Uh, that's not exactly the point, max.

People on these blogs can be a little too serious and earnest for their own good. Delong's list is not a brilliant and serious legal piece of analysis, and it's not supposed to be. It's obviously something written off the top of his head, when he had a couple of free minutes. I don't think he should be taken to task for leaving out Reconstruction issues, particularly since the post asks for further examples...
I do agree the collapse of Reconstruction is one of the most underappreciated and shocking events in our history. Basically, after winning the war, the North decided ten years later to let the South win the peace. Of course, the South had to pay heavily, in that the price of white supremacy was the acceptance of its role as a economic backwater. But still...

One nit-picking point: Plessy vs. Ferguson, which legitimized Segregation, came down in 1894. That might be a litle late to consider it part of the Reconstruction period.

This amnesia about the Supreme Court judicially striking down a series of Reconstruction Civil Rights laws in the 1870s and 1880s, de facto licensing the Klan to murder at will, and sanctioning segregation and disenfranchisement of black voters is all too common,.... every other action by the Supreme Court pales in comparison in the effect of this judicial murder of Reconstruction after the Civil War. It not only helped usher in the injustice of American Apartheid but turned the South into a peculiar enclave of rightwing politics whose effects persist to this day.

Yes, this has long been one of my pet peeves. It is one of the reasons I believe racism endures. Americans unwillingness to teach the facts of the institutionalization of racism in this country and the gross injustice to Negros, under the rule of law by the highest court in the land, that governs American democracy.

It is particularly galling as this is American history, not German history. Elementary kids and collegians know far more about the Holocaust in Europe than they do the details of the systematic discrimination for over 100 years of American citizens of color.in America.  While both are horrofic. Only one is the history of how our nation with its ideals, of truth and justice under the law  perpetuated and institutionalized discrimination on the basis of race. Our nation. Not Germany or Europe or the Russians. It is solely America's history. 

The history of this nation, where Americans are the culprits who denied their own countryment the rights of citizenship granted in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights is virtually unknown relative to the depth of knowldedge Americans have about the Holocaust. This needs to be particularly juxtaposed with Americans being willing to go to the aide of humans of european descent while continuing to deny their own citizens of color American rights  and the 'freedom of democracy' while nevertheless  being so patriotic as to carry the flag of democracy abroad to fight for American justice for non-citizens to uphold those principles.  Kinda makes you shiver and gives greater historical context  to this administrations let's fight them ...over there...so we do  not have to fight them here at home, ....everything old is new, again. Do not forget or you are doomed to repeat, circle of life.

The dearth of  historical knowledge on the part of Americans  of this nation needs to be addressed to the degree Americans know and understand  the destruction of the American Indian and the European decimation of jews, where Americans are portrayed as champions of democracy.  It is these historical facts which are often missing when Americans  use that 'playing the race card' retort . The person generally has no clue or is willfully dissociating the issue from the historical relationship under the rule of law of African Americans in this country while touting America's role in carrying freedom and democracy abroad.

So, I thank you for writing about this legal disenfranchisment and institutionally sanctioned discrimination against African Americans that America is deafening silent about, and consequently perptetuates a false sense of racist entitlement in America. 

No, it's precisely because it's a quick list off the "top of the head" that I think it's significant.  Our "common sense" understanding doesn't make the destruction of Reconstruction a big part of our history that is obvious.

BTW Plessy v. Furguson is not the case I'm referring to.  Read the piece I link to; folks vaguely know about Plessy, which came down in 1894, but not about Cruikshank, which came down in the 1875-76 session, which sanctioned mass murder by the Klan and overtuned Reconstruction voting rights statutes.

What you say is so very true. It is not only the Japanese who censor -- or are unable to face -- their own recent history. I feel that our anomalous situation -- in terms of health care and the social safety net - with respect to other wealthy countries -- is caused by our legacy of slavery and race prejudice. Not to mention the historical desire -- the necessity -- almost, on the part of Southern elites for unpaid, or barely paid labor. The taboo on mentioning it is virtually a form of Omerta'-- still in force today. The official and unofficial narrative of our history is still the triumphalist story of the pioneers and their westward journey.

