the Republic strengthened for many Irish Americans and African Americans their American identity and brought greater self-recognition of their allegiance to the United States. Moreover, shouldering the federal rifle invigorated in both groups expectations of full inclusion in the American people, along with the same protection, rights, privileges, and opportunities enjoyed by native-born whites. Both groups had in the past cited their contributions to America as a response to exclusion. Now, in the wake of the Civil War, Irish Americans and African Americans reasserted that argument with greater vigor as a result of their sharpened sense of American identity, as well as the moral foundation provided by their military service to the Union. Both groups relied on these military contributions to help frame and resolve the debate over the meaning of the Union’s victory and define changes made to the nation’s constitutional order. That between 188,000–196,000 African Americans, and 150,000 (if not more) Irish Americans, fought in the Union’s armed forces made some native-born whites more receptive to the idea that members of both groups should be included in the American people. Their military service allowed both groups to push their expectations to the center of Civil War era debate.1
6. “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner.” A celebration by Thomas Nast of postwar egalitarianism, in this drawing Uncle Sam carves a turkey at a table surrounded by men, women, and children of different races and nationalities. Uncle Sam’s female counterpart, Columbia, sits at the far left of the table between a black man and a Chinese family. An Irishman sits at the far right of the illustration. A banner in the background celebrates the Fifteenth Amendment, and the table’s centerpiece is labeled “Self-Government/ Universal Suffrage.” Behind Uncle Sam a painting depicts Castle Garden, a major entry point for immigrants before Ellis Island. Thomas Nast in Harper’s Weekly, November 20, 1869. Courtesy Library of Congress.
From this dialogue between Irish Americans, African Americans, and native-born whites, a new understanding of national citizenship emerged in the law: that any person born or naturalized in the United States (excluding Native Americans) was entitled to the same rights and privileges regardless of race or former status as a slave or alien. As Republican congressman George S. Boutwell from Massachusetts pronounced on July 4, 1865, “The war for freedom and the Union has been carried on by the whites and negroes born on this continent, by the Irish and the Germans, and indeed by representatives of every European race. With this fresh experience we ought to make it a part of the organic government that no State shall make any distinction in the enjoyment of the elective franchise on account of race or color.” Although Boutwell spoke about the vote, his sentiments pointed to a broader understanding of citizenship rights in general.2
African Americans and Irish Americans significantly involved themselves, in separate but intersecting ways, in the redefinition of American citizenship that occurred during the 1860s. The uncoordinated efforts of both groups resulted in a broader concept of citizenship, the rights associated with it, and its applicability to blacks, the foreign-born, and native-born whites on an equal basis. Both groups helped eliminate the possibility of caste or second-class categorization in the law of national citizenship, consummated with the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, even where it existed in practice as to blacks through extralegal white discrimination and then the rise of Jim Crow. Even where tensions persisted between members of both groups, and many Irish Americans continued to define citizenship along racial lines, overall Irish American and African Americans helped to mold the more modern understanding of national citizenship that we recognize today. In the process, African Americans and Irish Americans acted as American citizens.
Moreover both groups successfully urged a more robust use of the national government’s power, at least in terms of defining and protecting the rights associated with citizenship. In this way, African Americans and Irish Americans helped to promote the concept of a stronger American nation-state. African Americans urged the federal government to assume the authority to define citizenship rights and then enforce them, revising in the process the boundaries of federalism in the law of citizenship. Irish Americans challenged the United States to assert its power on a global stage, not only as a defender of republicanism but in terms of protecting abroad those who it identified as its citizens. Overall, the theme of a more powerful nation-state linked with Attorney General Bates’s earlier recognition that national citizenship afforded to individuals rights and duties that could not be truncated by the laws of a state, and Francis Lieber’s argument that the United States formed, “and ought to form, a Nation.” Adding to this impulse, African Americans and Irish Americans benefited, as did the native-born, from a pension system for Civil War veterans and their families, which gradually replaced local models of assistance and strengthened the ties between the federal government and its citizens both during and after the war.3
Additionally, African Americans and Irish Americans experienced a kindling of American patriotism generated by their sense of inclusion during the 1860s, in contrast to cynicism and exclusion born of slavery and nativism before the war. The arguments of both groups now helped to fuel the broadening of American nationalism from a white/native form to something more willing to incorporate immigrants and blacks, even where nationalism remained hotly contested ground. Both groups thus helped to bring to gradual fruition, in practical terms, Abraham Lincoln’s July 1858 declaration that something stronger than a blood nationality united Americans. Lincoln noted that “perhaps half our people…have come from Europe,” without any connection to the Founding days by blood. “But when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men,” Lincoln pronounced, “that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration…and so they are.” For Lincoln, “That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriot hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”4
For blacks, change came in particularly profound forms during the 1860s. Ex-slaves suddenly transformed from chattel property to person and, in light of their military service, could never go back to bondage again. Both Northern and Southern blacks validated their manhood and American identity by joining the armed forces in the first place. This choice, along with other experiences in the military, helped many blacks to recognize an American allegiance from which they had been excluded by law before the war (besides the fact that consideration about their national allegiance probably never crossed the mind of most slaves).
