Vann Woodward and Jim Crow Evaluating the

Vann Woodward and Jim Crow Evaluating the impact of Reconstruction social policy on blacks is more controversial due to the issue of segregation. Until the publication of C. Vann Woodward Strange Career of Jim Crow in 1955, the traditional view was that after the gains of Reconstruction, Conservative Democrats clamped down on the blacks by instituting an extensive system of segregation and disfranchisement (Woodward, 1974). Woodward, however, argued that there was a period of fluidity in race relations between the end of Reconstruction and the 1890s.

Woodward concentrated on de jure segregation rather than de facto segregation, in part because he was influenced by the Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954) and the growing agitation over desegregation. In still another example of current affairs influencing a historian's viewpoint, Woodward wanted to show that segregation was not an irrevocable folkway of Southern life, but actually a rather recent innovation.

Despite attacks from a number of scholars who pointed to the existence of segregation during the antebellum period in both the North and South, and, most pointedly, even during Reconstruction, Woodward's view was widely accepted. Woodward's critics were limited by their own desire to make history conform to their expectations and as a result simply searched for proof that segregation represented the norm in Southern life (Dailey, et al. 2000). As a result their work lacked a dynamic approach which would emphasize process (Rabinowitz, 1978).

In fact, the question is what segregation replaced, and the answer is not integration but exclusion. In other words, those institutions established by the Radicals, such as public schools and colleges like Fisk, Atlanta, and Howard, and welfare institutions that included poor houses and asylums for the care of deaf, dumb and blind, broke new ground by admitting blacks for the first time (Woodward, 1993). But blacks were admitted on a segregated basis. Initial access to places of public accommodation often followed a similar pattern.

Yet under the Radicals, there was not simply a shift from exclusion to segregation, for the Radicals proclaimed that the blacks would enjoy facilities the equals of those open to whites (Woodward, 2013). In other words, the concept of separate but equal treatment was the basic Republican goal in the area of social policy, an idea whose roots can be traced to antebellum Northern society (Cole, 2012). As such, and for a variety of reasons, the policy was endorsed by most black leaders.

The Democrats, upon gaining power, accepted the shift from exclusion to segregation, but though they publicly endorsed the concept of separate but equal, in practice they failed to sustain it (Williamson, 1968). Segregation, then, emerged in the postwar South as a reform, that is, an improvement over the previous policy of exclusion. It was certainly an ironic legacy of the Reconstruction governments, but it was also about as much of a change as the legal, social, and political climate would permit (Dailey, et al. 2000).

American Reconstruction was thus primarily concerned with reintegrating the South into the national economy through the substitution of free labor for slavery (but without the massive federal rebuilding effort associated with modern reconstructions), increasing the political power of the Republican party, and guaranteeing blacks equal rights, even while accepting segregation (Woodward, 1993).

The years after Reconstruction, generally referred to as The New South, but which I've called The First New South to distinguish it from at least three separate twentieth century proclamations of a New South, reveal just how badly the Reconstructionist agenda fared (Woodward, 1974). They also provide a sobering message for those trying to predict the outcome of German Reunification (Bell & Robert, 1978). As should already be clear, limited federal support for the weak Southern Republican coalition eventually meant the return of the former Confederates to power.

This did not constitute a simple return of the old planter elite, however. Although its representatives continued to wield considerable power, it was no longer dominant and indeed had gone from being the most powerful and influential agrarian elite in the western world to perhaps the least powerful. It had no control over the conditions for Reconstruction laid down by the federal government, unlike, for example, the situation in Russia, Jamaica, Cuba and Brazil.

After all, unlike their Latin American and European counterparts, these men bore the label of "traitor," (Woodward, 2013) which justified a more extensive challenge to their authority. Even after Reconstruction ended this old elite had to share power with new men more in tune with urban and capitalist values, values that many of them had in fact come to embrace as well (Cole, 2012).

Together this new coalition created a Solid South which enabled the national Democratic party to survive the taint of treason and remain one of the two major political parties, with perhaps a natural majority of voters in the nation as a whole.

