If any vision of American citizenship was to become a reality on July 4,1865 it would have to be reconstructed at the intersection of sacral language, manhood, military service, and historical narration. If the vaunted ideal of liberty, so revered in parlance and so reviled in practice, was to hold any real meaning it could only be created through the building of usable origin stories to define the political possibilities of the new nation. The narratives of slavery and emancipation, the Lost Cause, immigration, and westward expansion fit the criteria. First each vision of history held its own sacral language. Second, each carried its own unique vision of war, of manhood, valor, bloodshed, and service in a righteous cause. Third, each historical ideal could be interpreted in terms of all the others, thus providing a self-enclosed circular logic of what the American nation ought to be. These stories gave concrete meaning to the abstract conceptions of liberty mentioned by many and maintained by few.
During the long decades prior to the Civil War, Americans created a moral language in opposition to slavery. Now, on the eighty-ninth anniversary of Independence they applied that moral language to understand the nation. The narrative of slavery and emancipation stood as one of the foundation stories of the new republic. In plotting the outlines of the nation, unionists, cast the narrative of slavery and emancipation in religious terms and thus erected a chronicle of a land redeemed and a nation restored. So, James Lynch argued that “the colored man’s original right to freedom” was found in “the first chapter of the book of Genesis. “William Howard Day, maintained that an old-testament religion mandated anti-slavery principles proclaimed at Sinai, and quoted the Shema:“I am the lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt out of the house of bondage. Nathanial Smith also spoke of slavery in similar terms: “Never, since the shadow of Heaven’s wrath darkened the pavilions, where Egypt’s Magicians muttered their spells in vain, has a people known such gloom.” The Mayor of Boston quoted the Apostle Paul and named slavery a “thorn in the flesh,” to George Boutwell it constituted a “sin,” while to Congressman William Cutler of Ohio it was a “leaven” that “nearly corrupted the whole mass” of the nation.
The reading of freedom into holy writ, the quoting of the Shema, the identification of slavery with Egypt, and the sacral language describing slavery helped to reinforce a narrative of Americans as god’s chosen people. In this story God chose Americans, like the ancient Israelites, for a special work and a special purpose. Further, echoing the words of John Brown and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, where sanguinary bloodshed serves divine providence, the sacred chronicle of a slavery narrative contained the thesis that the Civil War stood as God’s judgment on the nation for the crime of slavery. Thus, William Cutler spoke of living nations “born from ideas,” identified the American nation with the Jews of ancient Palestine, and argued that “when they went after Idols, God scourged them back to their cardinal faith. “William Howard Day quoted the Noahide covenants in Genesis that “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood by man shall his blood be shed,” and the injunction against theft in Exodus popularized by Charles Elliot: “He that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.” Henry W. Adams spoke of the slave-holding oligarchy that “grisly ghost of southern retrogression,” which for seventy years had “elected and controlled the government and the Supreme Court, muzzled the press, hung paddocks on the lips of free speech, banished the school house, profaned the sanctity of marriage, and subsidized dueling, lynch law, and treason” in order to “terrify mankind into subjection to their barbarous institution.” The divine punishment for national acquiescence, to southern slavery had been, Adams argued, “a land of wailing widows and orphans crying for their fathers and brothers far away in unknown sepulchers, with faces upturned to the wild daisy and to God.” Similarly, the Reverend Frederick T. Brown, created an image of the Antebellum nation as “sick unto death,” and unaware of its sickness, “leprous from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot,” from the disease of slavery. In Brown’s cosmology of the American nation “fathers and mothers” sacrificed “idolized” sons, “wives” sent “their beloved husbands to see them return no more” and siblings watched “brothers sleep the sleep of the slain” all to “purify this heritage of God” from the stain of slavery. The language of divine judgment, of active male sacrifice to purify a female nation, served to create a sacral narrative of sin and redemption centered on the national experience of slavery.
