It strikes me that the North and the South have a lot in common, on the slavery issue. Both the North and the South have significant histories of racist slavery. Both of them tried to rewrite history, to make themselves look less awful.
The difference is that the North succeeded in rewriting history; very few people now remember that all the original Northern states were slave states. And in the North, just like in the South, it was not a moral awakening but a war that delivered a mortal blow to slavery; but in the North’s case, it was the Revolutionary War that did slavery in. ((I’m aware that slavery in the North didn’t end instantly with the Revolutionary War, any more than it ended instantly in the South with the Civil War. But in both cases, the War can reasonably be seen as the essential event bringing the eventual end about.))
The South hasn’t succeeded that well, so everyone remembers that the South had slaves, but somehow many people now believe — contrary to what the South’s leaders, in the lead-up to the Civil War, said — that the South didn’t fight the civil war to preserve slavery.
I respect attempts to uncover the whitewashed history of slavery and racism in the northern states. But I don’t think that project either requires or excuses whitewashing the history of slavery and racism in the southern states.
I think more than slavery, for me the defining issue has always been segregation.
This is not to say that the North isn’t racist . . . I mean, I think that’s obvious, that we live in a racist society. Heck, both the Rodney King beating and The Oakland Riders case happened in the state I live in. (Hint: Not Alabama.)
That having been said, too often I think I hear Southerners say, “but the North is racist too,” not as a way of discussing the ever present racism of our culture but as a way of excusing slavery, segregation, and the historically systemic racism that was specific to the South.
It’s a bit like hearing someone from South Africa protest loudly that Scotland is really racist too. I mean, yeah, I’m sure that’s true . . . and I’m not dismissing it . . . but didn’t you guys have fucking apartheid?
—Myca
IMHO as a bewildered London->Atlanta transplant, the South make the whitewashing far harder to achieve because they make attempts to honour their ‘old South’ identity, attempts which have the effect of reminding everyone of slavery. Confederate flags (often used as parts of state logos), monuments to local Civil War heroes (things like Stone Mountain, the Confederate Rushmore) – by using such symbols to mark their Southern culture, by maintaining that they identify with the defeated slavers, they invite a host of questions about their own moral backgrounds, questions which those who espouse Northern US identities do not invite because the context isn’t there.
And they’re used to this. So much so that once, when I (that’s Atlanta-me) simply asked an older coworker why there was so much of that Confederate identity around – and why information at historical sites locally stressed that the Confederates were few, local and simple while the Union was much stronger and more tactically advanced – as if the war was somehow unfair and won by cheating – she immediately said ‘But some black people fought for the South, you know! Even some of the slaves!’ even though I hadn’t mentioned race at all.
EDIT: I’ve just decided this comment contains nothing but circular reasoning:
Everyone knows Confederacy=slavery
therefore
Mentioning your historical identity=mentioning slavery
doesn’t really explain why
mentioning your Yankee identity=/=mentioning slavery.
Maybe because it’s not taught in history lessons all over the world (I learned all about Dred Scott in Government and Politics lessons in the UK) – or just because the defining moments of that history are not so clearly about keeping slaves, while the great moment of Southern history quite clearly is. Maybe I had a point after all. Sorry.
This comment confuses me.
I’m aware that slavery in the North didn’t end instantly with the Revolutionary War, any more than it ended instantly in the South with the Civil War.
Legal slavery ended in the occupied South as soon as the War was lost. It hung on in the border States–Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky–but I think it’s accurate to say that legal slavery ended in the South instantly on losing the Civil War.
I wasn’t aware that most people thought the North never allowed slavery. I’m not going to argue that fact. But “the south” is defined as the states that left the union. “The south” left the union primarily to preserve their right to own black people as property. So the identity of “The South” is pretty closely tied to slavery. Dress it up however you like but that was the primary motivation for the succession.
yeah the north was bad too, but so what? Pretty much any group of people with power have used that power to help themselves and hurt others at one time or another. Arguing about which part of the country was better 150 years ago is pretty silly beyond how it affects things today.
As an ex-Southerner, I find myself sometimes wanting to point out the North’s history of slavery, racism, and wage slavery when Notherners get all pompous about how morally superior they are to the stupid rednecks in the South. Or to counter the assumption that many Northerners seem to have that all Southerners have white robes in their closets and yearn for the good old days. Which is not to say that the South doesn’t have a bunch of racist idiots in it (some in elected offices) along with some level of racism in its institutions and assumptions or that the Civil War wasn’t over slavery. Of course it was. So was the Texas Revolution, if you must know. But I’d like to see the dialogue framed more as “How can we deal with the history fairly and openly and move on as a society” rather than a discussion of who did the worst thing to whom and when. I suppose it’s too late for a South Africa style truth and reconciliation committee?
