African Americans Citizenship and the Economy of Reconstructed Louisiana - Term Paper Example

 The Impact of the Granting of Citizenship to African Americans on the Economy of Reconstructed Louisiana Introduction The fact that the finale of the Civil War brought about a new age of capitalist social relations in Louisiana and the rest of the American South and that the accompanying changes in the economy, polity, and society in the region were both deep-seated and unparalleled seem unquestionable. However, as profound as the emancipation of roughly four million slaves or the granting of citizenship to African-Americans may have been and as novel as the reconstructed South was, one major connection remained between the old slave and new emancipated postbellum South (Blassingame 2007). That connection was in the manner white American southerners perceived, understood, and exercised time and economy. If, as a historian claimed, “A culture’s sense of time is the key to its nature, (Smith 1997,154)” and if alterations in a society’s understanding and use of time and economy are both a manifestation and an outcome of major economic and social change, then definitely the disorder of the reconstruction and the breadth of the granting of citizenship to African-Americans would also have disclosed the existence of a new economic awareness if, indeed, one existed (Smith 1997). However that the calamitous change in the economic consciousness of Louisiana did not take place, not because the reconstruction was not deep-seated, for the change was fundamental in fact and the American South was, in numerous regards, new (Du Pratz 2007). There exists no new economic knowledge merely because southerners had previously grew an awareness of the Southern economy both in agreement with and matching to the form of culture vital to the new elite economic and social order required by the new citizenship (Du Pratz 2007). Basically, as elaborated by the statement of Julie Saville (1996), “in the wake of Sherman’s march, it required a fine eye to distinguish the twilight of slavery from the dawn of freedom” (p. 15). The immediate interest of the planters in Louisiana in 1865 concentrated not that much on the maintenance or withholding of their lands to which the granting of citizenship to African-Americans in the South, not like the emancipation in other slave communities, raised no actual danger, but instead on retaining or reclaiming control over what they thought would be had always been a lazy and capricious laborers (Verney 2006). The Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln incited such a reaction from a sugar planter in Louisiana (Smith 1997): Free labor, as it is so called, will inevitably prove a failure in the South. The negroes are naturally a low, lazy set. They are not influenced by any desire or gain, as are all the members of the white race. When they have earned a dollar, they will do nothing until it is gone, and starvation compels them to work again. I have lived among them twenty years, and I know them to be a dependent race (p. 155). Such apprehensions sounded prophetic for some. However in fact, planters were better endowed to handle freedom and to manage emancipated workers than many of them were keen to recognize or believe (Reed 1999). Primarily, the fears of planters about managing unchained laborers and making them into what they thought to be hard-working and capable laborers were anchored in antebellum, and perhaps racist, colonial beliefs about African-Americans’ supposed incapability to work diligently and attentively and, just as relevant, the accounts planters had encountered about the granting of citizenship to African-Americans and its apparently catastrophic economic outcomes in the British West Indies and anywhere else in the world (Levinson & Sparrow 2005). However, there are historians who argue that the granting of citizenship to African-Americans had a positive effective to the economy of Louisiana and the American South. During the years prior to the Civil War, the free black people were considerably the richest group of African-Americans in Louisiana (Power 1997). Although these elite African-Americans were stripped of the basic social liberties and civil rights of white society, they owned more property than emancipated African-Americans in any other state (Boehm 2004). Their positive contribution to the economy of Louisiana was due partly to the state law which was distinct in the sense that it permitted free blacks to inherit, own and give property, to make authorized agreements, to have right to a trial if indicted with unlawful behavior, and to take legal action and bear witness against white people in civil courts (Du Pratz 2007). During the reconstruction, these socially and financially powerful individuals attempted to secure for themselves a position of sustained standing and distinction from the mainstream population of new African-American citizens of the American South (Cantor 1998). Although the presence of these elite black groups contributed to the expansion of the economy of Louisiana the separation between this affluent group and other African-American groups hampered the growth of social and political cohesion among black Americans (Power 1997). This essay will attempt to analyze and discuss the effect of the granting of citizenship to African-American on the economy of Louisiana during the Reconstruction era. In order to provide an inclusive and balanced view