I am just now reading for the first time James C. Cobb's excellent "The Most Southern Place on Earth" which talks about this in detail. The title refers to the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta area, (home of Walmart) whose huge plantations became paradigmatic as exemplifying the old South but which were in fact proto-agribusinesses, many with absentee owners. The region in fact was largely settled after the Civil War by planters looking for large and speedy returns on their considerable investments (gambles really) in real estate. According to the author it is the proto-type of the get-rich-quick "American Dream" mentality. In cartoon proportions, I might add, and I think myself that the same syndrome has produced our Iraq adventure.

Another recent book that really opened my eyes was "Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America" by John M. Barry. This book is a little less painful reading than the previous because so alien and strange. It tells the history of the attempt at taming the Mississippi River -- the frontepiece map that shows the enormous reach of the Mississippi River basin complex -- which, with its tributaries, extends down the middle of and over what looks like over two thirds of our country is almost worth the price of the book itself. The chapters relate a series of loosely linked stories about the political and engineering struggles to tame the Mississippi floods -- the failure of the levees in the great flood of 1927, the deliberate flooding of New Orleans, and the huge repercussion of these events on national politics, race relations, and even the resulting internal migrations of millions of people. The book was made into a PBS documentary.

In college (in the 1960s) we were required to read John Dollard's "Caste and Class in a Southern Town," which is seared into my mind. This is a study of the psychological pressures (and terrors) that kept both black and white Sotherners in line -- I notice it is still on reading lists and I expect it is still relevant.

If I were constructing a college -- or even high school reading list I would include on it Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi -- a primary text.

"Worse Than Slavery" by David Oshinski-- the story of Parchman Farm -- and by extension the southern prison system -- really a gulag -- is also a must read. The threat of being sent to these vast work farms helped to keep southern blacks and whites in line. Parole was mostly unknown and pardon the only recourse. So terrible was the thought of this punishment that white defendants were frequently not convicted by white juries of any crime. But some white civil rights workers were sent there.

If you read your history you will find that the Percys and other big families infiltrated and made use of the Republican party during the destruction of reconstruction at the end of the nineteenth century.

It was Herbert Hoover's egregious betrayal of black leaders after the 1927 flood that caused black people (where they were allowed to vote) to definitively turn their backs forever on what had been the party of Lincoln.

Don't assume that every opponent of slavery was a proponent of equal rights for blacks. Not so.

Some abolitionists opposed slavery because they didn't want blacks in the US under any circumstances.

Hitler was also influenced by and conciously imitated the spectacle of American football, I understand. (I suppose he was interested in any form of crowd control and manipulation.) This gives an uncomfortable germ of truth to Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard's bleak, oft repeated hyperbole that, in his words, "There is no difference at all between organized sports and the Nazi party"! -- a very entertaining writer, in any case.

I'm going to disagree with the commentators saying this isn't the issue. The political alignment and subsequent realignment is very important in understanding the effects of Reconstruction and, more to Nathan's point here, why it's not well understood in America. Reconstruction was not about Civil Rights anymore then the War was- rather, is was all about politics and money.

The uncomfortable truth is that even those legislators who voted for the Civil Rights bills of the time didn't really think blacks (or women, or poor people, or the Irish, or whatever) were actually equal to them. (This is also reflected in the anti-populist bias of these policies.) Even those who really had a problem with slavery weren't, by and large, going to allow their precious daughters to marry some 'African Brute.' For example: the above post references Woodrow Wilson (and yes, I know he's not really Reconstruction era). When he saw The Birth of a Nation- which, if you've ever seen it, you know is one of the most hateful movies of all time- he was reported to have said it was "like writing history with lighting." So they didn't protest too much when the Court overturned the legislation, and it would be another 100 years before the Civil Rights movement forced a new generation of lawmakers to finally make some rules that would stick. An accurate history of the race relations of this era would be messy, disquieting, and contradict the Myth of the Great Emancipating North around which so much of the Civil War History we teach our children is based.

Max, you're making a formalistic argument, and it can't stand up to scrutiny. You're saying that since it was the Democrats who controlled the South during and after Reconstruction, today's Democrats must feel guilty for all the horrible racist stuff that went on. During and after reconstruction, the Democrats were the conservative party in the U.S. Now they are the liberal party. You're trying to argue that people who label themselves as Democrats today are somehow responsible for the post-Reconstruction horrors of the South. But that doesn't make any sense. If I were magically transported back to 1872, I wouldn't be a Democrat--I'd be a Republican.

The rightwing in the South was responsible for the sins of Reconstruction. And today they have a different party--a different label. That's it.

