Southern whites could no longer hold southern blacks in servitude. Were southern whites under Reconstruction subjected to slavery themselves, or what?

http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=1611&theme=home&page=5&loc=b&type=cttf

There’s, of course, more by him.

There’s a essay in “First Principles” by Steve Ealy on the Agrarian’s “I’ll Take My Stand,” and Penn Warren’s contribution on the Southern Negro circa 1929, titled “The Briar Patch.” Both are well done. Warren’s position is that the Southern Black missed an opportunity following the War Between the States to unite with the defeated Whites (Rebel soldiers) and rebuff the Yankee authorities and carpetbaggers both white and black. Instead they enjoyed the time when these ex-Confederates were forced by the Yankees to “sit at the end of the table.” As you know that only lasted until Reconstruction was over then the White Southerns got their revenge. Human nature (Lockean?) and less Christian, it appears, on both sides.
I’d like that essay for you but I’m too stupid to link two things without screwing up the works. Also, you should know, that Warren’s daughter told me that “he’d grown” with regard to race relations following his 1929 “The Briar Patch” essay. Personally, I kind of think he told the truth of stuff, as he knew it. Also, I think the ground of “racism” is economics (see the New York Draft Riots), Lincoln violated the Constitution in ordering his armies to invade the South, who were merely exercising certain legal rights, and your last sentence reveals your heart, and that’s sad, very sad.

Heading for my turntable (still got one) for Randy Newman, with “Sail Away” and “Rednecks”, and maybe Buffy Sainte-Marie with “My country tis of thy people you’re dying”.

I have been wanting to read E. Genovese’s stuff on the planter class…and as for the R Penn Warren, you’ll have to steer me.

I grant with Herbert Storing that it was a fairly rational position to think, circa 1700-1865, that while multi-racial empires, or national kingdoms, whether slave-holding or not, had worked in history, but that there was simply no precedent in all human history for a multi-racial republic or democracy. Americans were already pushing the limits of the possible by combining republicanism with physical extension, after all. They couldn’t load experiment upon experiment. So, it made basic sense to think you either a) had to keep slavery in place, or b) had to resort to colonization schemes if you were to get rid of it, even gradually. Those who know U.S. political history from 1820-1860 know the dynamics that did not allow this “basic sense” to keep the peace.

But once the war was lost, what kind of rationality could think, that with railroads, modern communications, the explicit repudiation of Dred Scott, etc., that a whole class of legally free persons could be subjugated and perpetually terrorized into an only semi-constitutional and in every way lawyerly-finessed status of half-citizenship (really much less than half)? If you were worried, for example, as Jefferson was in the “wolf by the ears” letter, about a gathering resentment/vengeance-seeking of freed blacks, if they were to remain in America, clashing with a long-bred racism of the whites, what system could possibly generate more of these feelings, on both sides, than the segregationist one? If you couldn’t win a vote then and there authorizing massive colonization, or a separate American state for blacks, didn’t you have to admit that you and your descendants logically had to try the multi-racial democratic republic, had to give it the best shot you could? Which meant the black vote, desegregated schools, black interest groups (sharecropper unions included), and yes, miscegenation, all logically followed, could only be put off by illegal and mob-empowering means, could not be put off indefinitely anyhow, and so must be legally set under way from the get-go? What kinds of corruption did white Southerners invite into their own politics, society, religion, mores, and very souls, in the absurd attempt to maintain (or as, Raymond suggests, to merely tolerate) this system?

And economically, segregation and the labor-flight it eventually drove was disastrous for the South. Not the initial reason for Southern impoverishment, but we can say that Booker T. Washington’s voice simply wasn’t heeded by those, the Southern whites, who needed to heed it most.

So I say the white South was in spiteful wound-nursing denial about the realities of their situation, as were those short-term political actors in the North who gave up and let segregation spread. (To some extent, I’m speaking crudely, as a historian like C Vann Woodward can show you that what happened was due to certain political coalitions of whites in South losing, and others winning.)

I’m with CJ. Even if I recognize that Jim Buckalew may be right about the some of the ironies the entire situation has bred. (Jim, whatever evidence you’re aware of about a trend of black return to the South, please pass that on.)

And my complaint about the reconstruction is that it wasn’t radical enough.