The religious language centered on slavery, with its attendant fundamentalism created a national story that served the same function as a European ethnic nationalism centered on a common ancestral past. In the effort to create a nation in the aftermath of Appomattox, these stories of slavery, drawn from pious tradition, allowed certain white unionists, abolitionists, former slaves, and free blacks to create a common national understanding of the American past. Moreover, in many of these narratives of sin, judgment, and redemption, slavery stood present at the discovery of America. Henry W. Adams spoke of “Columbus” who “stained his immortal name by the capture and enslavement of large numbers of American aborigines.”[Both Adams and Day narrated the founding of Jamestown in 1607, and relayed how shortly afterward, the slave trade began in earnest. In this narrative of American history “the shout of the freemen” contrasted with the “wail of the bondsmen” in a macabre duet.” Additionally, the religious language surrounding slavery underwent a reinterpretation in the aftermath of the civil war. Prior to the war, proslavery advocates emphasized the Hamitic myth as a biblical justification for slavery. Now with emancipation a reality in Georgia, James Lynch reinterpreted the parable as a source of pride: “They tell us we are the descendants of Ham, the naughty son of Noah. Then our race first gave science, art and learning to the world.” In Lynch’s retelling of the Hamitic myth, “the sons of Ham founded Egypt” and “Egyptian civilization has been transmitted to every succeeding nation on the face of the globe.” For his reinterpretation of what was once a slave-holder’s story Lynch quoted Psalm 105 where “Israel also came into the land of Egypt and Jacob sojourned in the land of Ham.” As James Lynch illustrated, more than creating a narrative of sin and redemption, by placing slavery at the founding of the nation, as an inherent part of the national experience, Unionists formed an epistemological framework placed African Americans at the center of the national story—a narrative which erected a logic of black civil rights in the aftermath of civil war and emancipation.
To be an effective appeal for citizenship and civil rights, the story of slavery and emancipation, aside from appealing to a nineteenth century theological framework, also had to function in tandem with other themes in the broader American story. First, by narrating the story of slavery and emancipation alongside with the arrival of Englishmen at Jamestown, and Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, African Americans and their white allies, framed the experiences of black Americans as an original part of the nation. Second, the story was also a narrative of migration to a new land. However unwilling or forced and whatever the vagaries of the middle passage, only by casting the story of slavery as a story of migration to a new land whose “virgin soil” in the words of James Lynch was “left untouched for thousands of years by the ploughshare” could former slaves, free blacks, and white advocates of equality before the law, advance the cause of civil rights.
The narrative of slavery and emancipation also needed to fit within the framework of westward expansion and progress. The Rev. Brown in his oration expressly linked the growth of pro-slavery ideology to the nation’s westward expansion. He began by saying that when the Constitution was adopted “there was but one opinion on the subject of slavery” that it “was iniquitous and unprofitable.” He then went on to argue how after every major acquisition of territory the price of slaves had doubled rising from $300, to $600 after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, to $1000, after Florida’s annexation in 1819, and to $2000 in 1845 after the Mexican War. Setting themes for future historians, Brown held that through purchase, conquest, and expansion slavery “ruled the country” and underwrote the “politics, the literature, the social customs,” and “the religious and theological faith” of the American nation. As Congressman Henry Winter Davis declared “the expansion of our territory inspired [slavery] as it grew in strength, first with a desire for permanence, then with a desire for power” asserting its dominance in the Missouri Compromise, the conquest of Texas, the compromise of 1850, bloody Kansas, and culminated in the Dredd Scott Decision. In short, westward expansion provided the lens through which many unionists understood the growth of the slave power in antebellum years.
Further, the westering ideal of America as a land for a people, for a people without a land, posited, in the aftermath of emancipation, a justification for black landownership. Massachussetts state senator James T. Robinson, described the recently freed slaves as “without land, without the means of education, without rights in the courts—utterly at the mercy of his former master.” Former slave and longtime abolitionist, William Wells Brown said that he feared under these conditions that African Americans in the South, “will be ground to powder.” Yet, as Pastor Andrew L. Stone argued the nation owed former slaves “a grand reparation for ages of wrong,” and the logic of national expansion supplied the means of argument. Already in 1863, the nation had guaranteed one hundred and sixty acres of the public domain, as long as the occupant could pay the five dollar filing fee. Now, victorious unionists annexed the logic of a free public domain, and the story of westward expansion to advocate for African American homesteads. William Howard Day, echoing Henry David Thoreau, spoke of the westward “star of empire” and the “lands which God keeps for the poor, which “stretch away and away ‘to the distant west,’ even to the threshold of the golden gates.” And, in Bellpere, Ohio Congressman William Cutler argued that in the South, former slaves should possess “the public domain on the principles of the homestead law,” and “the further benefit of the confiscation of the large landed estates forfeited by their crimes of their former rebel owners.” The framework of progress and westward expansion, freed from the slave-power, formed part of the argument for black landownership in the aftermath of the Civil War.