Not to quarrel with the thesis of this blog, but Bama Belle is saying something that needs to be said. Racism is deeply entrenched in the American psyche, both in the North and in the South. It is not helpful to demonize one region while implicitly excusing another. The effect of silence is to implicitly excuse racism.

For the sake of balance, I recommend the following readings. They are eye-opening. How many people know that slavery actually ended in Connecticut in 1848, and that it actually ended in New Jersey in 1865? This information comes from the home page of a web-site by a Pennsylvania historian, Douglas Harper.

If we are going to criticize DeLong for leaving something out, then completeness would seem to be the order of the day. Please see the following:

Douglas Harper. Slavery in the North. http://www.slavenorth.com

David Roediger and Martin H. Blatt, ed. The Meaning of Slavery in the North. Summarized at:http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/hisnps/NPSBooks/slavery.htm. (The authors are historians from Massachusetts.)

Joanne Pope Melish. Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and Race in New England, 1780-1860. Reviewed at Amazon.com. (The author is a Connecticut historian.)

For a general history of the origins of the Civil War, I recommend Kevin Phillips book, The Cousins Wars. Reviewed at Amazon.com.

I am familiar with previous posts made by Bama Belle, and I can tell you that you are reading something into her beliefs that is simply not true. She has done nothing to minimize the role of Southerners. She is not by any remote stretch of the imagination a Neo-Confederate who cherry-picks facts. I think you have not, in fact, read her post very carefully. You have filled in the gaps of your comprehension with preconceptions of your own.

I seriously recommend that you read the references that I listed above. One is a substantial web-site. Meaningful reviews can be found on-line for the others.

If you were objective, you would start by demonizing the deadly slave-ships that sailed out of New England. If you were objective, you would quote Charles Sumner, who denounced the "unholy alliance of the Lords of the Lash and the Lords of the Loom". Sumner was not a hypocrite. He understood that the economies of New England and the Lower South were deeply intertwined.

You are clearly not objective, but I will not accuse you of ill-will. If you read the sites that I recommended, you will find that a balanced account of the facts is not that easy to find, and that the historians had to do some digging to discover the full truth.

In one case, they did this at the request of a black historian, who was dissatisfied with the portrayal of the New England textile mills that he found at a historic site maintained by the National Park Service. This resulted in a conference sponsored by the Park Service, and the book edited by Roediger and Blatt. The summary that I cited will be found at the web-site of the Park Service.

To the reading list of jhc (3:22 PM), I'd add

"Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism", by James W. Loewen

I will never defend any of the evils you have listed, but I believe that an extensive quotation from the summary of the book by Roediger and Blatt would give quite a different balance. Unfortunately, it is difficult to summarize what is already a summary. I just recommend that people follow the link.

I have no idea what state you are from, but Douglas Harper's web site has pages for individual states. Again, there is too much information for me to quote, and it is easy to follow the link.

Discrimination against black people in the North goes much deeper than most people realize, and deeper than anything you have mentioned.

To demonize the South is to take the easy way out. Sure, you can do that, but what have you learned if you gloss over the details of racism in the North?

I think you are presenting a desensitized view of racism in the North. I just want you to express some real dismay about the subject.

Frankly, the more I learn about the history of this country, the more disgusted I get.

James Cobb makes the point that the "American Dream" of quick riches and conspicuous consumption was epitomized by the economy of the Deep South and you could say the war over expanding slavery (and empire) was about that. People understood this very well at the time of the American Civil War.

Politics money and race were inseparable.

There were racists in the North and South and there were wonderful people who were not racists, and who deserve to be remembered and celebrated. Vermont, for example, abolished slavery in the 1700s.

It is a fact that Jim Crow laws, the huge (for profit) prison farms with no parole, and Walmart occured in the South. The urge to simplify and say, "They were all equally bad, so let's move on and not talk about this unpleasantness" is exactly the problem here.

Actually May 18, 1896

One of the best websites I've found for the discussion of this and other landmark decisions is Landmark Cases.  The case was decided finally in 1896, but it had been moving through the courts since 1892.  There are great resources here, including the full case in pdf format, excerpts from majority and minority decisions, and materials for discussion at three different reading levels. 

