The Civil War and its Aftermath

The Civil War was fought over slavery.  It was the burning moral issue of its time for most Americans, but in the South it was also an economic issue.  Should it be expanded?  Should it be allowed to exist but contained?  Should it be abolished?  The presidential election of 1860 tipped the scales towards an answer to those questions.

The policy debate was whether new states being formed and admitted to the union in western territories should be allowed to keep slaves or be “free” states.  Both the North and the South agreed with the conclusion that the power to decide the question of slavery for the territories was the power to determine the future of slavery itself.   

Abraham Lincoln, running an as a Republican from Illinois, supported banning slavery in all new U.S. territories, but did not stipulate the prohibition of slavery in states where it currently existed.  

Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Illinois senator who defeated Lincoln in 1858 for that post, ended up representing the “Northern Democrats” after the Democratic party split.  He asserted that settlers in a territory should have the same rights as citizens in any state in the Union to decide on the establishment or prohibition of slavery as a purely local matter.

“Southern Democrats” stormed out of the convention before Douglas was selected.  They nominated John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky as candidate for the “Southern Democrats,” who took the position that there was no constitutional federal authority over such questions as slavery but rather state sovereignty empowered states to expand slavery as they wished.  It became known as the “states’ rights” ideology and though framed as a broad constitutional power it was created to advance slave state interests with federal authority.  It was a demand for federal slave protection, with the implicit threat of secession if that demand was not met. 

John Bell, a Tennessee senator representing the Constitutional Union Party, took the stance that equal numbers of free and slave states, as embodied in the Missouri Compromise, should become a constitutional mandate.

You know the rest of that story.   Lincoln, Douglas, and Bell, candidates who all favored preserving the union, won 82% of votes cast nationally.  Voters at that time were white men only.  The Democrats split, voting on both sides of the slavery issue, and Abraham Lincoln, whose party platform was built upon the most stringent of the slavery containment planks, won a plurality and became the first Republican president of the United States.

But before he could be inaugurated, seven states with cotton-based economies declared secession and formed the Confederacy; Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas.  They were soon joined by Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.  They named Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as their first and only President.

A newly formed Confederate Army, financed by wealthy plantation owners and others who had an economic stake in preserving slavery, began seizing federal installations within the territory it claimed as a separate nation.  Both the North and the South prepared for war.  The confederates assumed European countries, especially England, were so dependent on their cotton that they would intervene, but none did, and none recognized the sovereignty of the new Confederate States of America. 

Despite the lack of European support, on April 12, 1861 Confederate forces fired on Forth Sumter, a federal installation in Charleston, South Carolina.  The North declared war on the Confederacy, and the Civil War began. 

If the North’s intentions regarding slavery were not clear before the war, they were made clear by an executive order issued by Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863 called the Emancipation Proclamation, which changed the federal legal status of more than 3.5 Million enslaved African Americans from slave to free in designated areas of the South.  It allowed that as soon as a slave escaped the control of the Confederate government, by running away or through advances of federal troops, the former slave became free. 

The proclamation did not compensate slave owners, did not outlaw slavery, and did not grant citizenship to the ex-slaves (called freedmen).  But it did make the eradication of slavery an explicit war goal, in addition to the goal of reuniting the Union.

At that point, if not convinced before, Southern whites believed they were fighting for not only their economic life, due to the large amount of capital invested in slaves, but also their mortal lives as well.  Southerners feared a repeat of the “horrors of Santo Domingo”, in which nearly all white people-including those sympathetic to abolition, were killed after the successful slave revolt in Haiti.  Perhaps that prediction is how rich plantation owners were able to motivate so many poor white Southern men to fight so hard for the economic interests of a few.  Slavery was illegal in much of the North, it was fading in the border states and in Southern cities, but it was expanding in the highly profitable cotton districts of the rural South and Southwest.  

You know how this story ends also.  At about 1:00 p.m. on April 9^th, 1865 General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate Army, rides his horse Traveler up to the home of Wilmer McLean in Appomattox, Virginia, ties him to a hitching post, and goes inside to meet with General Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Union Army.   Lee knows the retreat of his army has been blocked by Grant and that continued fighting is futile.  He reviews the terms of surrender that have been drawn up by Grant and asks for one change.

Grant’s terms stipulate that Lee’s soldiers give up all arms, ammunition, and horses to the Northern forces.  Lee points out that Southern soldiers brought their own mounts to their cavalry regiments and would need those animals for farming when they returned home.  Grant agrees to the change.  Lee mentioned that his men had not eaten for several days and are hungry.  Grant orders that 25,000 rations of food be delivered to the Confederate soldiers camped not far from Appomattox. 
With that the American Civil War ended.  The Union of American States was preserved.  From 1861 to 1865 it is estimated 620,000-750,000 American soldiers lost their lives along with an undetermined number of civilians.  By one estimate, the war claimed the lives of 10% of all Northern men 20-45 years old and 30% of all Southern white men aged 18-40. 

As a result of that war the union of our American states was preserved, and 4 million African Americans were freed.  Or were they?