While the paired stories of migration and westward expansion as understood through the narrative of slavery, the narrative of Confederate defeat, when subordinated through the same lens, also helped to frame the case for the emergence of African American rights. Unionists in the aftermath of Civil War fully understood the realities that the Civil War had visited upon the South. The physician, John Howard Pugh said that “the south has been impoverished by the war. “James T. Robinson added figures to the picture arguing that the South “lost six thousand millions of dollars” of its seven billion in taxable property extant in 1860. Congressman Henry Winter Davis in Chicago reminded his auditors that “American blood has flowed on both sides,” and spoke of “three hundred thousand” southerners “laid in bloody graves.” The Chaplain of Massachusetts cadets, S. K. Lothrop told of “the desolate plantations, the ruined towns and villages, the multitude of battlefields, the whole scene throughout that whole region of the country from the Potomac to the Mississippi.” Yet, the picture of the South’s defeat, far from reconciling the nation around a picture of common valor on July 4, 1865, helped to bolster the cause for black civil rights in three important ways.
First, many speakers viewed southern ruin as the just outcome of a war fought to perpetuate slavery. James Robinson quoting scripture compared the South to the whore of Babylon: “Alas! Alas! That great city Babylon; that mighty city, for in one hour is thy judgment come.” Massachusetts’s Congressman George Boutwell, said of white southerners that “they are of a race which through two centuries has been contaminated by the vilest crime, thecrime of slavery” which has given birth to conspiracies, for the perpetration of the crimes of arson, of murder, of treason, of assassination,” transgressions “as could not have been committed, or even contemplated, in any other country or by any other people.” Likewise, the Rev. J. M. Manning, Boston’s orator of the day, quoted the English poet Joeseph Addison, and summed up the feelings of many union veterans on July 4, 1865: There is some chosen curse/Some hidden thunder in the stores of heaven,/Red with uncommon wrath, to blast the wretch/Who seeks his greatness in his country’s ruin” In short, the South deserved its punishment in both sacral and secular language for perpetuating slavery and visiting upon the nation the bloody vicissitudes of civil war.
Second, the story of the war, in William Howard Day’s words, “the great wave of blood” rooted in slavery, which “for two hundred years has been sweeping over you,” and in 1861 was finally visited on “the hearts and homes of the nation” offered its own justification for black enfranchisement. Americans on the winning side had not yet forgotten about African American war-time service. The story of black veterans created its own narrative of manhood and military service, which further bolstered claims for the civil rights of former slaves and free African Americans. In a letter to the Christian recorder published July, 8, James Lynch said that the “the presence of colored soldiers and officers of the army” in Augusta, Georgia was evidence of divine providence. Seargent William A. Warfield, of the 119th C.I. in Kentucky described the celebration of black soldiers at Camp Nelson as an “age of wonders,” and went on the argue that “if we would obtain our just privileges we must strive for them.” A soldier of Echo Company, of the 41st U.S.C.T., writing on June 30, 1865 said “we have done all that soldiers could do to wipe out this terrible rebellion,” despite marching on half rations and without pay for eight months. Corporal George Thomas, told of his unit on dress parade in the public square of Louisville, Kentucky where “as we are drilled very well, the former slaveholders open their eyes, astonished that their former Kentucky working stock are capable of being on an equal footing with them at last.” These black union veterans emerged from the Civil War with a sense of duty, manhood, patriotism, and valor, which only soldiers know. The Army taught them how to stand at attention and how to walk in formation, tested their physical limits as they half-dozed on their feet during forced marches, placed the government’s insignia on their shoulders and weapons in their hands. In turn, these veterans, many of them former slaves, arose at the end of the war, to claim their rights as men and citizens in the new republic.
