Despite the fervent efforts of northern abolitionists during the first half of the nineteenth century to banish slavery from American life, the South stubbornly tightened its chains during those decades to the point of violent resistance. The “states’ rights” argument is simply a bedtime story the South told itself after it lost the Civil War. When the Confederate States of America formed, its Constitution was clearly designed to perpetuate slavery. It prohibited passing any law that would deny the right to own slaves. It also guaranteed slavery would exist in any future territories. Make no mistake—the Civil War was about slavery and deep-seated racism. At no point was this evidenced more than the 1864 Fort Pillow Massacre in Tennessee.
Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest led a cavalry division of around 2,000 men to take Fort Pillow, which overlooked the Mississippi River north of Memphis. The fort was protected by only 557 men, 262 of whom were black Union soldiers. There were few things more abhorrent to the Confederate Army than facing northern black troops on the battlefield. Forrest’s men captured the fort with few casualties. The remaining Union soldiers surrendered and should have been held as prisoners of war. Instead, Forrest ordered the black soldiers to be executed—and more than 200 of them, along with some women and children, were beaten, shot, stabbed with bayonets, or hacked with sabers. Confederate soldiers even dragged the wounded from the fort’s hospital building and killed them.
In his written report about the battle, a white Union lieutenant wrote that even the day after the massacre, he witnessed two wounded black soldiers plead for their lives before being shot in the head by a Confederate soldier with a pistol.
Nathan Bedford Forrest would go on to become the first and only grand wizard of the KKK. Indeed, America has some extremely ugly stains.
After the Civil War and the strain of Reconstruction, the nation might have had a chance to reboot race relations. Instead, the Supreme Court weighed in again to sucker-punch blacks who by now (thanks to the Fourteenth Amendment) were U.S. citizens. In the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, the Supreme Court legalized segregation with its infamous “separate but equal” clause, meaning that as long as facilities such as train cars were equal in quality, you could have “white only” and “black only” sections. Southern states jumped on this clause like a famished dog on a bone, and soon, everything from restrooms to water fountains to theaters was segregated. Naturally, the separate facilities were almost never “equal.”
Between the last Union troops pulling out of the South in 1876 and the Supreme Court’s disastrous Plessy v Ferguson ruling twenty years later, segregation and Jim Crow laws were firmly entrenched throughout the South.
One of the highest-profile examples of Jim Crow “justice” happened in Brownsville, Texas, in 1906. A white bartender was shot and killed, and a Hispanic police officer was wounded in downtown Brownsville. Several white citizens, and even the mayor of Brownsville, immediately accused black soldiers who were stationed at nearby Fort Brown. The accusers even claimed they’d seen the soldiers in town firing their rifles. Investigators believed the white citizens’ testimony, especially after they produced spent shells from army rifles (later evidence showed the shells had been planted).
The white commanding officers at Fort Brown believed the soldiers were all in their barracks at the time of the shooting. Nevertheless, the ire of the town turned into a wildfire of outrage. The whole company of black soldiers was assembled and given an ultimatum to confess and call out the guilty party. The men refused to name names, because none of them had committed a crime.
The scandal rose all the way to the commander in chief in the White House—Theodore Roosevelt. In one of the worst moves of his lauded presidency, Roosevelt decided to dishonorably discharge all 167 of the black soldiers from Fort Brown over the incident because of their “conspiracy of silence.”
The black community was appalled at the miscarriage of justice, and that Theodore Roosevelt had played a role in it. Booker T. Washington, who enjoyed a relatively close relationship with the president, pled with him to reconsider. Roosevelt refused. This incident triggered the general changeover in black voter loyalty from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party.
The Brownsville affair is maddening in its unfairness, but it was unfortunately typical and hardly the worst example of the dangers of Jim Crow life. A far more tragic incident afflicted the black citizens of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, in a prosperous section of the city often called “Black Wall Street.”
As the main part of Tulsa grew and prospered at the turn of the twentieth century, so did the section of Greenwood, which was home to ten thousand black citizens. The oil boom and wealthy white businessmen created a huge need for service jobs that the black community eagerly filled. Every morning black workers walked south across the train tracks, returning later that night with pockets full of cash. This brought in scores of black professionals from all over the country, setting up shop in the business district of Greenwood. At a time when lynchings were common across the South and opportunities were sparse for blacks in much of the nation, Greenwood was seen as a Promised Land. Greenwood was home to movie theaters, soda shops, and countless stores, restaurants, and schools. It was decidedly atypical in the Jim Crow era.
Tragically, however, the poison of violent racism seeped into the peaceful haven of Greenwood. In late May 1921, a black man named Dick Rowland was arrested for allegedly assaulting a seventeen-year-old white woman. He was a shoe-shiner who worked in the same building as his accuser, who was an elevator operator.
Though the police doubted the woman’s story that Rowland had assaulted her, rumor ran rampant through Tulsa, spurred on by the racist owner of the Tulsa Tribune, who published a sensational story about the alleged attack within hours of Rowland’s arrest. Soon after the newspapers hit the street, a mob formed and headed to the courthouse where Rowland was being held. KKK members arrived on the scene, whipping the mob into a frenzy.