The new leadership's promises, however, of a genuinely New South, one dedicated to sectional reconciliation and characterized by increased urbanization and industrialization, diversified agriculture and moderate race relations, convinced many Northerners and even some Southern blacks that the region would lose its distinctiveness and become fully integrated into the American mainstream (Williamson, 1968). In fact, the new Democratic governments proved unresponsive to the needs of both poor whites and blacks. They embraced retrenchment in public services, and demonstrated a capacity for corruption that could put the most dishonest Radicals to shame.

And despite much rhetoric to the contrary, the Southern economy was not remade in the image of the North. Even allowing for some notable urban growth, the South remained the most heavily rural area in the country. Although industrialization increased, the Southern economy was primarily agrarian and lagged far behind the rest of the country. In short, as C. Vann Woodward put it, the South experienced an industrial evolution rather than revolution. As a result, the region was becoming an economic colony of the North.

By the 1880s Northern capital was in control of railroads, factories, and mines, and the South was firmly established as a producer of raw materials for Northern industry (Cole, 2012). Agriculture itself was less healthy than it had been before the war. The first point is that by 1880 the South was no longer self- sufficient in basic foodstuffs as it had been in the antebellum period.

For a variety of reasons that are not altogether clear, both a majority of blacks and of formerly self-sufficient whites were engaged in the production of cotton rather than foodstuffs. And this occurred despite the virtual stagnation in the worldwide demand for cotton between 1860 and 1880 (Bell & Robert, 1978). The Rise of Jim Crow and Academic Interest On April 20, 1937, Arthur Mitchell boarded an Illinois Central train in Chicago bound for Hot Springs, Arkansas. A black Democratic congressman from Chicago, Mitchell was off that evening for a brief vacation.

He bought a first class ticket, secured a compartment in a sleeping car going as far as Memphis, and passed an uneventful night. The next morning, just before the train arrived in Memphis, a porter transferred Mitchell to the Pullman car that was going through to Hot Springs, and the congressman settled down in one of a number of empty seats. From Memphis on, he traveled over the fines of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railway (Bell & Robert, 1978).

Soon after the train pulled out of Memphis and crossed the Mississippi River into Arkansas, a Rock Island conductor approached Mitchell and told him that because the state had a railroad segregation law, he would have to move to the Jim Crow coach. Mitchell objected, pointing out that his first class ticket entitled him to ride in the Pullman car and that there was plenty of room in it to accommodate him. When these arguments failed to impress the official, Mitchell added that he was a United States congressman.

The conductor, Mitchell later recounted, "said it didn't make a damn bit of difference who I was, that as long as I was a nigger I couldn't ride in that car" (Cole, 2012). "You will have to ride in the 'secondclass' car and no other place on this train," he allegedly warned Mitchell, "or I'll stop the train and have you locked up" (Woodward, 1974). Mitchell gave some thought to letting himself be arrested but then remembered he was in Arkansas, where a troublemaking black risked a lynching.

After a last and futile effort to get a seat in the smoking section of the car, which was completely vacant, Mitchell reluctantly headed for the Jim Crow coach, His baggage was allowed to remain in the Pullman. Mitchell had been riding in a clean, carpeted, air-conditioned car, equipped with modern and well-kept rest-room facilities (Dailey, et al. 2000). A potter's services had been available, and Pullman passengers had access to the dining and observation-parlor cars on the train.

For the next four hours, however, from the time of the incident until his arrival in Hot Springs, Mitchell sat in an old Jim Crow coach divided by partitions into a smoking area for whites and smoking and nonsmoking sections for blacks. The car had no air conditioning and was poorly ventilated, filthy, and foul smelling. A dirty lavatory for black men had no flush toilet, washbasin, running water, soap, or towels.

The experience was a common one for a black traveler in the South, but Mitchell, on his return to Chicago, resolved to challenge it (Ayers, 1992). The incident that Congressman Mitchell endured was one example of a system whose history was at least a century old and national in scope. Segregated or "Jim Crow" public carriers first flourished in the North before the Civil War, where they were part of a pattern of racial discrimination (Williamson, 1968).

With the aid of radical white abolitionists, however, Northern blacks challenged Jim Crow transit as early as the 1840s. Using a battery of techniques ranging from petition campaigns and legislative lobbying to boycotts and court suits, they successfully undermined segregated transportation in the North by 1865 (Woodward, 1993). Although the practice was not completely eliminated for some years, Jim Crow travel never again posed a major problem for Northern blacks. From Reconstruction on, segregated carriers and the controversy over them were centered in the South (Cole, 2012).