of the topic, arguments for and against the positive effect of this citizenship grant to black Americans on the economic status of Louisiana during the reconstruction will be brought into play. The Alleged Negative and Positive Impact of African-American Emancipation on Louisiana’s Economy On African-Americans’ believed inherent, permanent laziness, antebellum planters in Louisiana had discussed much and come to the realization that only a closely controlled, rigid, and consistent structure of plantation administration could force African-Americans to toil on a regular basis (Vincent 2005). For instance, as stated by ‘Dysaethesia Aethiopica’ (Smith 1997, 155): a superficial scientific assumption introduced in the 1850s indicating the evident ‘inherent laziness’ of slaves caused by a ‘hebetude of the intellectual faculties’ (Smith 1997, 155). The presumption was common among southerners and northerners (White & White 2005). Basically, these planters and several historians believe that the granting of citizenship to African Americans will only negatively affect the economy of Louisiana because the accompanied social privileges and civil rights of citizenship will merely reinforce the inherent indolence of the black community. The supposed effect of emancipation on the economy, or more specifically on the labor practices of workers in the West Indies, strengthened the credibility of such gobbledygook, at least in the belief of southern planters (Smith 1997). Of the outcomes of citizenship grants in Jamaica, for instance, they were informed (Smith 1997): The negroes in some districts will only work the first four days of the week… Hardly in any case will the people work more than five days in the week; in several districts they refuse to work more than four days in the week; and the average time of field labor is from five to six hours daily. The labor is not only inadequate in quantity, but generally ill performed… The negroes are incurably indolent and pathetic (p. 156). As a result, when slavery was eradicated in the American South, planters tended to perceive the episode with anxiety and expressed their fears in terms of class and racial lines and specified what they thought as the unsuccessful emancipation attempts of other slave communities (Sowell 2006). These revealed trepidations served to intensify the bigger concern of planters in Louisiana of how to sustain a productive and docile workforce after the granting of citizenship (Reed 1999). A sympathetic northern observer identified the core of the anguish of the planters: “The planter is looking at his own interest simply, when he argues this point; and, when he talks of the slave’s laziness and imbecility, he means, simply, that he will, through freedom, get beyond his reach,-- nothing more (Smith 1997, 156).” A large number of planters, by 1866, had come to voice out this fear explicitly and, in the process, bore witness to the function work hours served in sustaining productivity and order on Louisiana’s economy (De Jong 2005). If labor hours could be implemented as they had been enforced under slavery, several scholars argued, the plantation would maintain its fundamental social and economic strength (De Jong 2005). Such was the general idea of a planter’s note to De Bow’s Review (1866): How to make them work more is well worthy of consideration… Mr. Carlyle has most humorously shown that the laws of demand and supply have no more influence on the conduct and industrial habits of the free and improvident negroes of the West Indies than such laws have on wild horses in a summer pasture. Political economy stands baffled and perplexed in presence of the negro… How to make him work ten hours a day whose every present want can be supplied by laboring three hours a day?... The negro slave worked eight or nine hours a day; the negro freedmen will not average three hours a day (p. 416). The rest of the nineteenth century was spent attempting to resolve these problems. Numerous though the different solutions suggested by planters were and risky though far-reaching conclusions are, what is evident is that practically all such solutions, alike other capitalist techniques for controlling production and sustaining a vigorous level of abuse, concentrated on how to control work hours of emancipated people (Bizier 1999). At times details on how to manipulate the labor of free workers through the use of time originated from other reconstructed societies (Du Pratz 2007). Supervisor of plantations in Louisiana H. Styles allegedly believed he was acting as the inspiration of modernity and disclosing some kind of secret revealed only to elite Yankees when he divulged the technique of managing a plantation in the reconstructed American South: “I would first establish a regular time for labor,-- say ten hours a day,-- as making a day’s work (Berlin, Glymph, Miller, Reidy, Rowland, et al. 1991, 585).” If the targeted audience of Style was planters in the American South he was, ardently, lecturing to the choir (Berlin et al. 1991). Rather than recognizing their lectures on how to manage emancipation from resettled northerners and rather than search beyond their geographic frontiers to communities whose unique situations may not have estimated their own, planters more frequently resorted to their personal experiences to defend their agricultural estates of the future (Freidel 2008). As suggested in 1887 by an ex-master, “A recurrence to only recent history will convince