Black soldiers bolstered their declarations of equality by successfully protesting unequal pay, opposing other inequities, and performing well in combat. Blacks seized on the ideals embodied in events such as flag presentations, the intersection of equal rights and military justice, and mustering-out ceremonies, and sought to have them permanently enshrined in citizenship doctrine. Military experiences helped blacks appreciate a greater awareness of the power of national organization, and increasingly recognize, in harmony with free labor Republican ideology, the value of education and the worth of black labor.
In this context, blacks articulated more developed and cohesive demands for rights through national and state-level conventions and organizations, including across the South within months of Appomattox. Blacks helped to shape the legal concept of citizenship that emerged during Reconstruction by calling for due process and equality before the law, civil and political rights, and economic autonomy and self-sufficiency, including intervention by the federal government to prevent de facto slavery created through disadvantageous race-based state laws and contractual interpretations. With astounding speed, blacks went from having no rights that whites were bound to respect to asserting a voice in America’s governance and standing as equal citizens armed with the rifle, the vote, and other important rights, even where some whites sought to prevent them from enjoying these rights in practice. African Americans helped to motivate such changes in the law as the Civil War amendments, Civil Rights acts of 1866 and 1875, Reconstruction acts, Enforcement acts, and creation of the Department of Justice.
Additionally, more than two decades after the war, Joseph T. Wilson, who fought with the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, lauded the effect of educational opportunities in the army: “Since the war I have known of more than one who have taken up the profession of preaching and law making, whose first letter was learned in camp; and not a few who have entered college.” In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Freedmen’s Bureau helped coordinate the education of ex-slaves, while various faith-based aid societies such as the American Missionary Association, American Freedmen’s Union Commission, and organizations run by specific denominations, poured money, supplies, and thousands of Northern white teachers into the South during the late 1860s. Black colleges such as Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee; Hampton University in Virginia; and Howard University in Washington, D.C., established within years of the Civil War, trained black teachers. The educational initiative comprised a long-term success of Reconstruction. By 1892, 25,000 schools existed for blacks in the South, and nearly two-thirds of the 20,000 Southern blacks who taught in them had themselves been educated in schools founded during Reconstruction. By the 1890s, more than 2 million Southern blacks had learned to read, many could write, and blacks edited more than 150 newspapers across the South.5
For Irish Americans, changes wrought by the Civil War were less profound, if more stable and long-lasting. Irish American military service accelerated the withering, though not the death, of nativist feelings and action against them. Irish Americans now unapologetically celebrated their ethnic character and religious identity, but felt entitled to do so as Americans. In contrast to antebellum nativist fears, the country embraced the Fenian movement and its self-identification as the vanguard of an American-led global impulse toward republicanism and democracy. Empowered by their military service and their votes, Irish Americans successfully demanded that the United States enforce expatriation rights and remove legal distinction between native-born and naturalized citizens. These changes in the law came about through the Fourteenth Amendment and the Act of July 27, 1868. In the process, Irish Americans established their power as a national voting bloc and helped to sanctify the idea that conscious embrace of Americans ideals and principles formed a basis of citizenship alongside native birth.
In the explosion of postwar industrial and geographic growth, more Americans began to view immigration not as a liability but as a boon, a way to fuel industrialization and provide the labor necessary to open still untapped resources of the American continent. According to John Higham, nativism lay substantially dormant for the two decades after Appomattox; overall, it never again came close to achieving the power it did during the zenith of Know Nothingism. This circumstance inspired Frederick Douglass, who in 1879 noted that nativist hostility against the Irish and Germans had melted, and that Boston, Baltimore, and New York were no longer scenes of violence against European newcomers. As racist forces reestablished their dominance, Douglass voiced his hope that black rights in the South would similarly “revive, survive and flourish again.”6
Postwar changes played out for Irish Americans in different ways. The dedication in May 1879 of New York City’s new St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and the election in 1880 of Irish-born William R. Grace as that city’s first Catholic mayor, indicated the increasing stability of Irish America and the Catholic Church in the United States. By the 1880s, accessible public transportation in many cities permitted an avenue of escape from working-class slums to places such as Brooklyn and South Boston. Irish Americans began to play increasingly critical roles in urban politics through the use of organized machines, such as New York’s Tammany Hall, and by 1890 Irish American bosses led many urban Democratic machines or otherwise wielded heavy influence. The establishment of nationwide religious, political, and cultural institutions, such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians (reorganized in 1871), Philo-Celtic societies (1873), the American Irish Historical Society (1897), and the Gaelic League of America (1898), focused on creating a respectable Irish cultural identity so that members of this ethnic community could assimilate not as members of a sullen group but one noted for its culture and civilization. By 1900, two-thirds of Irish America, 5 million strong, was born in the United States, and Irish Americans had largely achieved occupational parity with native whites: 35 percent engaged in white collar work or farming, 50 percent worked as skilled laborers, and 15 percent toiled as unskilled laborers (although these proportions varied geographically).7
Yet, based on persistent native-born fears about Irish American political power now wielded through powerful machines noted for their corruption, political tensions continued. The New Jersey legislature in 1870 thus abolished elective government in Jersey City as a result of the election of Irish Americans there, and the 1885 Massachusetts legislature removed Boston’s police force from city control when Hugh O’Brien became that city’s first Irish Catholic mayor. Thomas Nast published in Harper’s Weekly during the late 1860s and early 1870s cartoons that depicted simianlike Irish Americans. One caricature, entitled “The Day We Celebrate,” represented St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in 1867 by showing apelike Irish Americans wearing top hats and beating policemen. Such depictions contrasted with Nast’s 1869 illustration, “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner,” which celebrated egalitarianism by depicting Uncle Sam carving a turkey at a large table surrounded by men, women, and children of different races and nationalities, including the Irish. Uncle Sam’s female counterpart, Columbia, sits at the far left of the table between a black man and a Chinese family, and the table’s centerpiece celebrates “Self-Government/Universal Suffrage.”8
Citizenship status notwithstanding, uncertainty remained for increasing numbers of Irish Americans ascending into the middle class by the 1890s. Besides facing the painful separation of moving away from ethnic neighborhoods, these Irish Americans stood vulnerable to possible Yankee rejection as well as financial failure, which threatened to send them tumbling back to the working-class neighborhoods they sought to escape, especially during the economic turmoil of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The transition into the middle class also gave rise to a vaudeville form of parody, which amused some Irish Americans, and infuriated others, by poking fun at Irish American aspirations, as well as class tensions within ethnic America.9
7. “The Day We Celebrate.” In contrast to including an Irish American at the table in “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner,” Thomas Nast in this engraving depicts the Irish Americans as stereotypical apelike brutes. Thomas Nast in Harper’s Weekly, April 6, 1867. Courtesy American Social History Project.