John Marshall Harlan, the sole dissenting voice, is a hero of mine.  How ironic that the dissent was written by a former Kentucky slave owner, and the majority opinion written by a Northerner.  It is also ironic that Harlan was nominated by Rutherford B. Hayes, whose contested election in 1876 sounded the death-knell for Reconstruction

aMike

Thanks for the link to the Newman & Gass paper. I'm not a historian, but thought I had a reasonable layman's grasp on that period of time. I was wrong.

On second thought, I shouldn't thank you because now I have a lot more reading to do!

In "The Culture of Defeat" Wolfgang Schivelbusch"
argues that the ante bellum South encountered near universal rejection of its attempts to intellectually justify slavery , while the post war South enjoyed similarly broad acceptance of its position that the races are unequal.

Military defeat translated into an
intellectual victory. Not for the first time
the victor belonged to the spoils.( a quote
but I don't know from whom)

Whiterosebuddy wrote:
The manner in which the 1964 Civil Rights Act, has been dismantled is virtually a blueprint of what happened with the 1865 Civil Rights Act, particularly the way they have eroded affirmative action laws.

What's equally disturbing is the complicity of African-American GOP members with this process. It seems to me that GW Bush has benefitted the most from affirmative action.
Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Don Imus represent drug addicted slackers given a second chance and pushed upwards aided in large part by skin pigmentation. Would Gw be a drunken oil field worker with impaired verbal skills if he were Black?
On another aspect of the country's past history, I'm currently in the process of reading "Medical Apartheid" which discusses the impact of medical experimentation and institutional abuses by the medical community directed at African-Americans. There's much more than the Tuskeegee experiment. Even today, studies directed at the differing pharmacogenetics among ethnic groups which impact drug responses are few. Complicating this fact is that past experiences with the medical community has fostered suspicion and a hesitancy among African-Americans to participate in medical studies that would address these and other questions .
Additionally, levels of care for well known diseases are different in African-Americans and Whites despite similar levels of insurance and income.

This discussion has been enlightening.
As an aside, I have heard Pennsylvania described as Philadelphia surrounded by Alabama. (No letters please)

While there is no question that many northerners in the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction held racist views, your post here, as well as a later reply, makes assertions that are way too general, and therefore inaccurate. Most notably, your claim that even those legislators who voted for civil rights laws didn't think that African-Americans were equally to them is unquestionably far too all encompassing. In fact, there were a great number of Republicans, and not just the so-called Radical Republicans, who believed ardently in the principle of equality before the law.They may, and in fact probably did not want their daughters marrying African-Americans, but that does not mean they did not hold, as a central tenent of their political ideology, that all men( and yes, not women) must be equal before the law.

Moreover, your assertion that Northerners, in general, were equally complicit in the destruction of Reconstruction fails to recognize that a great number of Republicans in the North maintained the fight to enforce the war Amendments in the South throughout the 1870s and even the 1880s. While they did not succeed, that does not mean that they did not try. Similarly, the notion that the North fully embraced the white supremacist( which needs to be seen as distinct from other forms of racism) views of the South and of the Democratic party as whole in this period is just not so. While many historians have ignored this, I heavily suggest that people who are interested in this issue go and look at a wide range of Northern newspapers in the wake of the Supreme Court's Civil Rights Cases decision of 1883. While some papers embraced the decision and used to it question the propriety of the reforms introduced during Reconstruction they were, by and large, Democratic papers. In contrast, Republican papers were furious and denounced the decision unequivocally. Further, in many states where Republicans controlled the legislatures, new laws were passed that were often broader than than the originally federal law of 1875.

I do not doubt the validity of your basic point here: racism has been a national problem in the United States. Nonetheless, your challenge to the so-called consensus of the "Great Emancipating North" is faulty. If anything, the orthodox position within Reconstruction historiography has long held much of what you claim: Northerners/Republicans didn't really care about African-Americans' rights, they gave up the fight very early on, and then didn't mind a bit when the South overthrew Reconstruction because they shared the same white supremacist ideology. Unfortunately this stance is just as overly simplistic as the perspective that you are attempting to challenge.

The latter was definitely true in the ancient world since slaves then were mainly from the same race as their masters.

This is true globally. However, America's slavery was distinctive for the fact that it was 'chattel slavery' slaves were property. That was not true in ancient times. Slaves were thought of as members of the household. The chattel slavery system in America was far more brutal, barbaric and dehumanizing than any other form of slavery in the history of the world. American slavery made people 'things' ..property to be owned, trade, bought just like on the NYSE. Human beings, based on color,were an investment...property.

