Jumpin' Jim Crow

Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights

Jane Dailey, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Bryant Simon, Jane Dailey, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Bryant Simon, Jane Dailey, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Bryant Simon

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691216249
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

White supremacy shaped all aspects of post-Civil War southern life, yet its power was never complete or total. The form of segregation and subjection nicknamed Jim Crow constantly had to remake itself over time even as white southern politicians struggled to extend its grip. Here, some of the most innovative scholars of southern history question Jim Crow's sway, evolution, and methods over the course of a century. These essays bring to life the southern men and women--some heroic and decent, others mean and sinister, most a mixture of both--who supported and challenged Jim Crow, showing that white supremacy always had to prove its power.
Jim Crow was always in motion, always adjusting to meet resistance and defiance by both African Americans and whites. Sometimes white supremacists responded with increased ferocity, sometimes with more subtle political and legal ploys. Jumpin' Jim Crow presents a clear picture of this complex negotiation. For example, even as some black and white women launched the strongest attacks on the system, other white women nurtured myths glorifying white supremacy. Even as elite whites blamed racial violence on poor whites, they used Jim Crow to dominate poor whites as well as blacks. Most important, the book portrays change over time, suggesting that Strom Thurmond is not a simple reincarnation of Ben Tillman and that Rosa Parks was not the first black woman to say no to Jim Crow.
From a study of the segregation of household consumption to a fresh look at critical elections, from an examination of an unlikely antilynching campaign to an analysis of how miscegenation laws tried to sexualize black political power, these essays about specific southern times and places exemplify the latest trends in historical research. Its rich, accessible content makes Jumpin' Jim Crow an ideal undergraduate reader on American history, while its methodological innovations will be emulated by scholars of political history generally. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Edward L. Ayers, Elsa Barkley Brown, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Laura F. Edwards, Kari Frederickson, David F. Godshalk, Grace Elizabeth Hale, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Stephen Kantrowitz, Nancy MacLean, Nell Irwin Painter, and Timothy B. Tyson.

Chapter 1

LAURA F. EDWARDS

The Politics of Marriage and Households in North Carolina during Reconstruction

IN THE FALL of 1865,¹ North Carolina lawmakers gathered at the statehouse in Raleigh to draw up a new constitution. The unenviable job of opening this difficult session fell to Edwin G. Reade, who tried to set a reassuring, positive tone. “Fellow-citizens,” he began, “we are going home.” Despite recent events, the Union still stood as an “old homestead . . . built upon a rock . . . [that] . . . weathered the storm.” Defeated Confederates simply needed to “grasp hard again the hand of friendship which stands at the door . . . [and] . . . enjoy together the long, bright future which awaits us.”² With this imagery of this Union as a domestic haven, Reade intended to blunt the conflicts that had torn the nation apart and divided the Confederacy. While Unionists and Confederates had faced off on battlefields and in statehouses, their old homesteads stood unchanged, waiting to enfold them in domestic tranquility when they returned. Now they just had to open the door and enter.

Reade’s homecoming metaphor drew praise both within and outside the South. Not everyone, however, greeted his invitation with enthusiasm. At the very same time that North Carolina’s lawmakers were listening to Edwin Reade, a group of African American delegates gathered across town and called to order the first statewide Freedmen’s Convention. Their final report also featured domestic issues and imagery. But their destination could not have been more different than Reade’s. The delegates wanted “education for our children,” protection for “our family relations,” provision for “orphan children,” and support for “the re-union of families which have long been broken up by war or by the operations of slavery.” Unlike Reade and other white lawmakers who longed to “go home” to the households they had left behind in 1860, black delegates had no intention of returning to their ex-masters’ “old homesteads.” They and the African Americans they represented wanted households of their own.³

In the history of Reconstruction, Edwin Reade’s domestic vision has taken precedence over the African American delegates’ claims. Even as historians of the period carefully questioned every other aspect of political and social conflict, they left this one, highly gendered image in place. Like Reade, they assumed a distinction between “private” and “public”: the public sphere, a dynamic and contentious place, was where history happened; it did not happen in the quiet isolation of “private,” domestic space. Traditional political historians occasionally noted sentimental attachments to the “old homestead,” but then passed it by to locate the dynamics of change in coalitions, elections, legislation, and organized acts of violence. Social historians extended the public realm to include fields, streets, and work places and to cover the battles waged by African Americans and poor whites over labor and race. Yet, for the most part, they too ignored the domestic sphere. The household may have provided support and motivation for political action, but it was not actually part of that arena. By either standard, Edwin Reade’s metaphoric homestead seemed historically accurate and the domestic issues raised by the North Carolina Freedmen’s Convention appeared politically inconsequential.