Third, the victorious Union did not forget their sacrifices on this first Anniversary after Appomattox. New Hampshire Congressman, James Patterson argued that the “freedmen are now citizens of the United States, and their rights and liberties must be protected by that government which they have helped to preserve by their blood.” The Governor of Illinois, Richard Yates, said “the negroes have had sense enough to be loyal, and fight for the government; while their masters have only had sense enough to be traitors, and to fight against their country.” Nathanial Smith, addressed the black soldiers in Woodbury, Connecticut directly and praised their valor: “Side by side with our own race, you, colored soldiers have shared the danger and shall equally receive the glory.” The Rev. Andrew Stone related how “the sands of Morris Island,” and “the chasmed mines of Petersburg, give crimson witness to their valor and patriotism.” Stone also remembered that “Weitzel’s colored brigade” had provided “the first measured tramp” of Union Soldiers “that came up the streets of Richmond on that third of April morning.” Henry Winter Davis said of black soldiers that “on many a bloody battlefield they have proven that they are men, not beasts,” that “today’ on July 4, 1865, they “have a part in the Declaration of Independence which they never had before,” which “they have earned.” Clearly, the sacrifice of African American civil war veterans acted as a further justification for citizenship on July 4, 1865.
The nation had reunited but had not yet reconciled over the common valor of soldiers North and South. Nor, had the nation thus far excised the valor of African American soldiers from its collective consciousness. As a result, the story of black manhood, fully realized through wartime service, created its own logic of equality before the law that in conjunction with reimagined narratives of migration, westward expansion, Confederate defeat and the sacral language of slavery and emancipation created a path to citizenship for African Americans. As William Howard Day, agrued at the nation’s capital, the Civil War created a path out of the despotism of “thinghood” and into a fully realized “manhood.”[ The strength of these narratives, provided the intellectual framework for the 14th amendment first proposed by Congressman Henry Winter Davis during a speech in Chicago.
Prior to the amendment, the old narrative of citizenship centered on the constitution and on the immigration and naturalization act of 1790. Both of these documents wrote a conception of whiteness into the founding of the American republic. Their revision by the proposed amendment in the aftermath of the war has often been characterized by historians as enshrining the concept of birthright citizenship into law. Yet, the amendment, despite its proposed wording, did not function as a guarantee of citizenship and civil rights for all inhabitants of the American nation, as the experiences of Ely Parker illustrated. Instead, the proposed 14th Amendment laid down a construction of citizenship based on the over-arching narratives of American history present on July 4, 1865. Each clause reflected the stories of immigration, westward expansion, emancipation, and Confederate defeat.
The National Anti-Slavery Standard carried the full text of the proposed amendment:
No state shall make any distinction in civil rights and privileges among the naturalized citizens of the United States residing within its limits, or among persons born on its soil of persons permanently resident there on account of race, color, or descent.
The language of “no state shall make any distinction in civil rights and privileges” mirrored the new understanding of the primacy of the federal government. As the Reverend Frederick T. Brown, told his hearers, the doctrine of state sovereignty “was an insidious principle of evil,” and represented one of the causes of the Civil War. The wording surrounding “civil rights and privileges,” was intended to circumvent the black codes, like that passed by the town of Opelousas, Louisiana on July 3, 1865, and to guarantee a modicum of civic protection to freed people in the South. The narrative of immigration guaranteed that the “naturalized citizens” of the United States would be put on an equal footing with “persons born on its soil,” while the rhetoric of “persons permanently resident there,” which found expression in 1866 as “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” was included to bar the nation’s indigenous inhabitants from citizenship and fit the narrative of an ever expanding nation. Finally, the amendment made no mention of gender, illustrating how these stories, and the rhetoric of citizenship remained overwhelmingly tied to ideals of manhood and military service.
Far from enshrining a principle of birth-right citizenship or fundamental equality into the nation’s thought, the proposed Fourteenth amendment stood as a legal document that created a vision of citizenship rooted in the moral-historical understanding of the unionist, anti-slavery sentiment of the American nation after Appomattox. Congressman Henry Winter Davis revealed the narrative underpinnings of the Amendment: “When negroes become free, they become a part of the people of the nation, and to ostracize them is to sanction a principle fatal to American free government.” Moreover, in the emancipationist vision of history offered by Davis, the proposed amendment served as a means to break the power of “a hostile oligarchy” already emerging in the South. To secure this aim, and prevent the further domination of the new federal government by the old slave power, as many referred to the South on July 4, 1865, the nation needed “the votes of all the colored people.” Broadly speaking, the framers of the 14th amendment did not seek to create a “non-racial democracy” in the new country after the end of the Civil War, but to advance the cause of African American citizenship, and create a climate in the South where loyal unionists would be free to exercise political power.