Moreover, the Irish American working class continued to face the realities of industrial life. On one hand, Irish American males broke into the ranks of the skilled and unionized trades to a surprising degree by 1900. On the other hand, the economic turbulence that marked the period from 1873 to 1897, as well as increasing labor tumult (from 1880 to 1905, the building trades alone experienced ninety-five hundred strikes), created for these workers tough and uncertain lives. Irish Americans played a prominent role in many labor actions, which led to bloody clashes between mobs and militia. Hostility among some Americans toward organized labor blurred with attitudes toward Irish Americans as a result of their prominence in unions. A good portion of Irish America’s unskilled laboring population, moreover, remained in squalid slums such as Chicago’s Bridgeport or Philadelphia’s Skittereen.10
In this context, a radical form of Irish American thought emerged, creating some previously unexpected alliances and helping blur ethnic lines by emphasizing class issues instead. According to historian Edward T. O’Donnell, one reason antebellum Irish Americans often stood on the “wrong side of all the burning social issues of mid-nineteenth-century American, be it temperance, abolition, or public education” was their pre–Civil War association of reformers with nativism. The diminution of nativism, affirmation of naturalized citizenship, and the economic situation during the 1870s and 1880s, all led to and made possible Irish American interest in causes such as antimonopolism, labor unionism, and land reform.11
In surprising ways, Irish American radicalism carried forward the Civil War era’s discussion about human rights, and it merged with some elements of the Protestant, native-born reform tradition. These circumstances encouraged both groups to reevaluate their assessments and stereotypes of the other. Irish American organizations honored abolitionist Wendell Phillips on his death in 1884, and when a fellow crusader against bondage, James Redpath, died in 1891, Irish and American flags fluttered next to each other at his home. Both Phillips and Redpath supported the Irish National Land League, an organization that promoted Irish independence coupled with socioeconomic change, united the Irish American community across class, and introduced thousands of working-class Irish Americans to labor and reform critiques.12
Born in Galway in 1837, Patrick Ford became one of the most famous of the Irish American radicals. Ford’s parents brought him to Boston in 1845, in flight from the Famine. At fifteen, Ford worked as a printer’s apprentice for William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, and in 1862, he enlisted with his brother in the Ninth Massachusetts (as a postwar letter shows, Ford had great respect for his commander, Guiney). Ford relocated to New York City in 1870 and there founded the Irish World, which achieved an impressive audience on both sides of the Atlantic. Ford used the Irish World, which he renamed the Irish World and Industrial Liberator in 1878, to endorse trade unions, justify labor violence, and promote issues such as women’s suffrage and black inclusion in the labor movement. While calling for Irish independence, Ford also urged social reform on both sides of the Atlantic. In the mid-1880s, Ford tempered his positions in the face of intensifying labor violence and nativist condemnation of Irish American involvement in it, criticism from the Catholic Church, and denunciation by “pure” Irish nationalists who recognized the need for social and economic reform in Ireland but charged that Ford’s radicalism distracted attention from the objective of Ireland’s liberation.13
Ford also took exception to what he characterized as Anglo America’s view that they “were the American people,” along with its expectation that other groups had to reject their own identity in order to assimilate with it so as to create a nationality. Ford instead vowed that “each element has a perfect right to its own traditions, its own social usages, customs, religion, modes of living, amusements” and that “no other element has any right…to interfere or dictate in the matter.” Fearing that “Anglo-Americans and Protestants” would transform America’s republic into an aristocracy, Ford looked to Irish America “for the preservation of democratic principles in our government.” As Frederick Douglass tried to do for African Americans, Ford articulated an Irish American vision of the nation matching Irish American aspirations for equality.14
Meanwhile, even some middle-class and upper-class Irish Americans embraced the notion of labor reform. Patrick Guiney, serving as Boston’s assistant district attorney after the war, did not forget his youth spent working in factories, and in 1866 he accepted the nomination of the Workingman Party to run for Congress (he came in third, behind the victorious Republican candidate and the Democratic nominee). The Workingman Party supported an improved moral, intellectual, and social culture for workers, besides practical measures such as an eight-hour work day. During the campaign, Guiney vowed to fight for laborers’ rights, called for support from both Democrats and Republicans to promote the interests of common American citizens, and expressed anger that one New Hampshire company issued an 80 percent dividend to its stockholders but not so much as a cent increase in its workers’ wages.15
On the other hand, native reformers promoting clean city governments grew angry with corrupt Irish American political machines. Eugene Lawrence’s scathing articles, published between 1871 and 1876 in Harper’s Weekly, blamed Irish Catholics for New York City’s problems, and recalled their role in the wartime Draft Riots. The labor struggle forced working-class Irish Americans to confront strikebreaking and mob violence. Intensifying bloodshed associated with labor unrest helped reinvigorate nativism against Catholic and foreign-born radicals, and immigrants in general, by the later 1880s. Members of the American Protective Association, founded in 1887 and centered in the Midwest, took an oath never to vote for a Catholic, employ one if a Protestant could be found, or strike with them. While never achieving the success of antebellum nativist organizations, the group raised a cry at the flow of new immigrants.16