Recent work that uses gender, in combination with race and class, has challenged this view. Emphasizing the institutional connections between the “private” and “public” spheres, these studies have revealed the extent to which public power was deeply rooted in domestic relations and underscored the centrality of southern households to social and political change.⁴ As this new work has shown, the antebellum household was far more than a collection of people or a place of residence. It also defined private obligations and mediated the distribution of public power. Before emancipation, heads of household assumed economic, legal, and moral responsibility for a range of dependents, who included African American slaves as well as white women and children. Heads of household also shouldered the duty of representing their dependents’ interests in the public arena of politics. In this way, private authority translated directly into public rights and power.⁵

The exemplary household head was an adult, white, propertied male. To those who held the reins of power in the antebellum South, this was the only kind of person capable of the responsibilities of governance, whether in private households or public arenas. Because women, children, and African Americans were considered to lack both self-control and the capacity for reason, they were thought to require the protection and guidance of white men. But white men claimed power on their ability to fulfill the duties of household head, not on the basis of their race and sex alone. Not every man measured up. Dependency tainted all those who lacked sufficient property to control their own labor and maintain their own households. Nevertheless, all propertyless white men possessed the potential to head independent households. In this sense, their position was always different from that of white women and African Americans, who could step out of their proper place and even step into the role of household head, but could never fully embody the power of that role.⁶

War and emancipation shook the antebellum household to its foundations and shattered the configurations of power it supported. Freed from their dependent position as slaves, African American men could, theoretically, take on the role of household head with all its private and public privileges. Although African American women would find it difficult to claim the same rights as their menfolk, they might well demand privileges previously reserved for white women as dependent wives and daughters. At the same time, many white men faced the loss of their property and, in the case of slaveholders, most of their dependents as well. Not only did the borders of their households shrink but also the very basis of their mastery there was called into question, a situation that also undermined their exclusive claims to public power. The household thus became a highly contested political issue. After all, political and civil rights still hinged on how households were defined, who qualified as a household head, and what rights they and their dependents could exercise.⁷

Nowhere was the political content of the household more evident than in conflicts over marriage in the early years of Reconstruction. As the institution that created households, marriage lay at the very center of the postemancipation political structure.⁸ Perhaps more than any other issue in Reconstruction, the questions raised by the status of freedpeople’s marriages show how domestic relations structured civil status and political rights. Immediately following emancipation, conservative whites imposed legal marriage on freedpeople as a way to consolidate state power over them and compel them to support their families. African Americans, however, turned legal marriage to their advantage, using it to buttress their claims to civil and political rights while also trying to maintain their own vision of marital relations. But the laws governing marriage allowed them only so much room for maneuver. The rules of marriage formed the central support in a patriarchal legal framework that had subordinated poor white and African American men as well as women before the war and could still be mobilized to serve the same ends.

As conflicts over marriage are connected to traditional political issues through gender, the politics of Reconstruction begin to look different. New issues come into focus: Edwin Reade’s homestead becomes far less tranquil, while the domestic claims of the first Freedmen’s Convention begin to look far more significant. The actions of people excluded from formal political arenas take on new immediacy as well. Ultimately, their efforts to remake the domestic sphere meant that Edwin Reade and other elite white southerners could never “go home” to a place untouched by political conflict or historical change.

With the abolition of slavery, the legal burden of constituting households fell to marriage alone. As a Mississippi judge explained in 1873: “The superstructure of society rests upon marriage and the family as its foundation. The social relations and rights of property spring out of it and attach to it.”⁹ Without marriage, there were no legally recognized fathers, and without fathers, there were no legally recognized parents, since mothers had no formal rights to their children. In this situation, the transfer of property across generations became more complex. Inheritance laws, designed to keep property in the legitimate male line of the family, supplied little guidance in a world where fathers had no legally recognized male heirs. Marriage also framed the rules for the distribution of property and authority within households. In its absence, women no longer surrendered to their husbands their property, their wages, their children, and their ability to contract in their own name. Laws did exist to deal with children who were born out of wedlock and lived outside a legally recognized family; they became wards of the state and were apprenticed to a responsible master. But there were no comparable mechanisms to deal with unmarried women, whose number multiplied as a result of wartime casualties and emancipation. They were simply on their own, accountable for their own material needs, political interests, and moral destiny. The prospect of self-supporting women called the allocation of public power into question as well. Household heads represented the interests of their wives and children in the public sphere because they were legally liable for them. In the absence of this relationship, former dependents moved in the public world on their own. Within existing legal and political structures, of course, those people assumed to be dependents had few rights and little power. But without marriage, the rationale for this situation also dissolved.

