"Editorial cartoon on the “massacre" at Cainhoy, South Carolina, October 1876."
Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet combines the best traditions of historical synthesis with extensive original research to trace the development of black politics in the rural South from slavery to the Great Migration in the first decades of the twentieth century. By recentering the story of emancipation onto the sustained self-activity of African-Americans – as opposed to “[measuring] politicization chiefly by what came to the freedpeople from the outside” – Hahn positions himself against the bulk of the historiography, which has been dominated by a “liberal integrationist framework” that posits assimilation as the presumed endpoint of black struggles against white supremacy (6).
Hahn’s focus on specifically rural actors also distinguishes his approach from the urban bias predominant in most other studies of black politics and working people in general. Slaves and freedpeople did not begin a political life upon their migration from the countryside to the city; rather urban political formations grew out of and built upon the extensive social networks constructed within slave communities. Far from unquestioningly adopting the hegemonic material and cultural power of their slaveowners, African-Americans built extensive networks based on kinship (17-19), religious belief (43-51), and even economic exchange (24-33).
These organized slaves later seized their masters’ secession an opportunity “to turn one rebellion into two” (64). Many (males) actively participated in the fighting, while others built “liberated zones” (80-82). The war brought together African-Americans in physical contact as never before, whether in contraband camps, Union-occupied plantations, or in armed battalions. The hothouse of war grew a new social and political consciousness of the potential for black “liberation and unification” (96).
The defeat of the Confederacy emboldened the newly freed slaves, as well as white Radical Republicans. Union-backed Reconstruction regimes operated as instruments of political revolution (259-260), while freedpeople organized into Union Leagues that attempted to protect and extend the social gains of the revolution. Dreams of significant land redistribution were crushed by the stubborn persistence of the old regime, embodied by the quintessential agents of the counterrevolution, the Ku Klux Klan, and a host of like-minded groups. As the strength of counterrevolutionary groups grew along with white nightmares of “Negro rule,” the resolve of the federal government to implement Reconstruction weakened, and politics gradually devolved into a paramilitary contest to impose the rule of either faction.
"'The Union As It Was' Harper's Weekly cartoon from October 1874 depicting White League and Klan opposition to Reconstruction"
However, the demise of Reconstruction did not end black mobilization. New biracial political alliances with insurgent white political movements brought a new era of experimentation, and Virginia’s Readjusters were notably successful in this vein (382). While Hahn details extensive attempts at forging a lasting black-white political coalition, “the wages of whiteness” proved too tempting: railing against “ignorant and degraded barbarians,” many former white allies proceeded to answer “the question of the supremacy of whites over blacks” (420) in the affirmative, often through extensive violence. While many freedpeople would stay in the South and attempt to withstand the emerging Jim Crow system, “Grassroots emigrationism,” or black collective action and desire to escape the viscerally white supremacist “‘one-party’ Democratic South” (450), appeared to be most popular alternative.
It is during these struggles for African-American self-determination that the foundations of twentieth-century Garveyism, Black Nationalism, Black Power, and the Civil Rights Movement more generally, were built. Hahn connected the dots in an original and highly influential fashion, and I am interested in hearing what you all thought about his treatment of these subjects.