Within years of the Civil War, the Orange Riots in New York City illuminated all of these persistent tensions. On July 14, 1870 and 1871, deadly riots erupted in New York City during successive Protestant Irish parades celebrating the anniversary of William of Orange’s victory over Catholic James II at the battle of the Boyne (there were eight deaths in 1870 and more than sixty deaths and one hundred injuries in 1871). The Orange Riots transcended simple, centuries-old animosity between Protestant and Catholic Irish to reveal the continuing contest in New York City between working-class Irish Catholics standing up to defend their rights against persecution versus middle- and upper-class Protestant reformers disgusted with Tammany Hall corruption and seeking the downfall of the Tweed Ring, persistent nativists who still feared the threat of Irish Catholic ascendance, and concerns overall regarding the values and increasing protest radicalism of a growing working class. Each side worried that the other threatened to subvert American republicanism, so that, as historian Michael A. Gordon wrote,
Irish workers and many middle-class Irish allies believed that the Orangemen symbolized the oppression they had known in Ireland and that Orange principles would help to subvert republicanism and ‘Anglo-Saxonize’ America at the same time that industrialization was causing class lines to harden. Supporters of the Orangemen, believing it was the Irish Catholics who threatened republicanism, attempted to reassert the values they believed should govern social relationships as immigrants like the Irish challenged their class authority.
Irish American veteran, author, and revolutionary D. P. Conyngham in 1871 thus distinguished between Protestantism as a “religion of toleration” but Orangeism as “the embodiment of intolerance, bigotry, and slavish degradation.”17
Meanwhile, Irish nationalism, which figured so prominently in the redefinition of American citizenship, alienated some of its American support, as some elements of the movement shifted from romantic forms of rebellion to social revolution and terrorism by the 1880s, at the same time America faced the labor strife with which Irish Americans became increasingly associated. The stabbing murder of the new chief secretary for Ireland in Dublin in May 1882 echoed President James Garfield’s September 1881 death from an assassin’s bullets. Bombings by “Dynamiters” in England mirrored labor agitation in the United States such as the Haymarket episode. Increasing violence alienated Americans, and divisions appeared even within Irish America over Irish nationalism’s radical tactics.18
Despite their uplifting transformation in the law, blacks continued to confront even greater paradox and duality, as practical realities unceasingly challenged egalitarian ideals. For example, the Union veterans’ organization, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), officially adopted a color-blind policy for membership and permitted blacks to join it. Yet, while integrated nationally, black and white veterans often attended segregated local posts. The GAR nonetheless provided blacks with opportunities on several levels, and historian Barbara A. Gannon aptly noted that its members, “black and white, created and sustained an interracial organization in a society making giant steps backwards into an almost dark age of racial segregation. If they could not hold back the darkness, they should receive some credit for lighting a small candle against the coming of the night.” By the 1880s, the GAR afforded blacks a vehicle for broadcasting their vision of the Civil War’s meaning against those who sought to submerge the memory of slavery and black military service, or promote the South’s Lost Cause mythology. Through GAR posts, blacks commemorated emancipation and the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, sponsored speeches and campfire meetings recalling their military experiences, honored local black veterans as well as white friends in naming their posts, participated alongside whites in Memorial Day observances, Fourth of July celebrations, and GAR encampments, and consistently reminded members of both races of black military service and their struggle for freedom in the process. Integrated posts existed more frequently than previously thought and allowed blacks to take part as full-fledged members, bringing together veterans regardless of race or class just as the Union army did decades earlier. Even segregated posts in the GAR represented a milestone, incorporating blacks and whites into a nationwide organization and affording black veterans a local social, charitable, and political platform. While the GAR did not vigorously challenge lynching and discrimination against blacks with action, and many GAR members held prejudiced views typical of the time, on the other hand the GAR provided an important veterans organization for blacks and kept alive memories for future generations of both blacks and whites.19
Some USCT officers maintained a presence in the lives of their black soldiers, while others promoted the African American cause. Internally, many black veterans maintained a close sense of comradeship with their former army friends, staying in touch whether through the GAR or private means. In some areas, USCT veterans clustered together, such as in North Carolina’s northeastern central section, permitting the development of sustained security and support networks that resulted in less white-on-black violence than in other sections of the state. Moreover, an 1872 gerrymander by Democrats created the “Black Second” congressional district in that area, which elected black congressmen such as James O’Hara, Henry Plummer Cheatham, and George H. White during the last quarter of the century. Other black veterans, however, focused not on community or citizenship issues but confronted in personal ways the intensely difficult adjustment to civilian life many soldiers felt after serving in combat; others simply lost contact, especially those who moved away from the local area where their unit had been recruited. Moreover, in the South, black veterans frequently became the target of intense anger from whites who felt overlapping feelings of prejudice, betrayal by their participation in the Union victory, or simply dismissed them as willing simpletons conned by the Yankees.20
Not surprisingly, historian Donald R. Shaffer found that black veterans as a group lived poorer, shorter lives marked by lower status jobs, harder physical labor, and greater susceptibility to disease than did their white comrades but also achieved a level of prosperity greater than blacks who did not serve. Shaffer concluded that the Civil War “left a significant positive legacy” for black veterans, validated their manhood, created admiration for them within the black community, and permitted them to benefit from military pensions. The 1890 census also reveals a disproportionate number of black veterans in developing urban areas in both the North and South. On the other hand, Shaffer notes the partial nature of blacks’ gains, the targeting of black veterans by angry white southerners, and the eventual marginalization of their contributions to the Union victory.21