Amp, whatever else can be said about slavery in the North, it was eradicated without the necessity of a civil war. The North, however and whoever, succeeded in getting rid of slavery voluntarily. In reality, what made Civil War inevitable was the notion that slavery would (at least theoretically) expand to new states. I’m not mounting a defense for slavery as it was practiced anywhere, I’m suggesting that there’s a principled distinction between places that decided to eradicate it on their own and those that did not.
I’m suggesting that there’s a principled distinction between places that decided to eradicate it on their own and those that did not.
I think that you’re skipping over an important fact. Slavery was not as economically advantageous in the increasingly industrialized northern states as it was in the agricultural southern states. Had slavery remained as economically advantageous in the north, I don’t think that slavery would have been eradicated as early or as easily as it was in those states.
I think that this sort of statement may be what Dianne is pointing in her first sentence. I also think that it is an example of how US history lessons are woefully inadequate here in the US. We wind up with extremely simplified views of complex events and eras.
The northern states may have been slave slates, but the importance and prevalence of slavery there never approached the southern experience. A significant portion of the differentiation between the historical memories of the south and the north comes from this fact, not from a more successful “whitewashing” campaign in one region. That’s an absurd way to view history, in the absence of actual, you know, whitewashing campaigns.
Very few people are aware that the Atlantic slave trade was brought to an end by a combination of British military power, military adventurers, and Christian evangelical activists. The result of a whitewashing campaign? No, the result of most people not knowing most history.
Slavery was not as economically advantageous in the increasingly industrialized northern states as it was in the agricultural southern states.
I agree, although I think that slavery might have continued for a longer period of time in the northern states, despite its lack of economic advantage, if there hadn’t been people around aggitating for its end. Economics are one important motivator of human behavior but so are tradition, a desire to feel superior to someone, and simple lack of imagination. Let’s not give the robber barons all the credit…
I agree, Dianne. I was just trying to point out that there were factors other than superior morals that led to slavery ending earlier in the north – that rather than a simple explanation that relies on only one thing, the explanation is noticeably more complex. (Robert added some more factors in his comment)
Ah, yes, the whiny six-year-old defense. Best answered in the same way that your mother answered it when you were six: “And if the North jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?”
I’ve heard it said that slavery was the main issue in the Civil War, and I’ve heard it said that slavery was merely a very visible issue, while the real issues had to do with local vs. federal government, etc. I just can’t shake the feeling, though, that the cause of the war must have been pretty much the same as the cause of our more modern wars: powerful people decided that they would benefit from a war, so they stirred up a bunch of poor people with whatever reasons appealed to their fears (“If we don’t fight then the
TerristsYankees win!”) and got them to fight their war. Great profit was had by all. (Well…by some.)I can’t see much of one. For an individual person who decides that what he is doing is wrong, repents and tries to make amends, perhaps I can see a distinction. But societies don’t really work like that.
The longer preservation of slavery is not, IMO, the reason many people think of the South as more racist today. The reason most people think of the South as racist today is more recent conduct, including 1) Confederate nostalgia and revanchism; and 2) that the segregation that immediately replaced slavery in the South ended just recently in historical terms. Connecticut and Massachusetts just do not have post-WWII histories of poll taxes and literacy tests, segregated lunch counters and executing young black men.
If you want to play the moral equivalence game, you’ll have to do better. Maybe you should take the Northeast to task for its oppression of indigenous peoples; that’s a real historical criticism.
Seriously, Amp. This is like “Why does Germany get all the blame when the Croats were fascist, too?!”
Let’s get this right out in the open, Amp. Are you saying that, for a particular point in history, the Northeastern US was more racist and oppressive to African-Americans than the Southeastern US? Or would you agree that if we’re assigning the titles “better” and “worse” for each year since European arrival, the South pretty much dominates and “worse” category?
You have to wonder about people that hold multigenerational grudges. Its like the Hatfields and McCoys writ large.
You listen to some northerner’s snooty arrogant attitude with that annoying air of superiority when they cast immediate judgment on someone with a southern accent. You listen to some southerners and get the feeling that they would like a rematch. Its crazy. I can understand a WWII Marine vet not caring much for the Japanese, or an Army vet the Germans, or the intense visceral hatred of Jane Fonda by Vietnam vets. But I can’t fathom that intensity lasting thru more than one or two generations.