The belief that the American nation could overcome its history grew out of the story of slavery and emancipation as understood on the Eighty-Ninth anniversary of Independence. In sum, the narrative created an understanding of race where slavery stood as the “sole cause of prejudice.” In the words of New Hampshire Congressman James Patterson “the great underlying struggle between free and slave labor” was the foundation of “a prejudice that has no foundation in principle.” Or, as Massachusetts Congressman George Boutwell argued, “the people of this country,” maintained “a prejudice against the negro race such as human beings never felt toward any of the animate creation, from the foundation of the world until now.” Likewise, James Lynch believed that “where slavery has not existed and its influence has not been prevailing” prejudice “does not exist.” The historical narrative surrounding slavery and emancipation offered an origin story of the causes of discrimination, and also posited an ideal of a nation redeemed.
With the Civil War finally over, with emancipation a reality in many but not all places throughout the South, with the thirteenth amendment making its way through the states for ratification, and with the newly proposed fourteenth amendment in their pockets, Americans who placed the narrative of slavery and emancipation at the center of the national experience, held out hope of a nation delivered from racial animus. So old is the idea of a post-racial democracy that it served as one of the animating principles on July 4, 1865. In the words of Congressman Henry Winter Davis, “this government” rested “on the right of individual liberty and the right of every man to bear a share in the government whose laws he obeys and whose bayonet in the hour of danger he bears.” Historian Alexander W. Bradford, author of American Antiquities and researches into the Origins of the Red Race, argued that Americans on the national anniversary in 1865, stood “together as a band of brothers, with no stain of slavery on our escutcheon, with our garments unspotted and our vestments undimmed by any law of oppression or wrong.” William Lloyd Garrison in the pages of the Liberator maintained that “through suffering and triumph, through the sundering of all chains, and the liberation of all the oppressed, our country enters upon a career of prosperity and glory.” William Howard Day, concluded his oration with an ode to an American nation that “shine[s] on history’s page” a story which “the proud shall envy and the good shall cherish.” Similarly, James Lynch speaking in Augusta Georgia, urged “North and South, white and black” to “shake hands—join hearts—shout for joy—gird up their loins and with a patriotism as exalted as the national grandeur, a love of justice and mercy like that which is Divine, and a hope as high as the objects of promise, go on in the pursuit of further development.” The utopian vision of a nation cleansed from the sin of slavery and free of hate and prejudice animated many hearts on the eighty-ninth anniversary of Independence. Perhaps the nation needed such visions of egalitarian millennialism to steel itself for the work of Reconstruction. It may well be that the hope of Americans for a more perfect union and a nation which finally lived up to its professed ideals was the ideological payment for all the blood poured out on the battlefield.
Even so, the notion of progress and the ideal of liberty could not be divorced from its historical arguments. In giving voice to the narrative of slavery and emancipation on July 4, 1865, Americans created a framework for African American civil rights, a vision that maintained itself through the long years of reconstruction, persevered amidst the dark interlude of Southern ascendency and Jim Crow, to resurface again gloriously during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s—and the narrative is with the nation still. But the vision of emancipation was not strong enough to guarantee civil and political equality for all Americans. Nor was the story of emancipation any guarantee of lasting civil and political equality for black Americans. Arrayed against the chronicle of freedom from bondage stood other visions of the American nation. The fables of confederate defeat, and of immigration as expressed by the nation’s Irish population, held their own sacral understanding of what the nation ought to be. These nationalistic sagas remained rooted in visions of white supremacy. They created a vision of national history diametrically opposed to the emancipationist vision of the war, and channeled the national past to advance the interests of white immigrant labor and southern sectionalism. Moreover, these competing ideals of a usable past held their own constructions of manhood and military service. Ideals which did as much to shape the understanding of the nation as did the narrative of African American war-time service. It yet remained to be seen which vision of the past would hold the mastery. The prayers of all could not be answered, and it is to these constructions of the nation that the story now turns.