Even the pension process provided a paradox for blacks. Shaffer found that white veterans achieved greater success in obtaining pensions than blacks did. In a sample he examined, about 92 percent of white Union veterans made at least one successful application as compared to approximately 75 percent of blacks, almost 84 percent of white widows received a pension versus 61 percent of their black counterparts, almost 70 percent of white parents succeeded in obtaining a pension in contrast to about 36 percent for blacks, and approximately half of both black and white minor children proffered successful claims. Yet Shaffer accurately notes that bureaucratic factors, and other matters admittedly borne from overall racism against blacks, skewered these numbers, but not race-neutral pension laws. Where they did refer to blacks, these laws often sought to assist black veterans and their dependants by setting an easier standard for African American widows in terms of proving their marriage. The illiteracy of many African Americans hampered their ability to complete adequate applications, and poverty hindered their means to hire attorneys skilled in prosecuting pension claims and to pay for other related legal expenses. Racism by individual examiners at the U.S. Pension Bureau, who investigated black veterans’ claims more closely than they did whites’ applications, infected the process. These examiners more frequently ordered “special examinations” for black claimants, often out of racism although other times simply because defective black applications failed to offer sufficient proof of service such that the government could grant a pension.22
Judicially, the courts initially protected black legal rights. When defense counsel challenged a guilty jury verdict against whites who burglarized a black woman in Kentucky on a May 1866 night on the basis of a state law that a black had no right to testify against the white thieves, the circuit court of Kentucky took notice that formerly “black witnesses were excluded” so that “crimes of the deepest dye were committed by white men with impunity.” “Congress met these evils,” continued Supreme Court justice Noah Swayne, writing in his capacity as circuit court judge, “by giving to the colored man everywhere the same right to testify ‘as is enjoyed by white citizens,’ abolishing the distinction between white and colored witnesses, and by giving to the courts of the United States jurisdiction of all causes, civil and criminal, which concern him, wherever the right to testify as if he were white is denied to him or cannot be enforced in the local tribunals of the state.” Swayne identified the Civil War as an “impetuous vortex” that swallowed up the “evil” of slavery, leading to a Thirteenth Amendment that “destroyed the most important relation between capital and labor in all the states where slavery existed.” According to Swayne, the amendment’s drafters “sought security against the recurrence of a sectional conflict” but also “felt that much was due to the African race for the part it had borne during the war,” and they were “impelled by a sense of right and by a strong sense of justice to an unoffending and long-suffering people.” The court upheld the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, relying on the Thirteenth Amendment’s authorization that Congress could enforce it by appropriate legislation and prohibit a reconstitution of slavery except in name, and added that the amendment “throws its protection over every one, of every race, color, and condition within that jurisdiction, and guards them against the recurrence of the evil,” slavery, so that “the constitution, thus amended, consecrates the entire territory of the republic to freedom, as well as to free institutions” for all future time.23
In 1873, Iowa’s Supreme Court affirmed the “equality of all men before the law, which is not limited by color, nationality, religion or condition in life,” and that the principle forbidding that rights could be denied “on the ground of race or color” had “become incorporated into the paramount law of the Union” by the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment. In Coger v. The North Western Union Packet Co., a biracial teacher of black children boarded a steamboat on the Mississippi River. When the management of the vessel, following a custom separating blacks from whites on board, sold Coger a meal ticket entitling her to eat only in a separate area of the ship, she returned the ticket and asked a man to buy for her an unrestricted ticket without informing the ticket agent that it was for a black. After seating herself at dinner, Coger was told by one of the steamboat’s officers that she must leave the table and eat elsewhere, and when she refused, the captain forcibly removed her from the dining area. Coger resisted so that the table cloth was torn off and dishes broken. The court noted, “By her spirited resistance and her defiant words, as well as by her pertinacity in demanding the recognition of her rights…she has exhibited evidence of the Anglo-Saxon blood that flows in her veins. While we may consider that the evidence, as to her words and conduct, does not tend to establish that female delicacy and timidity so much praised, yet it does show an energy and firmness in defense of her rights not altogether unworthy of admiration.” The court went on to affirm that all who observe reasonable rules and regulations of a common carrier had the right to receive first-class accommodations, regardless of color, that the Fourteenth Amendment and Civil Rights Act of 1866 sought to protect blacks from prejudice borne of their former condition of slavery and “protect them in person and property from its spirit,” and upheld liability for damages to the plaintiff.24