Another annoyance: The point that the civil war was fought for THIS reason, but definately not THAT reason. As though there can be only one reason to do something. Or that some people can’t do something for mainly ONE reason, while other people for mainly ANOTHER reason, while yet other people for MANY reasons. Why did we fight the Germans in WWII? (Remember there can be only ONE reason) Its overly simplistic to the point of being silly. Its entirely possible (and probable imho) that some people mainly fought to preserve slavery, while others to mainly for states rights, and others for a whole host of reasons. People and events just aren’t that simple.
Seriously, Amp. This is like “Why does Germany get all the blame when the Croats were fascist, too?!”
IMHO it is more like “Why is Germany considered the epitome of genocidal countries when the US committed far more effective genocides, albeit against smaller populations?”
The US is the master at using other people’s bad behavior to justify their own. Try to start a conversation about whether the use of the atomic bomb was justified and inevitably someone will bring up the Holocaust, which had all sh!t to do with it*, since Germany had surrendered by August 1945. Bring up racism in the north, even contemporary racism, and someone will mention slavery as though it excuses all acts of racism up to and including lynching as long as they occurred north of the Mason-Dixon line. The oppression Olympics is a losing game for both sides and distorts the truth–slavery was only a part of the overall history of racism in America.
*I know, I know, not quite true since a number of the scientists who worked on the a-bomb were refugees from Naziism and they may have been motivated to work harder by fear that the Nazis might take over the world if they didn’t produce an “ultimate weapon”. But the decision to drop it, once it was made, had little or nothing to do with the Holocaust. The rape of Nanjing, possibly, but not the Holocaust.
There are two different discussions here, and I think understanding of both of them is necessary.
The first discussion revolves around the fact that someone else’s worse behavior does not excuse your bad behavior. The fact that the south had slavery and segregation does not change (or ‘make okay’) that northern culture was and is deeply racist. This is sort of linked to the way that some white folks will point at klansmen and skinheads as if to say, “That’s what a racist looks like! Not like me, certainly,” and thus never have to examine their own racial prejudices and the fact that (I think) on some level all white people have some unexamined racism.
The second discussion revolves around the fact that someone else’s bad behavior does not excuse your worse behavior. If Southern culture fought a war to maintain slavery, lynched thousands of black men for offenses real or imagined, and maintained segregation until well within living memory . . . well, I’m sorry, but you don’t get to point at the North and say, “but . . . but . . . they did bad stuff too!” Yes, the North is racist, but fuck, man, there are differences. I think this is essentially the point Thomas, TSID was making above.
I’ve seen both of these discussions happen all the time about a huge variety of topics. See, also: Horrible Vicious Huge Republican Homophobia does not excuse Less Widespread But Still Awful Democratic Homophobia, but neither is the reverse true.
—Myca
Well summarized, Myca.
Another problem complicating things is that it’s not as though the North and South were completely separate, hermetically sealed regions that never influenced (or influence) each other. People moved and move from one to the other. And not everyone in either region agreed with the policies of their regions’ governments. There were southern abolitionists, pro-slavery northerners (Kentucky and Maryland, anyone), people who didn’t approve of slavery but thought that blacks and whites could never live together and all American blacks should be deported to Africa (I’ve heard a rumor that Lincoln held this belief), people who didn’t give a fart about slavery one way or another but who were annoyed at the army wandering through their fields–whichever army it was, and so on. Which is why I don’t think that the racism in the south can be examined completely without consideration of racism in the north or vice versa.
I like myca’s summary.
Well said, Myca.
Here’s a good resource on slavery in the North, if anyone is interested.
http://www.slavenorth.com/
I find it to be a balanced account of how slavery played out in the North. It’s not a “see, see, the North was evil too!” piece, but just decent historical scholarship (for what you can find online at least) that looks at the North’s role in slavery.
I wanted to jump back to the original question, which as I understand is why the South is so much more defensive about race than the North.
I think a lot of it has to do with the war. I think the North was able to spend the next century feeling smugly superior, since they fought “the good fight”, and won. I think a lot of Northerners after the war felt that they had done enough — and they had, indeed, paid an almost unimaginable price in ending slavery throughout the country.
In contrast, the South had the end of slavery imposed on it, kicking and screaming. And then for the next 140 years, they’ve felt as thouugh the rest of the country was looking at them with condescension and suspicion. And I think being defensive, even to the point of beligerently defending the patently indefensible, is an outgrowth of that.
