Author David Blight will lecture at the Freedom Center on December 8 at 6:30 pm on two of his books, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory and Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory and the American Civil War. Blight is a professor of American History at Yale University, is Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale and is working on a full biography of Frederick Douglass that will be published in 2013.
Last week, Mildred Fallen, Public Ally for Marketing & Web Communications, had the opportunity to interview Dr. Blight over the phone. Below is the transcript of the interview.
FC: I was reading a little bit of Fredrick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee; that seems really fascinating. There was a chapter I was drawn to, Chapter 5, Frederick Douglass and the Apocalypse, that has a quote from W.E.B. DuBois describing Emancipation as the Apocalypse for the newly freed slave. Can you talk a bit about what this implicated about the transition from slavery to freedom, especially for a modern reader who might think freedom meant African-Americans immediately shared the same rights as whites?
Well, that’s unfortunately a hopelessly simplified view of the whole thing, although, it’s hard to carve that out of our imaginations, isn’t it? That somehow, when freedom came, everything changed—but of course, it didn’t. In fact, we now have a much deeper understanding of the whole Emancipation process than we did even when I was in college and graduate school. There’s an enormous and growing good historical literature now on the whole story of Emancipation, and the Emancipation, though a wonderfully important and terrific transition in American History, it didn’t come easy, it took an all-out civil war, it meant that people had to flee from plantations and farms to try to reach Union lines against tremendous odds.
We now know that roughly, only about 600,000 of the 4 million slaves were actually free within Union lines when the war ended, that meant that more than ¾ did not become free during the war; they became free afterward or toward the end of the war. But even then of course, it began another whole story. Freedom often meant freedom to be tenant farmers, (or) if they were lucky, free to be sharecroppers. They were still mired in the South which was a cash-poor economy, had no credit, and no money, and therefore, the share-cropping system involved—the idea of working on halves—half the crop you keep, half the crop goes to the landowner. Blacks were given civil and political rights to a great extent through the 13, 14, and 15th Amendments and Reconstruction Acts; that is an amazing and hugely important revolution.
But that of course, led to a counter-revolution by the white south, and in a period of eight to 12 years, all of the Confederate and southern states were taken back by the white southern Democratic, partly through the work of the Ku Klux Klan and its many imitators, and partly through the work of mob violence. The rights and liberties created by the war were to an extent, eroded or eradicated by the 1890s, although not entirely. By the 1890s, about 20 percent of southern blacks owned their own land. Blacks voted in huge numbers with very important results and elected all sorts of black politicians during that short window of Reconstruction. There were still black politicians getting elected as late as the 1880s in the south. That was mostly crushed by the Jim Crow legal system, which began to take hold by the 1890s, so yes, Emancipation is a huge moment, turning point, pivot in American History—it’s really the pivot of the 19th century. But the freeing of 4 million slaves has implications and consequences, like almost nothing else ever happened in the 19th century in America. And yet, as everyone knows, it took another reconstruction–it took the Civil Rights’ revolution of the ‘50s and ‘60s to ever really make those results work, and we’re still dealing with that change from the Civil Rights Movement, which caused a counter revolution movement too, didn’t it? And the conservative movement has been moving against it ever since. If we have our eyes open and our ears open we know that. It’s like everything in history; nothing is ever a perfect change. Look at the way so many of us felt the night Barack Obama was elected. It’s hard to believe—it probably was a moment of hope for at least 52% of the voters, like no other, but look where we are now. Great change brings great reaction, that’s one thing we can be certain of.
FC: I’ve been seeing some things on line where you’ve drawn some similarities between 1861 in terms of America’s views on racial segregation and power and privilege and today, in 2011. Do you care to talk about that?
Well sure, I’ll talk a little about it; and I’ll also talk a little about it in my lecture. One of the things I want to talk about in that talk is the kinds of legacies of the Civil War era that we can still see around us today. And one of the most obvious is this rolling, brutal debate we’re having about the role of the Federal Government in relation to the states, the Conservative Movement, the Republican Party and the Tea Party at its root, have been trying to take back power from the Federal Government and return it to the states. The Conservative Movement has been trying to blunt many, many of the changes brought by federal power over these many decades now. They’re trying to erase the New Deal in some ways, Social Security, collective bargaining; all sorts of things that really were given a huge boost by the New Deal and the Great Society, like Medicare and Medicaid, which was created then.
That debate stems directly from the great transitions of the Civil War, because it was in the Civil War that a much stronger, highly centralized Federal state, federal government came into being, and it was created by the first Republicans. It was created by the party of Lincoln. And all of this talk we have in our politics, all of this debate we have about the role of so-called, “big government,” or the problems of big government, the first big government was created by the Lincoln Administration. It was created by the Republican Party that fought and won the Civil War; that passed the first Income Tax. It passed the Homestead Act. It passed the Transcontinental Railroad Act.
They passed the Morrow Act, which was the creation of land grant colleges to train farmers into mechanics and better. And above all, it passed Emancipation, which was the longest single concentration of property in American history. And all of that was done in the service of winning the Civil War, so those people who don’t like big government, in my view, should go back and ask themselves, would they prefer the Union lose the Civil War? Would they have preferred we lose the war against Japan and Germany? It took big government to win the big wars, and it took big government to create national health insurance of any kind, which is Medicare. It took big government to create Social Security, which is old-age pensions.
It took big government to try to guarantee collective bargaining for workers, and it took big government to help secure women’s rights. I guess my suggestion is that whenever you hear anybody complaining about big government or complaining about federal government or arguing for state’s rights or arguing for limited government, (I ask,) what do they want the limited government in the service of? Why do they want to blunt the powers of the Federal government? In the interest of what? Why do they hate the E.P.A.? Why do they hate the endangered species act? Anyway, I talk more about this in the lecture.
For more information about Dr. David Blight’s lecture, contact Jackie Wallace at jwallace@nurfc.org or 513.333.7586. To RSVP online click here.
Funding for this program was made possible in part by the Ohio Humanities Council with support by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in the program do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment of the Humanities, or of the Ohio Humanities Council.
Funding for this program was made possible in part by the Ohio Humanities Council with support by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in the program do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment of the Humanities, or of the Ohio Humanities Council.