Moreover, Cecilia Elizabeth O’Leary correctly noted that an “uneasy relationship between citizenship, racism, and nationalism would persist into the next century as a central contradiction in the construction of American identity and allegiance,” something highlighted from the start by the fact that black soldiers did not march in the Grand Review of 150,000 Union soldiers in May 1865, an inspirational pageant celebrating American power and nationhood, but focused on Northern whites. Nonetheless, the process of incorporation had begun; despite setbacks and retreats, there would be no going back. As O’Leary noted just as accurately, “At no other time during the nineteenth century would blacks consider themselves so fully American as they did during Reconstruction.” Thus Thomas W. Higginson, an abolitionist colonel of a black regiment, recalled a joyous service for blacks on January 1, 1863, during which he “waved the flag, which now for the first time meant anything to these poor people,” and “there suddenly arose…a strong male voice (but rather cracked and elderly), into which two women’s voices instantly blended,” singing “My country, ‘tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing!” As more blacks joined in, Higginson motioned for the whites on the podium to remain silent because he “never saw anything so electric; it made all other words cheap; it seemed the choked voice of a race at last unloosed.” The Civil War era proved the moment when blacks definitively asserted that the United States belonged to them as much as any other, that nothing could change the fact that this was their land too.25
8. “The Union as it was. The lost cause, worse than slavery.” A chilling depiction of extralegal violence against blacks in the South, in contrast to their newfound rights in the law, this engraving shows a member of the “White League” shaking hands with a member of the Ku Klux Klan over a shield which depicts an African American couple holding a possibly dead child, while a man hangs lynched from a tree in the background. Thomas Nast in Harper’s Weekly, October 24, 1874. Courtesy Library of Congress.
On the other hand, vicious racist violence across the South continued to prevent most blacks from enjoying their rights. Such violence severely impeded Republican voting, the efforts of the Freedman’s Bureau, and the ability of blacks to live as citizens in practical terms. In 1871–72, the Klan burned thirty Mississippi black schools and churches, and in the period between January and March 1871, assassinated sixty-three Mississippi blacks. In December 1874, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, the site of one of the Union’s greatest military triumphs during the Civil War, an armed White Line force ousted black veteran Peter Crosby from his elected position as sheriff. The paramilitary force did more than that, moreover, murdering in cold blood fleeing blacks who had no intention of resisting. At least twenty-nine, if not more, blacks lay dead at the end of this violent spree, many of their bodies rotting in the open because their families feared to claim and bury them. Similar brutality erupted at Clinton, Mississippi, in early September 1875, as White Liners attended a Republican barbecue with concealed weapons. After creating a verbal confrontation, one White Liner shot into the head of a black man at point-blank range, and full-scale mayhem ensued. Some armed blacks fired back before scattering in fear for their lives, and white posses ranged through the area for days, butchering black leaders and white carpetbaggers and leaving their bodies exposed to animals and elements. Between thirty and fifty men died.26
By 1875, 2,141 blacks had been killed and another 2,115 wounded by white supremacists in Louisiana alone since the end of the war. Some of these deaths occurred singly, others in massacres such as one in the small hamlet of Colfax, Louisiana, where whites butchered and mutilated dozens of blacks on Easter Sunday 1873, after they sought to assert their political rights. In September 1874, a full-blown White League militia army numbering five thousand men defeated thirty-five hundred Republicans in battle on Canal Street, in the heart of New Orleans’ business district, forcing the temporary flight of Governor William P. Kellogg until federal troops arrived. This was not the first time New Orleans witnessed large-scale violence aimed at curbing black and Republican power. On July 30, 1866, as Republicans sought to reconvene a state constitutional convention and enfranchise black Louisianans, a white mob stormed the convention and attacked blacks parading in support outside the Mechanics’ Institute where the delegates met. Police joined whites in shooting and beating blacks, and by the end of the riot, at least thirty-four blacks (and likely more) and three white Unionists lay dead, with more than a hundred injured.27
After the war, the hostility Irish Americans in the South displayed against Republicans, African Americans, and Reconstruction legislation helped integrate them into regional white society. Historian Christopher Waldrep found that in Vicksburg, Mississippi, for example, whites in the 1870s unified as a racial bloc in which color trumped ethnicity or class interests. Irish Americans in the South shared in that region’s particular allegiance to the United States during Reconstruction, and its unique relationship with the vision of American nationalism that ascended as a result of the Civil War.28
The activities of white racists contrasted with the newfound ability and courageous determination of ex-slaves in the South to hold conventions, vote, move about, and do other things formerly prohibited to them when in bondage. Poll taxes and literacy tests, coupled with extralegal intimidation and brutish violence, combined to prevent many blacks from exercising the franchise as a practical matter. For example, the Republican vote in Claiborne County, Mississippi, went from 1,844 in 1873 to 496 in 1875. In Yazoo County, in which more than twelve thousand blacks lived, only seven Republican ballots were cast in 1875, and that number dropped to two on election day in 1876.29