To respond to Ampersand’s original comment — I think the north and south tried to escape their past in fundamentally differnet ways. The North’s whitewashing is an outgrowth of an overly self-satisfied view of the past — “we fought the war, so nothing before or since is significant in comparison.” And the South’s is a defensive reaction to being tarred as racist slaveholders — “yes, we were bad, but not as bad as you think, and you were bad too”.
I know that the former narrative had more resonance and persuasive power for me, but I grew up in upstate New York; I can’t vouch for how it appeared from school districts in Alabama.
Dianne mentioned
Lincoln unquestionably espoused this view. However, how much he believed it, and how dedicated to it he was, is another story. Lincoln was a politician, and a good one, and one often gets the sense that he was picking his public positions with a very careful eye on whose support they would garner, and what the practical consequences of pursuing them would be.
Lincoln’s political base, both in Illinois and during his national election, was the large pool of lower-income white Americans who were distrustful of slavery as a competition to free white labor, but who didn’t particularly like blacks, and were afraid that freed slaves would depress their wages. So Lincoln had to somehow assure them that ending slavery wouldn’t imperil them; this is also why the winning Republican campaign wasn’t for abolition, but for restricting the spread of slavery.
In office, he tried to encourage it — but didn’t really make any sacrifices for it. There’s apparently some evidence that his enthusiasm for it diminished markedly after large numbers of black troops fought in the Union army.
It’s worth remembering that colonization seemed much less crazy in the 1860s than it appears to us today. The African slave trade had only ended 50 years before; a large fraction of slaves would have had grandparents or great grandparents who actually came from Africa. The black population was far less integrated into American society than it would become. A number of black leaders were for it, as a way of escaping racism and oppression.
There’s a fair bit on Wikipedia about this, if you’re curious; see their page on Lincoln on slavery
Ari: Thanks for the info.
While I’m sure that things like the founding of Liberia looked better in 1860 than they would in 2007, I’m not sure they looked all that great even then. I got the impression that many whites (and maybe even some black leaders) were advocating forcibly deporting all ex-slaves, many of whom were probably more “white” than “black”, on the grounds that people of African descent and those of European descent simply could never live together harmoniously. Even a voluntary return had problems: Probably very few of the freed slaves had any idea what tribe they belonged to, what language their relatives spoke, or how to get in touch with their relatives in Africa. So they ended up forming a new country…on territory taken from the native Africans who formerly lived in what is now Liberia. In short, they became just another set of colonizers, even if they did look a little less strange than, say, the colonizers of South Africa.
I always find this argumentation style interesting. Sundown towns existed in a number of non-southern states less than 40 years ago. Although by their strict historical definition, it’s hard to find any currently, there are certainly modern analogues which aren’t much better.
Racial restrictive covenants were active in my city until the 70s. And I live just outside of LA. Hell, I grew up in the house that I did because it was the only house the realtor would show to my parents. The northwest part of town was for black people, and that was that.
In that same town, I was told to my face by the superintendent of the school district that our public schools (the one which I was attending at the time, in particular) were failing because there weren’t enough white kids enrolled. To my (black/Japaese) face. In front of the entire student body. In 2000. He had a plan to improve the schools, and it involved intense redistricting and changes to the system to make it more inviting for white students, and to try to shunt students of color off into other districts.*
It’s not poll taxes or lynching, sure… but each case is an example of institutional racism on a fairly large scale. I don’t know enough to point specifically to Massachusetts or Connecticut, but segregation wasn’t at all a south-only thing, and neither was institutionalized racism.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a difference of degree, concentration, or wider institutional support. Of course these things were concentrated more in some areas than others, and were harsher/more obvious in some areas than other, and were easier to carry out and sustain in some areas than others. That’s the case with any set of systems, whether they be harmful or beneficial. The point is that there’s this narrative where the south sprung up awful institution after awful institution, and … everyone else sat around looking virtuous for a while? I don’t even know what the proper contrast to that is.
(None of which even gets near the relative levels of subtle discrimination and inequalities that persist in what people consider our more enlightened areas. I’ve had (white) people refuse to serve my (brown) family in a restaurant before, in liberal, enlightened Oregon. I’ve definitely been one of an obscenely few people of color in all-white schools, over and over and over again, in areas where the circumstances made it clear that this was not due to any demographic challenges they may have had in recruitment or payment. I could go on and on. I suspect most people of color could do the same. Just because institutional racism isn’t overt doesn’t mean it isn’t institutional racism.)