Three states in that region provided for Jim Crow transit in their black codes, the statutes adopted throughout the South at the end of the Civil War to maintain white control over the newly freed black population. In 1865, Mississippi barred blacks from first class railroad cars, and Florida forbade both blacks and whites from entering any public vehicles set apart for the other race (Williamson, 1968). Texas in 1866 required rail lines to attach a special Jim Crow car for blacks to every passenger train.

Elsewhere, as black use of public conveyances rose, whites urged Southern carriers to segregate or exclude the freedmen, and some companies established a color line on their own (Bell & Robert, 1978). Blacks opposed segregation, however, and during Radical Reconstruction, they turned to the federal military commanders in the South and the federal courts to undo Jim Crow transit, especially on urban streetcars. New Orleans blacks, for example, protested segregation by boarding streetcars reserved for whites and gathering on the tracks to block the carriers in the spring of 1867 (Tindall, 1967).

In the same year, blacks in Charleston began a lawsuit against rules which restricted them to the front platforms of the city's new streetcars and started entering the vehicles in defiance of company policy. The demonstrations created turmoil in each city that led federal military commanders to intervene and end the discrimination. In October 1870, Louisville blacks brought suit against Jim Crow streetcars, and after a federal district court ruled in their favor the next spring, the practice was abolished (Boles & Johnson, 2003).

Blacks also used their new political rights against segregated carriers. At the state constitutional conventions and in the state legislatures that assembled under Radical Reconstruction, they sought assurances of equality on public transit. Mississippi blacks won a constitutional provision forbidding any infringement on the right of citizens to travel on public conveyances (Woodward, 1993). In Louisiana's constitution, blacks secured a guarantee of equal rights, without racial discrimination, for all citizens on public carriers.

Between 1868 and 1873, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas adopted civil rights laws that prohibited discrimination in transportation. After years of black agitation, Congress passed a federal Civil Rights Act in 1875, and its first section guaranteed blacks "full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations" of "public conveyances on land and water" (Ayers, 1992). These laws improved transit practices for blacks in parts of the South.

In South Carolina, for example, the state civil rights law of 1868 ended Jim Crow on many steamboats and enabled blacks to ride in first class railroad cars without difficulty. Although certain Louisiana railways and steamboats separated the races, it appears that an equal number obeyed the state antidiscrimination law and did not have a color line. After several blacks won damage suits in the early 1870s, most Virginia railroads admitted them to their first class cars (Tindall, 1967). In other areas, however, carriers did not comply with the laws.

Southern states generally failed to enforce their equal rights ordinances vigorously, and federal officials, who had doubts about the constitutionality of the 1875 Civil Rights Act, were reluctant to bring suit against violators. As a result, transit companies could discriminate against blacks, if they wished, with impunity (Woodward, 2013). Railroads in Texas and Mississippi, for example, allowed blacks only in second class coaches. Mississippi riverboats commonly separated the races.

Some rail lines in other parts of the South also barred blacks, including such prominent figures as Frederick Douglass or Louisiana's lieutenant governor Oscar J. Dunn, from their first class facilities (Woodward, 1974). In the end, the Reconstruction South developed a mixed and inconsistent pattern in public transportation. Although many carriers segregated blacks, others accepted integration as the norm.

Jim Crow seems to have predominated on public conveyances in deep South and more western states, such as Mississippi and Texas, but in upper South and seaboard states, integration was more common than segregation. However much Jim Crow pervaded other aspects of Southern life, it was not standard practice on all Southern transit in this era. Where a color line did exist, it often involved a partial rather than a total separation of the races.

Railroads that excluded blacks from their first class cars, for example, generally did not segregate the races in second class coaches or run Jim Crow cars exclusively for blacks. Southern carriers faced pressure from whites to segregate their accommodations, but through a combination of protest, political action, and for a time, support from the federal government, blacks often successfully countered that pressure (Dailey, et al. 2000). The end of Reconstruction brought no immediate change.

The Redeemer governments that ousted the carpetbaggers repealed state civil rights laws and curtailed black suffrage, but they did not immediately expand Jim Crow. As a result, the varied pattern of both segregated and integrated transit endured. Texas and Mississippi railroads continued to exclude blacks from first class cars, and during the 1880s, a few Texas cities passed ordinances requiring Jim Crow waiting rooms in rail stations.