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court slowly began to whittle away the practical impact of the Civil War amendments and legislation, beginning with the Slaughter-House Cases (1873), which truncated an expansive interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Holdings in U.S. v. Cruikshank (1874) and U.S. v. Harris (1883) undermined anti-Klan legislation. In Cruikshank, the Supreme Court overturned the handful of convictions the government obtained against participants in the Colfax Massacre under the Enforcement Act of 1870. After ruling that the indictments were faulty for not specifying race as the white defendants’ motivation, the Supreme Court sacrificed protection for blacks on the grounds of federalism, holding that the Fourteenth Amendment permitted Congress to prohibit only state violations of black rights, while state and local governments alone had the power to punish crimes committed by individuals. Where local authorities could not or would not prosecute white racist violence, blacks now stood open to terror dispensed by the Klan. In Harris, a lynch mob raided a Tennessee jail and captured four white prisoners, despite the sheriff’s efforts to protect them. One of the prisoners died, and the federal government prosecuted members of the mob under Section 2 of the Enforcement Act of April 1871, which made it a crime for two or more persons to conspire for the purpose of depriving anyone of the equal protection of the laws. The Supreme Court struck down the provision as unconstitutional, again ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment authorized Congress only to prohibit contravening state action, but left the acts of individuals to regulations by the states. In U.S. v. Reese (1875), the Supreme Court permitted the imposition of poll taxes and similar measures in a holding that the Fifteenth Amendment simply prohibited race-based exclusion in voting practices.30
The Civil Rights Cases (1883), involved defendants from New York, Missouri, Tennessee, Kansas, and California who denied blacks access to public facilities in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which desegregated public accommodations. In ruling that the Thirteenth Amendment purged badges of slavery but did not remove racial discrimination in inns, public conveyances, or theaters, and reiterating that the Fourteenth Amendment addressed state action but not private discrimination, the Supreme Court nullified much of the Civil Rights Act of 1875. By the 1880s, states across the South began enacting Jim Crow laws, formally quashing black equality in practice, disenfranchising blacks through poll taxes and literacy requirements, and mandating segregation in schools, education, and public accommodations.31
In the North, some Republicans recoiled at the growth of the federal government and tired of the use of federal troops in Southern states by the mid-1870s. Moreover, as the desire for sectional reconciliation flourished, Northern whites showed an increasing willingness to overlook racial injustice in the South. Overall, federal protection for black rights diminished in substantial ways and further allowed for the success of Southern white supremacists. The changing political economy that marked the last quarter of the nineteenth century also helped fuel Northern abandonment of African Americans. During and shortly after the Civil War, blacks’ labor, quest for property, and thirst for education made them seem to Republicans like model free labor Americans. Thus, in 1865–67, Northern Republicans embraced the idea that blacks could be productive workers, in contrast with the view of prejudiced Southern whites who mistreated blacks through violence and swindles. Practices of racial discrimination precluded blacks from gaining meaningful prosperity, however. While this situation led to the Civil Rights Act of 1875, opponents persuasively argued that the act radically expanded governmental power for the purposes of a particular group. Even in the North, complaints arose that blacks wanted to gain social equality without working for it, as had other groups, and that they sought to rely instead on legislation that reinforced reliance on the government and undermined adherence to free labor. Republicans grew disillusioned and indifferent toward blacks they increasingly saw not as exemplars of free labor ideology but as dependents reliant on governmental assistance, and who participated in and sought to exploit class conflict and labor tension. Mounting fear among Republicans about the expanding role of government, as well as disdain for interest group politics overall, fueled skepticism about black calls for land reform and increased governmental services and protections. In this way, political mobilization by blacks actually began to work against them.32
The Civil War era, then, bequeathed to the nation an incomplete and divided legacy, one in which the tremendous potential of the late 1860s began eroding as early as the 1870s. The promise of the wartime years, recognized by Frederick Douglass in 1863, remained unfulfilled in significant ways. As blacks, long-standing as well as newly converted white egalitarians, and diehard racists continued to contest the new meanings of citizenship during the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction and its aftermath, the result for African Americans was not a permanent linear leap forward but one of bold steps followed by continuing contention, and of the erosion of practical enjoyment of rights even after the solidification of a legal foundation for future egalitarianism. While historian Brooks D. Simpson identifies developments of the 1860s, as revolutionary, he aptly contends that in practical terms blacks learned to live with continuity of prewar treatment by the following decade. As Donald R. Shaffer noted, glory won on the battlefield segued into a “more profound, if less dramatic” battle as blacks fought to preserve the advances made during the Civil War era and to preserve validation of African American manhood in categories such as politics, governmental relations, economic autonomy, family life, interracial and intraracial relations, and historical memory. By 1895, 1865 Medal of Honor winner Christian A. Fleetwood of the Fourth USCI noted bitterly, “After each war, of 1776, of 1812, and of 1861, history repeats itself in the absolute effacement of remembrance of the gallant deeds done for the country by its brave black defenders and their relegation to outer darkness.”33
Notwithstanding, Americans during the 1860s laid a durable foundation for future correction. National citizenship, more important than before and now trumping that of the states, became better defined in a process that would continue to develop in the coming decades. A new paradigm ascended in which loyalty trumped race, color, and ethnicity in defining who belonged in the American people. Choice of allegiance, and the idea that one could elect to be an American and decide to embrace the ideals of the Republic regardless of race, ethnicity, or place of birth, rose to the same level as birthright as the maker of citizens. The theoretical notion that naturalized citizens should stand on equal footing as the native-born received constitutional sanction. Legislation still in force today ranked expatriation alongside the inalienable rights identified in the Declaration of Independence.