* To be fair, I suppose the Superintendent’s plan was internalized institutional racism, as he was a black man. A really pale black man, but a black man nonetheless. That doesn’t make it any less institutional racism, it just makes him that much more of an ass.
If Southern culture … maintained segregation until well within living memory . . . well, I’m sorry, but you don’t get to point at the North and say, “but . . . but . . . they did bad stuff too!”
Myca,
I could agree if the bad stuff was different. To a large extent, it wasn’t. The rioting over school desegregation in Boston was in 1974; whites totally fled the Chicago system as it was integrated in the 1970’s. Ralph Abernathy wrote that the reception MLK got in Chicago was more violently hostile than it was in the South.
Amp made some interesting points, but why does this feel like another discussion on who’s worse, the North or the South? Maybe it’s just been a long day.
I didn’t think that’s the point that Amp was making in his article and some of his point seemed to challenge this dynamic, but I could be wrong.
Yeah. That’s why I have a problem with some of this, which is worse, North or South? I’m not convinced the reasons the North stopped using slaves are entirely altruistic. An act of moral conscience? The reasons were likely more economical. After all, one of the reasons the Unitarian Church stayed out of the issue as long as it did was because many of their member owned merchantiles in New England which sold products made at least in part if not totally from slave labor in the South.
Which one’s worse, the North or the South? Is that the most important point or question? Both of these regions for the most part were part of one country and that makes a lot of us past and present in that country morally responsible and guilty because the United States benefited a lot from slavery including the North which of course, didn’t have to dirty its conscience with actually owning, working and abusing human beings after a certain period of time. It had the best of both worlds.
Everyone including the owners of merchantiles in the North who sold products made by using slave labor. That includes those who watched, and said, well that’s the South, we’re different, more enlightened up north. If Southerners use the “what about the North” argument to escape what’s going on in their backyards, the people in the North do the same thing, with “well, look at the South”.
In many visible ways the South was worse, but you know what? It could never have been *worse* in more visible ways if it hadn’t been for the fact that there was a “North”. Just like the North had serious issues with racism and couldn’t have been without a “South”. They’re very intertwined including during the time when they were torn apart.
Or a United States that had built itself on the back of slave labor even as it waxed on about the question of whether or not freedom and liberty included slaves.
Northerners don’t seem very hospitable to migration of Black men, women and families from the South.
Did anyone research some of the racist riots by angry Whites when Black people migrated up from the South for work including in places like Detroit? Whites including police killed Black people in these riots? Why?
When the South had slaves but the North didn’t, did the North kick the South out of the union, because it used slaves and that was so morally wrong? Did the South leave on its own and the North go to war to get it back into the fold to “preserve” the union?
When Abe Lincoln did his emancipation proclamation, where were slaves “liberated”? Everywhere in both the union and the confederacy?
Yes, there were brave men and women and children who fought against both slavery and Jim Crow, though emphasis on the successes and lives lost focus on the White abolitionists and civil rights workers. But for the most part, when Black men, women and children were assaulted, raped, killed and lynched, where was the uproar? If the North was so morally superior, where where they? There were anti-lynching movements in the South, of both Black and White women for example.
There were abolitionists in the North and in the South. There were civil rights activists in the North and in the South. There were pro-slavery and anti-civil rights people living in the same households with abolitionists and civil rights activists. Like Dianne said, there were pro-slavery people in the North and the South.
Silence on an issue, on burned bodies left hanging on trees, on children being separated from their parents, of Black women being raped by White slave owners, isn’t exactly the moral high ground. Some might say, it’s worse.
And Magniloquence brought it up in the previous post about “sunshine” towns being in other places. There’s still areas in the southern part of my county where African-Americans know not to be alone after dark. And it’s not the South. And it’s not the past.
As to comment #1 about the Oakland riders case. The cops that were framing up West Oakland blacks were of Filipino and Mexican descent. The cop that snitched against the other cops was white. While this is a case of anti-black racism, it doesn’t fit nicely into the box of white supremacy.
Also when the black panthers formed (in the 1960’s) in opposition to a viciously racist OPD many of Oakland’s finest were in fact transplanted southern racists.
Atlanta born and raised, in school we were repeatedly told that the civil war was NOT fought over slavery, but over state’s rights–of which slavery was an issue.
I don’t really trust that too much…
I was also told by my AP US History teacher/soccer coach that slavery, was “not that bad”. That all the slaves got food, clothing, and split level houses and that truly horrible beatings happened in Brazil.
I swear, I will remember that for as long as I live.