Given the importance of marriage, it is not surprising that North Carolina’s Supreme Court buttressed the institution against change in the years directly following emancipation. The first effort to do so came in 1868 with State v. Rhodes, a case of wife beating. A lower court had found Benjamin Rhodes innocent, basing the ruling in generations of legal precedent that allowed a husband to whip his wife as long as the switch was no larger in diameter than his thumb. In a decision written by Justice Edwin Reade, the same man who offered the homecoming metaphor at the 1865 constitutional convention, the North Carolina Supreme Court upheld the verdict but questioned the reasoning. For Reade, the issues in Rhodes extended beyond wife beating or even the civil status of married women. At stake was the relationship between the household and the state, which emancipation had destabilized. The state, Reade flatly declared, did not “recognize the right of the husband to whip his wife.” Nonetheless, the sanctity of the private sphere shielded the husband’s actions from public scrutiny. However loath the court was to condone violence within the domestic sphere, Reade believed that far greater evils “would result from raising the curtain and exposing to public curiosity and criticism the nursery and the bed chamber.” “Family government,” Justice Reade declared, “being in its nature as complete in itself as the State government is in itself, the Courts will not attempt to control, or interfere with it, in favor of either party.” In practice, this meant that the court assumed a household head innocent until proven guilty, since it was his governance that was in question. Given the court’s reluctance to interfere, guilt was nearly impossible to prove.¹⁰

Despite the rhetoric of domestic privacy, Rhodes also established the public dimension of the household. For the state’s conservative elite, marriage and the households it created were too important to their notions of social order to be left entirely to the discretion of the people, most of whom they neither respected nor trusted. Marriage, as Justice Reade later explained in defending the state’s right to prohibit interracial unions, “is more than a civil contract; it is a relation, an institution, affecting not merely the parties, like business contracts, but offspring particularly, and society generally.” Because marriage contained such wide-ranging social and political implications, the state had a right—indeed a duty—to make sure the institution took forms that served the public interest. The same logic shaped Reade’s decision in Rhodes. Even as he drew a veil around relations within the household, Reade planted that private sphere squarely in the public realm. Household heads derived their power from the state, and family government was ultimately subordinate to state government. Although the state would never meddle with “trivial complaints arising out of the domestic relations,” it would intervene if a husband, father, or master “grossly abuse[d] his powers.” The state reserved for itself the power to decide what constituted gross abuse.¹¹

In Rhodes, Reade confronted a world without slavery by reaffirming the household’s boundaries and its connection to public power. Emancipation lurked, unstated, between the lines. Focusing on “family government” and “domestic relations,” Reade explicitly extended the logic of his decision to other domestic relationships—namely, those of parent/child and master/apprentice. If not for emancipation, the relationship of master and slave would have been included. The fact that it was not made the others unstable. After all, if one domestic relationship could be dissolved with the stroke of a pen, then what was so inviolable about the rest? At the very least, they might be subject to alteration. Rhodes, however, ruled out this possibility, establishing precedent that would shape subsequent cases for the remainder of the century.¹²

But Rhodes did not resolve all the questions posed by emancipation. It made no mention of ex-slaves’ relation to legal marriage or whether legally married freedpeople acquired the same rights and duties that fell to legally married whites. Antebellum law had not recognized slave marriages, and emancipation did not make ex-slaves’ marriages legal. During the war, some northern officials found the absence of legal marriage among slave couples troubling and promoted “the sacred nature and binding obligations of marriage.” In some cases, their efforts were well received by African Americans who had their own reasons for formalizing their domestic relations.¹³ As long as slavery was in force, white southerners did not share these concerns. After emancipation, many southern whites began to view freedpeople’s domestic relations with alarm. Marriage figured prominently in William W. Holden’s recommendations to freedpeople in his first address as North Carolina’s provisional governor on Ju...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Politics of Marriage and Households in North Carolina during Reconstruction: Laura F. Edwards
• Chapter 2: Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom: Elsa Barkley Brown
• Chapter 3: One Man’s Mob Is Another Man’s Militia: Violence, Manhood, and Authority in Reconstruction South Carolina: Stephen Kantrowitz
• Chapter 4: The Limits of Liberalism in the New South: The Politics of Race, Sex, and Patronage in Virginia, 1879-1883: Jane Dailey
• Chapter 5: White Women and the Politics of Historical Memory in the New South, 1880-1920: W. Fitzhugh Brundage
• Chapter 6: William J. Northern’s Public and Personal Struggles against Lynching: David F. Godshalk
• Chapter 7: “For Colored” and “For White”: Segregating Consumption in the South: Grace Elizabeth Hale
• Chapter 8: The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered: Gender and Sexual Politics in the Making of Reactionary Populism: Nancy Maclean
• Chapter 9: False Friends and Avowed Enemies: Southern African Americans and Party Allegiances in the 1920s: Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore
• Chapter 10: Race Reactions: African American Organizing, Liberalism, and White Working-Class Politics in Postwar South Carolina: Bryant Simon
• Chapter 11: “As a Man, I Am Interested in States’ Rights”: Gender, Race, and the Family in the Dixiecrat Party, 1948-1950: Kari Frederickson
• Chapter 12: Dynamite and “The Silent South”: A Story from the Second Reconstruction in South Carolina: Timothy B. Tyson
• Afterwords
• Contributors
• Index