Rumors enveloped Greenwood that the KKK was planning an assault on the courthouse that night. Hundreds of black men, many of them World War I veterans, armed themselves and prepared for battle. They arrived at the courthouse to defend Rowland. Police tried to defuse the situation, but a white man attempted to disarm one of the black men, and all hell broke loose. Hundreds of shots rang out and mass chaos ensued. Twenty people were killed in the initial skirmish. Unfortunately, that was only the beginning.
The white mob grew to ten thousand people. A few black men were captured, tied to the bumpers of cars, and dragged through the streets of Tulsa. The Oklahoma National Guard was summoned to defend white Tulsa.
Early the next morning, a factory whistle provided the signal to attack Greenwood. The mob charged with the National Guard and the killing commenced. Fleeing black men and women were shot in the back. The mob ransacked homes and businesses before dousing the buildings with gasoline and burning them to the ground. Biplanes even dropped firebombs from the sky. Thirty-five square blocks were destroyed—more than a thousand homes burned. Five hotels, thirty-one restaurants, twenty-four grocery stores, four drugstores, one hospital, one library, one school, and twelve churches—all completely burned.
Nearly three hundred black citizens were killed. More than six thousand black survivors were rounded up by the police and National Guard and held in a sort of refugee prison camp outside Tulsa. No one knows who gave the attack orders that morning. It’s safe to say most people never read about the “Black Wall Street” massacre in history class. This one has been swept very far under a very large rug.
Racism among Americans and racist policy from the U.S. government was not limited to Native Americans and blacks. As America welcomed the “huddled masses” to its shores during the late 1800s immigration boom, not everyone was welcome. A nativist movement gained momentum over resentment of the flood of Slavic and Latin immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, Irish Catholics, and Chinese.
In the western half of the U.S., Chinese immigrants faced ju
st as much as or more discrimination than any other group. In 1880, Chinese immigrants made up 11 percent of California’s population. In the years after the Civil War, railroad construction chiefs liked hiring Chinese immigrants because they were hardworking and would often work for lower wages. White workers resented the Chinese “stealing” these jobs from native-born Americans.
By 1880, demand for railroad workers decreased, and Congress was convinced they needed to shut down the flow of immigrants from China. In 1882, Congress overwhelmingly passed a bill with a not-very-subtle name: the Chinese Exclusion Act. The law suspended immigration from China for ten years and could be renewed—which it was. In 1902, the law was extended indefinitely. The Chinese immigration ban wasn’t lifted until 1943. But by then, the U.S. government had turned its attention to a more worrisome Asian group—the Japanese.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, anti-Japanese paranoia soared, particularly on the West Coast. It instantly became a dangerous time to be a Japanese American. In the hours just after the attack, the FBI arrested—without evidence—1,291 Japanese American community and religious leaders and froze their assets. The governor of Idaho said: “A good solution to the Jap problem would be to send them all back to Japan, then sink the island. They live like rats, breed like rats, and act like rats.”
Two months after Pearl Harbor, fears of Japanese sympathizers, spies, and saboteurs prompted President Franklin Roosevelt to sign an executive order to round up Americans of Japanese descent and send them to internment camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed military guards. It was an audacious move, and probably the most egregious violation of the Constitution in U.S. history. But set within America’s heroic effort to defeat the Axis Powers, it’s often treated as a mere footnote in the bigger story and justified as an understandable, if harsh, side effect of 1940s wartime America.
More than 117,000 Japanese Americans were systematically removed from their homes and transported to one of ten internment camps in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. One-third of these prisoners were younger than nineteen years old. They were held in the camps for over three years. Anyone who tried to escape (and there were a handful) was shot and killed.
Most of these citizen prisoners lost their homes, businesses, and farms. Some were able to sell their property, but at a huge financial loss. The government informed two thousand internees that their personal vehicles would be safely stored until they were released from the camps. Soon, however, the U.S. Army offered to buy the vehicles at insultingly low prices. Prisoners who refused to sell were told the military had to requisition their vehicles for the war effort.
After one Japanese American prisoner arrived at his assigned internment camp, he was told that they were being put in the camps for their own protection. “If we were put here for our protection,” he replied, “why are the guns at the guard towers pointed inward instead of outward?” We don’t even need to go any further. America is a horrible force for evil.
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The Case for Good
No country on earth flogs itself for its past sins more than the United States of America. Self-examination is beneficial, of course, unless you refuse to move forward because you’re stuck in the mire of the past. This is where progressives and conservatives sharply diverge. Progressives tend to operate as if the past is an inescapable force that inhibits the present (and as if the past is especially paralyzing for minorities). Therefore, since America’s past was so evil and the nation was founded on oppression—according to progressives—America must be remade in the progressive image, which would balance the scales and create utopia.
Thoughtful conservatives tend to acknowledge America’s past wrongs (progressives would say we downplay them) while at the same time acknowledging that the record is not 100 percent evil. Conservatives find value for the present in many tried-and-true institutions, values, and principles from the past. There is a lot more good in our past than progressives care to admit, because if they did admit it, the whole existence of their movement would be jeopardized. I believe the conservative movement is jeopardized by not being on the leading edge of documenting, teaching, and learning from the wrongs of our past. We cannot say “Never again” if we do not first remember the truth.