Thank you, Pufland, for pointing out the range of and variety public opinion in the 1870s and 80s. People were often quite aware of the implications of what was happening, even if powerless to do much about it.

Islam is an offshoot of Christianity and did not originate the custom of castration. The Eastern Empire, which predated Islam, and was Christian, also practiced it -- and singers were castrated in Europe until the 19th century.

The topic of slavery is complicated by the fact that regular salaried labor is a quite recent phenomenon. There were many forms of unpaid labor -- apprenticeships, corvee, impressment, and so on. Children were considered apprentices as were legally required to work for their fathers until 21 (if male) and as long as unmarried (if female).

As I understand it. The difference between North American slavery and that of antiquity was that the latter were able to buy their freedom or be freed by their masters and integrate into society, whereas in the American South the "one drop of blood" rule meant perpetual slavery on the basis of skin pigment.

Slaves in this hemisphere were also routinely worked to death and almost never reproduced, but were continuously replenished from Africa.
According to "Bury The Chains" by Adam Hochschild, most sugar cane workers were female and their working conditions were too harsh to permit reproduction. In North America, however, the sporadic nature of tobacco farming and the abundance of game did permit enslaved people to reproduce.

According to a review of CHALLENGING THE BOUNDARIES OF SLAVERY, by David Brion Davis in the Times of London Literary supplement (I unfortunately lost the name of the author of the review):

By 1820, at least ten million African slaves had arrived in the New World, as opposed to a grand total of two million Europeans. And for centuries these Africans performed the most arduous and exhausting work, clearing forests, digging the soil, planting and harvesting the exportable crops that founded economic systems that prospered in ways that eventually attracted untold millions of free immigrants from Europe. And if black slaves provided the basic power that drove the interconnected economies of the New World, some of their sacrifice is reflected in the fact that by 1820 the original two million white immigrants had engendered a total white New World population of some twelve million, roughly twice as great as the surviving black population. ... [Was the history of the United States different from that of other countries?] ...as far as slavery was concerned. There were relatively fewer slaves in North America than in some other parts of the Western hemisphere. Only some 400,000 of the 10 million taken from Africa went there. Nevertheless, they multiplied with the result that all the states south of the Mason-Dixon line were slave societies in the full sense of the term, in that they relied on involuntary labour as their principal means of economic production. Even New England, where there were relatively few slaves, derived its wealth in large measure from slavery, because much of its trade was with the West Indies. The whole Atlantic economy right up to the early nineteenth century was largely slave-driven, a fact with implications for British as well as for American history.

Well, yes. The period around the US Civil War period did coincide with the development of so- called Scientific Racism, and not coincidentally, the European scramble for colonial empire. One of the most fanatical of the racist theoreticians was the Swiss-born Louis Agassiz of Harvard University. An opponent of Darwinism, Agassiz went around lecturing about black inferiority and unsuitability for freedom and the separate origins of the "races."

Another physical anthropologist -- or anatomist -- was Dr. Robert Knox, who was involved as a customer of the notorious Burke and Hare serial murder/body snatching case and had to resign in disgrace from the Medical College of Edinburgh. Knox subsequently made his living lecturing about the supposed superiority of the Anglo-Saxon "race." James Hunt, an anthropologist who was Knox's disciple, also exalted the "Anglo-Saxons" but his colleague John Crawfurd (a Scot) held the Scots race to be "pure" and the Anglo-Saxons a mixed or "bastard" race. In 1859. Hunt and Crawfurd banded together to take over the British Ethnological Society. They attacked the "romantic philanthropists" of the previous generation of liberal ethnologists who had opposed slavery and colonialism and advocated for the wrongs of indigenous peoples, calling their predecessors "romantic philanthropists" and believers in "The Noble Savage" -- Crawford, wrote a paper of that name. All this is recounted in Ter Ellingson's very valuable "The Myth of the Noble Savage" (2001).

It is amazing how the same cast of characters keeps popping up -- another believer in separate origins of the "white race" was the physical anthropologist Carlton Coon, who was still around and highly respected when I was young. It seems incredible -- I almost fell over when I read this --- Coon worked in Morocco for the OSS during the war as head of "Operation Torch" and was therefore involved in the Darlan debacle I mentioned above.