us that whatever improvements we of to-day have made upon the methods of ante-bellum days is due more to the growth of the ideas of our predecessors than to our own boasted probity and enterprise” (Smith 1997, 158). During the reconstruction, the numbers of African American property owners in Louisiana enlarged noticeably. The worth of the common African American investor’s assets declined during the reconstruction, but this trend cannot discount the fact that this contributed landholdings positively to the economy of Louisiana (Power 1997). As reported in the 1860 census, real estate comprised over sixty-five percent of the disclosed riches of emancipated African Americans (Power 1997). For instance, the Stocker family has been part of an elite family unit of emancipated African Americans. These family units allowed emancipated black people to detach themselves from the mainstream white people as well as from slave population (Power 1997). Stocker represented numerous of the features of the African-American citizen in Louisiana during the reconstruction, whom scholar David Rankin portrays as “a young man of unusual ancestry, uncommon wealth, and exceptional ability (Power 1997, 13).” The experiences of Stocker during the Reconstruction period manifest the divisiveness among the varied levels of African American society and the intricacy of its effect on the economy of Louisiana. Conclusion It was, therefore, the existence of a silenced, distorted, oppressive capitalism in Louisiana that generated the negative effect of African American emancipation on the state’s economy. The capitalism in the American South that created time compliance actually improved the economy of Louisiana since this developed a sense of time discipline among the new African American citizens. In the process of attempting to resolve their problem and undecided perspective of economic development, slaveholders imitated capitalists in the American north and Europe to such a degree that even though they were simply raised in the Atlantic economic realm, by the finale of the antebellum era they may as possibly have been of it. Definitely, slaveholders, if they were to protect their slave system, had to employ work hours in ways distinct from those of their counterparts in the north. But that slave owners managed to depend on time compliance, reinforced by the whip, rather than time-negotiating laborers to manage work by the hours; that they pioneered perhaps the most capitalist instrument of social control and economic abuse without shattering their whole society and without trading the time-negotiating principles within which factory supervisors had to deal with is certain, if unpleasant, evidence of the vitality of the economic administration of late antebellum slave owners. In slaveholders’ plea to protect their economic future, due to the granting of citizenship to African Americans, they searched space and time. They stumbled upon half-done solutions in the past and half-done answers in the reconstructing North. By merging the traditional, even valued procedure of time compliance, the dependable whip, and the time-supported productivity motivations of northern capitalists, slave owners to a significant level reconstructed their economy on their own way. Slaveholders in Louisiana made use of time so much similar of their northern counterparts that the actual disparities between the free-labor and slave modes of production at the daily social interaction level, and not at the larger point of economic generalization, were of increasingly declining value to the slaveholders and slaves themselves than has usually been believed. However, both the existence and the importance of these commonalities were usually lost to individuals at the moment, particularly, appears to northerners visiting the south. Although he saw the clock managing slave work of emancipated African Americans, for instance, Frederick Law Olmsted grieved indignantly in the 1850s while visiting Virginia, “You notice in all cases, vagueness in ideas of cost and value” (Smith 1997, 176). He believed he was demonstrating his argument when he emphasized (Smith 1997): For instance, I noticed a rivet loose in my umbrella, as I was going out from my hotel during a shower, and stepped into an adjoining shop to have it repaired. ‘I can’t do it in less than half an hour, sir, and it will be worth a quarter,’ said the locksmith, replying to inquiries (p. 176). Taken aback at what he saw as carelessness, Olmsted went back to his lodge “and with the firepoker did the work myself, in less than a minute… saving half an hour and quarter of a dollar, like a ‘Yankee’” (Smith 1997, 176). However it evidently eluded Olmsted that this lazybones from the American South shared his perception of time and its labor counterpart. Their disparities were over levels of time and in the ultimate conclusion, these disparities were minimal, in a historical way at least. Evidently, major disparities lingered: slaveholders were an independent and disappearing political group. Yet as an economic group, they had fell down thus far toward the capitalist use of work hours that by the advent of the Civil War they had fundamentally deserted the label of premodern. But slaves and African Americans in Louisiana, through gaining citizenship, contributed much to the state’s economy as productive and time-disciplined individuals. References Anderson, Bentley. 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