Let’s just do as we did with the bad. Let me give you a few things that you may never have learned about America, our history, and our heroes. While the U.S. Constitution fell short of abolition, by 1800, seven of the thirteen original states plus Vermont had banned slavery in their state constitutions: Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, New York, and New Jersey.
As president, George Washington signed a bill prohibiting slavery in the new territories opened up during his administration. In his will, Washington also provided for the freedom of his own slaves. He was the only Founding Father to take that step. That might seem like small potatoes to modern progressives, but it represented a step in the right direction. Washington wrote, “I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery.”
In 1774, Benjamin Franklin cofounded America’s first antislavery society. Franklin also became a friend of Phillis Wheatley. She had been brought to the U.S. as a seven-year-old slave from Senegal. John Wheatley purchased her, and she grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. The Wheatleys educated her in Latin and Greek, and she published her first poem when she was a teenager. She became the first black woman (and one of the first women, period) to publish a book, a volume of her poetry, in 1773. The Wheatleys freed her, and in 1778 she married a free black man from Boston named John Peters.
Did you ever hear about Phillis Wheatley in history class? Or how about Peter Salem?
Salem was a former slave from Massachusetts, freed when he was about twenty-five years old so that he could enlist in the Framingham militia. Salem fought in the Battles of Lexington and Concord and, most famously, at the Battle of Bunker Hill in Charlestown, Massachusetts, on June 17, 1775. After repulsing two British attacks, the colonists were running low on ammunition and were ordered to retreat to Cambridge. Just as the order to retreat was given, Salem charged ahead and fired his musket, mortally wounding British marine major John Pitcairn. Though Bunker Hill was technically a loss for the Americans, it was a major turning point in the Revolutionary War because it demonstrated that the scrappy Continental Army could hold its own against the mighty British military.
Though the Supreme Court severely hampered America’s ability to abolish slavery and treat blacks as equal citizens, there was an early bright spot that gave a glimmer of hope. In 1839, fifty-three African slaves were being transported from Cuba when they mutinied and took control of their ship, the Amistad. The slaves inadvertently sailed up the East Coast of the U.S. before they were intercepted by a U.S. naval ship near Long Island, New York. The slaves were then arrested and jailed. Northern abolitionists lobbied vigorously for their release. Eventually, their case landed before the Supreme Court, where their lawyer, former president John Quincy Adams, argued for their freedom. The Court ultimately ruled that because the international slave trade was illegal, the Amistad slaves were free men under American law and were allowed to sail back to Africa. Their story was told in the 1997 movie Amistad, directed by Steven Spielberg.
One of the great accomplishments of the Civil War was, finally, the inclusion of thousands of black troops among the Union’s fighting forces. The Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry formed in February 1863, almost two years into the war. More than a thousand black men volunteered to join the Fifty-fourth, including two of Frederick Douglass’s sons. One-quarter of the Fifty-fourth’s troops had escaped from slave states.
Robert Gould Shaw, the twenty-five-year-old son of wealthy abolitionist parents, was appointed to lead the Fifty-fourth. Shaw dropped out of Harvard to join the Union Army and was injured at the Battle of Antietam in 1862.
 
; Ultimately, the Fifty-fourth led an assault on Fort Wagner at the port of Charleston, South Carolina. On July 18, 1863, Shaw led 600 of his men over the fort’s walls. Badly outnumbered, 281 men of the Fifty-fourth were killed in the initial charge, including Shaw. The Confederates dumped all the dead bodies into one large, unmarked trench outside the fort. They sent a telegram to Union leaders saying, “We have buried Shaw with his niggers.” Shaw’s parents said there was “no holier place” than to be buried “surrounded by brave and devoted soldiers.”
The American constitutional system worked for good and justice after the Civil War with the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. These amendments abolished slavery, granted black Americans citizenship and equal protection under the law, and gave black males the right to vote. This was revolutionary. Sure, they should have been included in the Constitution seventy-eight years earlier, but the U.S. finally did the right thing in the face of fierce opposition. That is progress.
The Fifteenth Amendment granting black males the right to vote in 1870 was largely a congressional response to the terrorist activity of the southern Democrat-supported Ku Klux Klan. Congress also passed the Enforcement Acts, making it a crime to interfere with blacks registering to vote, voting, holding office, or serving on a jury.
President Ulysses S. Grant’s administration is usually remembered for the scandals that swirled around the president (without implicating him). But he doesn’t get the credit he deserves for defending black civil rights, especially in fighting the KKK. Congress passed a bill, informally called the Ku Klux Klan Act, giving Grant the right to suspend habeas corpus in arresting Klansmen. In October 1871, Grant used his new authority to send federal marshals into South Carolina, where they rounded up hundreds of terrorists. Hundreds of others fled. Few substantive convictions resulted, but Grant’s efforts crippled the KKK throughout the South. The Klan was forced underground and wouldn’t publicly rear its ugly head again until the new century.