In Virginia, however, integration on railways increased steadily, and throughout the 1870s and 1880s travelers in the seaboard states reported that blacks commonly rode in first class rail cars and on streetcars with whites (Williamson, 1968). Louisiana steamboats usually segregated the races, but New Orleans streetcars remained open to all. In addition, blacks still contested Jim Crow carriers. When a Florida railroad instituted a discriminatory policy in 1886, for example, blacks organized a boycott of the line.

In Texas, black conventions loudly protested railway segregation, and in the early 1890s, a Colored People's Progressive Union was established to bring lawsuits against the roads. When one rail company set up Jim Crow waiting rooms in its New Orleans terminal in 1882, objections and complaints from blacks swiftly stopped the new practice (Boles & Johnson, 2003). The Supreme Court, however, opened the way for more segregation in this era.

Beginning in 1873, it handed down a series of decisions interpreting the Thirteenth (Tindall, 1967), Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments so narrowly that for some half a century, those provisions were almost useless for safeguarding the rights of blacks. In their limited reading of the amendments, the justices reflected a widely held opinion that federal power had expanded too greatly during the Civil War and Reconstruction and that the time had come to restore the balance in federal-state relations.

The Court also mirrored a growing national indifference to the status of blacks and a willingness among Northerners to let the white South settle the racial issue in its own way (Boles, et al. 1987). Transportation emerged as the key ground for testing the constitutionality of segregation, and the Court indicated its future course on the issue in an 1877 decision (Bell & Robert, 1978).

The captain of a steamboat traveling between New Orleans and Vicksburg, Mississippi segregated the races on his ship, and a black passenger sued him, charging that his policy violated Louisiana's 1869 civil rights act (Woodward, 1951). The captain responded that Louisiana's law violated the commerce clause of the Constitution. His boat traveled between states, he pointed out, and the commerce clause barred the states from regulating any aspect of interstate commerce which was national in character and which therefore required uniform regulation that only Congress could supply.

The seating of the races on interstate vessels fell into this category, he argued. In a unanimous opinion in Hall v. DeCuir, the Supreme Court agreed and held Louisiana's statute an unconstitutional burden on interstate commerce (Dailey, et al. 2000). First, let us look at the economic impact of Reconstruction. There are really two aspects here, one involving the economy in general, the other involving blacks in particular.

As far as the economy is concerned, it is true that large public debts were incurred, but the Dunningite view fails to appreciate the extent to which this was due to increased public services and expenditures to encourage better transportation and not simply a matter of corruption. There was, in short, an important stimulus given to railroad construction, urbanization, industrialization, and public education (Woodward, 1974). The situation with regard to blacks seems more negative. Unlike Russian serfs, former slaves did not receive land. There was no large- scale confiscation (Woodward, 1951).

Most blacks remained landless and the backbone of an oppressive sharecropping system. This is the main point of recent critics of Reconstruction who argue in the tradition of W.E.B. DuBois's Black Reconstruction that there could be no true political or social reconstruction without economic reconstruction (Ayers, 1992). But it is unclear that owning 160 acres (or forty) would really have made much of a difference in the ability of blacks to resist oppression.

Besides, the Russian serfs were left mired in poverty even after receiving their land, land for which they had to pay an often outrageous price (Woodward, 1951). And it should not be forgotten that as in the British West Indies, Southern blacks demonstrated a tendency to engage in subsistence agriculture and it is unlikely that they would have used their land as profitably as white proponents of confiscation had envisioned.

Even if they had practiced commercial agriculture, they would have confronted a sad fact of economic life (Boles & Johnson, 2003) the onset of a thirty year worldwide agricultural depression in the 1870s meant that this was not a good time to be a small, market-oriented, landholding farmer in the South. Then, too, given the intensity of Southern white opposition and the dwindling Northern white support, it is unlikely that dispensing land to the freedmen would have had much of an impact on their broader status (Boles, et al. 1987).

Even if confiscation and land redistribution could have worked, they had neither popular nor legal support. For rather than being violators of the Constitution as former rebels and the defenders of states' rights argued, Republican leaders were constrained by respect for the federalist system and its limits on national power. They were also committed to an ideology of "free labor," which required the removal of artificial barriers like slavery but left labor to the vicissitudes of an allegedly "free market" economy (Boles, et al. 1987).