The experiences shared by native-born white, Irish American, and African American soldiers in support of the Union helped fuel this breakdown of racial and nativist distinction in the law. Even as an impulse of sectional reconciliation swept through the country and sought to submerge the race issue, blacks kept alive the memory of their service. Moreover, while some white Union veterans sought to hide from sight black participation in the war for fear of jeopardizing reconciliation, others kept alive the memory of African American loyalty by publishing papers about their service with black troops (several of which are cited in this book) or including blacks in GAR activities (whether in integrated posts or not). Even while prejudice may have persisted in many white Union veterans, so too did the mutual recognition of those who fought together to preserve the integrity of the nation.
Moreover, even as their practical enjoyment of rights eroded, the potential for blacks now existed, an indestructible template created from the storming of Fort Wagner and rejection of unequal pay, the convening of black conventions, and the ratification of the Civil War amendments and promulgation of congressional civil rights statutes. Affirmations of equality and inclusion also came in subtle yet moving ways, and not just through the law. A spirit of remembrance swept over the United States on May 29–30, 1869, with flowers placed on the graves of fallen Union veterans in 336 cities and towns across thirty-one states. As part of these commemorations, participants made a profound statement of inclusion in Wilmington, Delaware, as “native and foreign, white and black, Catholic and Protestant, orthodox and liberal, all acknowledged the binding force of patriotism and our common humanity, and joined in doing honor to the memory of those who died that the nation might live, and that ‘government of the people, for the people, by the people, should not perish from the earth.’” A black band and GAR post joined city police and firefighters, a white GAR post, and “Irish Nationalists with the harp and the sunburst flag of Erin” in a procession that included more than two thousand Protestant and Catholic children from various Sunday schools. The Catholics and a detachment from the GAR turned off into the Catholic cemetery where a requiem service was celebrated, while the rest of the procession continued to the Wilmington and Brandywine Cemetery, where the principal ceremonies occurred; earlier, visits had been made to smaller cemeteries, including where the black soldiers being honored lay at rest. At West Chester, Pennsylvania, white GAR Post 31 and black Post 80 held joint ceremonies and heard an oration by the Welsh-born former commander of the Irish American Sixty-ninth Pennsylvania Infantry, Brigadier General Joshua T. Owen, before paying tribute to veterans in Greenmount Cemetery. The entire cortege then relocated to the black cemetery, “where the same ceremonies were gone through with.”34
Perhaps even more powerful symbolically, during a service not long after Appomattox, a well-dressed black man shocked the congregation at Richmond’s St. Paul’s Episcopal Church by approaching as the minister was about to administer communion. The man’s action violated the tradition that blacks, confined to a special section of the church, could receive the sacrament only after all whites had. The congregation remained motionless in their seats as the black man knelt down at the rail until another distinguished, gray haired man approached and knelt down next to him: Robert E. Lee. The service then resumed.35
In later decades, as Jim Crow and social Darwinism ascended, and the Supreme Court affirmed the doctrine of separate but equal in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), blacks held onto the memory of such uplifting moments of equality, along with others borne from their military service. For them, such moments, as well as the legal changes of the 1860s and 1870s, made up the potential for the future. Molding the legacy of the Civil War comprised a major theme of Frederick Douglass’s postwar life, as he tried to maintain blacks’ place as part of “the people” as well as in the national memory. Douglass declared in 1884 that the cause of blacks “may be buried under the dust and rubbish of endless discussion concerning civil service, tariff and free trade, labor and capital…but our Lazarus is not dead. He only sleeps.” In 1888, Douglass noted that while “the nation may forget…the colored people of this country are bound to keep the past in lively memory till justice shall be done them.” As black soldiers, leaders, ministers, and common folk debated the meaning of participation in the Civil War, and tried to maintain a voice in the American polity, they kept alive the hope of the Civil War era’s achievements and potential—a memory that blacks began to define even before taking up arms in that struggle. In doing so, these individuals stoked the fire of hope and courage, and they articulated arguments that would be brought to fruition in future civil rights movements carried on by their sons and daughters, and culminating in another corrective moment a century after the Civil War.36