When I got to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, more commonly called “The Lynching Museum” on Caroline St. in Montgomery, Alabama it was raining.  I killed a little time inside the building across the street, bought my tickets for both the memorial and the museum, and read up on the place.  It is located on six acres in an old part of Montgomery close to downtown.  The art displayed across the street is the visual and physical manifestation of years of work of a group called the Equal Justice Initiative who have identified more than 4,000 African American men, women, and children lynched between 1877 and 1950.  The researchers believe that thousands more lynchings occurred that will never be documented and recorded.  Those are stories many, including the descendants of the perpetrators of such violence, want never to be told.  Just as many, including those murdered and their families, scream for acknowledgement of what happened.

The rain let up.  I walked across the street in a fine mist which was fading away.  It was quiet when I gave my ticket to the attendant ad went inside.  Few people had ventured out.  The memorial opened just ten months before, in April of 2018.  It was spring in Alabama.  Dogwoods and tulips were blooming that late February morning as I made my way up an inclined walk.

The Lynching Museum is no more than a roof with sturdy wooden beams on which are hung 800 steel boxes, one for each county in the United States where researchers could document racial terror lynchings. 

On those tablets are engraved the names of the victims.  Some 4,000 victims.  In reading the names, my focus went from social problem to individual tragedy.  It’s the names that hold the power.  The individual horror each one represents.  I had much the same feeling I had when standing in Washington D.C. at the Vietnam Memorial.  I quickly became overwhelmed by the names, aware that I could never appreciate the circumstances of each individual death, shaken to my core by the enormous senselessness of it, and horrified that it happened because of the politics and beliefs of Americans who could have stopped it had they chosen to do so.

I tried at first to read names.  I spotted my own family’s name.  William McClure was one of several African Americans lynched in Carroll County, Georgia on March 17, 1924.  St. Patrick’s Day.  Carroll County is just east of Atlanta on the Alabama State Line.

There were children’s names, and women.  Not only were women and children lynched for their own perceived offenses against whites but also in lieu of their husbands or fathers.  When lynch mobs pursued their intended victims they often fled, running north.  To carry out punishment for their alleged crimes their families were sometimes targeted.

The names blurred as the number of steel boxes increased.  And then anecdotal placards began to appear on the walls at eye level, as if to bring my attention back to those individuals who suffered.  I took pictures of them with my I phone, like this. 

Here’s the stories those placards told, one by one.  Read each one slowly if you can, and then move on to the next.

A black man was lynched in Millerburg, Ohio in 1892 for “standing around” in a white neighborhood.

Caleb Gadly was lynched in Bowling Green, Kentucky, in 1894 for walking behind the wife of his white employer.

William Stephens and Jefferson Cole were lynched in Delta County, Texas, in 1895 after they refused to abandon their land to white people

Robert Morton was lynched in Rockfield, Kentucky, in 1897 for writing a note to a white woman

David Hunter was lynched in Laurens County, South Carolina, in 1898 for leaving the farm where he worked without permission.

After an overcoat went missing from a hotel in Tifton, Georgia in 1900, two black men were lynched, whipped to death while being “interrogated” in the woods

William Donegan was lynched in Springfield, Illinois in 1908 for having a white wife.

Dozens of men, women, and children were lynched in a massacre in East. St. Louis, Illinois in 1917.

Parks Banks was lynched in Yazoo City, Mississippi in 1922 for carrying a photograph of a white woman in his hat.

In 1922, Charles Arkins, 15, was burned alive by a white mob of more than 1,000 people in Washington County, Georgia.

Laura Wood was lynched in Barber, North Carolina, in 1930 after a white merchant said she stole a ham.

Elizabeth Lawrence was lynched in Birmingham, Alabama in 1933 for reprimanding white children who threw rocks at her.

Otis Price was lynched in Perry, Florida in 1938 for walking past a window while a white woman was bathing.

Jesse Thomas was lynched in Luverne, Alabama, in 1940 for addressing a white police office without the title ‘mister.”

A black construction worker was lynched at Camp Blanding, Florida, in 1941 for insisting a white co-worker return his shovel.

Robert Mallard, a prosperous farmer, was lynched near Lyons, Georgia in 1948 for voting.

Those are but seventeen of the more than 4,000 stories of African Americans lynched in the United States.  Sometimes you are not ready for the things you learn.  Near the end of the exhibit is a stone wall with water flowing over it, a lateral fountain of sorts, with an explanation that the names of African Americans memorialized there are only those that can be documented.  Researchers believe there are thousands more.  In their anonymity they too are paid respect there in Montgomery, within the walls of the lynching museum.

Outside the building there are duplicate steel boxes lying flat for easier viewing.  It was there that I found lynchings documented in my state, Illinois.

Alexander County (Cairo area)                             3

Sangamon County (Springfield area)                   2

St. Clair County (E. St. Louis)                                 40

I was puzzled by the duplicate boxes.  As I left the grounds I asked an attendant about them.

“What’s the deal with the boxes outside?”

“We had those duplicate boxes made for counties, maybe states, across the country to buy and display, hopefully in a good place like their state capitol or in each county capitol.  It’s another way we thought of to create awareness of what happened.  We hope one day they will own their history and come to grips with it.”

“How’s that program going?”

“Very slowly sir.”

When I got back to the parking lot I got in the Buick, rolled down the windows and sat there a while in the quiet.  I knew there were lynchings in the South but I had no idea the enormity of them, how widespread they were, who they murdered.  In my country.  I didn’t see it coming, the way I felt.  I felt hollow.  The day was clearing off.  The sun was about to come out.

Things seemed different than before.