Whatever the merits of confiscation and land redistribution, it is therefore historical to insist on it. Besides, as we've seen, land distribution was no cure-all in Russia or Jamaica. For that matter, only seven thousand blacks were able to take advantage of the Southern Homestead Act of 1866, which extended the cheap land provisions of the 1862 Homestead Act to include the South's public domain and initially sought to encourage black applicants; and of those seven thousand, a mere one thousand ended up as landowners.

Meanwhile, the South Carolina Land Commission, the only state institution established to put blacks on land, was crippled by corruption, fraud, and political in-fighting (Boles, et al. 1987). But emphasizing the limitations on black freedom obscures the major economic change assured by Reconstruction which had profound political and social implications -- the end of slavery.

And while those recent scholars who attack Reconstruction from the left tend to highlight the pervasiveness of peonage, involuntary servitude, and sharecropping in order to minimize the differences between the antebellum and postbellum status of the freedmen, more balanced assessments rightly point to the significant differences (Boles & Bethany, 2003). Sharecropping arose in part because of black refusal to work for wages under close white supervision (and also the lack of white capital to pay wages). It was thus a compromise between landlord and laborer (Woodward, 2013).

The withdrawal of black women from the fields, although at times only temporary, was a further expression of black desire for greater autonomy. Then, too, there was always more mobility and freedom for blacks, whether in the region's growing cities or on new farm land, than scholars such as Jonathan Wiener and Jay Mandle claim.

And of course, thanks to Reconstruction governments, the initial white efforts to control blacks through Black Codes were turned back and blacks were assured the right to own property and engage in a variety of business activities. A surprising number of blacks even managed to become landowners (Ayers, 1992). A second broad set of Reconstruction contributions centered around the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments' assurance of basic civil rights for blacks as citizens of the United States (Woodward, 1951).

Blacks got the vote and enjoyed active political participation in the Reconstruction governments, a unique occurrence among former slave societies in the western hemisphere. And even though their power diminished when Conservative Democrats gained power, blacks kept the vote until the end of the century. In addition, they were at least legally guaranteed a variety of rights that included the right to testify in court, serve on juries, and marry (Boles & Bethany, 2003).

The Reconstruction amendments also brought about a reconstruction of Northern life which proved more long-lasting than in the South. As of 1865, only six Northern states permitted blacks to vote. And between 1865 and 1869, of eleven referenda held in eight Northern states on constitutional changes to provide blacks with the ballot, only two were successful -- Iowa and Minnesota in the fall of 1868 (Boles & Bethany, 2003).

Thus the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited the denial or abridgement of the right to vote on the grounds of race, color or previous condition of servitude, in practice only affected the North, since Southern states already had black suffrage as a result of the Reconstruction acts (Woodward, 2013). Indeed, Northern hypocrisy on voting had been a source of much resentment among white Southerners. Now, in addition to supporting black voting rights, many Northern states desegregated their schools and passed public accommodation laws.

Much prejudice and discrimination persisted, but at least now it was against both federal and state law (Woodward, 1974). Not only did the Reconstruction acts and amendments have real impact at the time, it is too often forgotten that as a result of them emancipation was confirmed and blacks became national citizens with equal rights before the law, but the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, plus the Civil Rights Act of 1866, represented what C.

Vann Woodward has termed a "deferred commitment to equality." Even after effectively nullified by Southern intimidation and manipulation, they remained on the books, later to be resurrected in the era of the so-called New or Second Reconstruction which followed World War II (Dailey, et al. 2000). Another once-overlooked contribution of Reconstruction was that it gave Southern states improved constitutions which in many cases were not revised until the end of the century. A case in point was South Carolina's constitution.

Produced in 1868 by the region's only black majority convention, it provided the state's first elected judiciary and system of public education, fairer taxation, and universal male suffrage. It was so well-done that Democrats felt no need to draft a new constitution until 1895 -- and only then so as to disfranchise black voters (Boles & Bethany, 2003). Finally, there is the broad area of social policy. There are two levels here: first, improved public services for all people, and, second, increased opportunities for blacks (Woodward, 1993).

The new constitutions provided for, and the first Republican legislatures accepted,.