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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 35. The Negro Protest - 2. The Negro Abolitionists and Reconstruction Politicians
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738 An American Dilemma
regard to the ten thousand wrongs of the American slave, you would enforce the
strictest silence, and would hail him as an enemy of the nation who dares to make
those wrongs the subject of public discourse!®
During the Civil War the Abolitionist leaders had to argue and protest
for two years before Negroes were given the right and chance to do their
share of the fighting. When they were finally allowed into the Union
Army, it was for reasons of military necessity The Emancipation Proclama-
tion was issued mainly for the same reason and in order to win over world
opinion for the Northern cause. The War was finally won, and freedom
materialized for the four million slaves.
The mass of slaves, even the more intelligent ones, and certainly the great group of
field hands, were in religious and hysterical fervor. This was the coming of the Lord.
This was the fulfillment of prophecy and legend. It was the Golden Dawn, after
chains of a thousand years. It was everything miraculous and perfect and promising.
For the first time in their life, they could travel; they could see; they could change the
dead level of their labor; they could talk to friends and sit at sundown and in moon-
light, listening and imparting wonder-tales. They could hunt in the swamps, and fish
in the rivers, and above all, they could stand up and assert themselves. They need not
fear the patrol; they need not even cringe before a white face, and touch their hats."*
During Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, P. B. Pinchback, John
Langston, and others of the Negro Abolitionist tradition constituted the
center of a much larger group of Republican Negro politicians. As they
were on the winning side, and as not only emancipation from slavery, but
suffrage and other civil liberties, had been accorded to the Negroes by
Congress, not protest but power consolidation and power exploitation be-
came their main concern. In many minor issues they actually often fol-
lowed a most accommodating pattern.
When, however. Restoration of white supremacy violently robbed the
Negroes of suffrage and civil liberties in the South, the reasons for
Negro protest again mounted. In the North, however, there was no immedi-
ate parallel to Southern Restoration and consequently no special incentive
to protest. Too, the Northern Negroes lost their white co-fighters. A great
deflation of ideals occurred, as is usual after a successful war. In a spirit of
opportunistic optimism and ideological defeatism the Northerners wanted to
get back to normalcy. The Negro was a thorn in their flesh. He stood in
the way of a return to national solidarity and a development of trade rela-
tions between the two regions. With some guilt, but probably more relief
the Northerners found out, when the compromise between the regions was
a fak accompli, that apparently they did not care much about the Negroes,
anyhow. A whole series of scientific, historical, and political writings
* Lincoln is reported to have said : “Without the Neg^roes* help, neither the present
nor any coming* administration can save the Union.”
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