Racism, Revolution, Reaction—1861-1877

By Peter Camejo

Pathfinder Press, 1976

Reviewed by Steve Halpern

Recently I wrote a review of Nikole Hannah-Jones book The 1619 Project – A new origin story. In that book Hannah-Jones and others argue that the persistence of racist discrimination began with the “original sin” of this country which was chattel slavery. Clearly, her book presents a considerable amount of evidence that supports this argument. However, I believe this question deserves a more detailed answer. 

In the following quotation that I used in my review of 1619, James Baldwin argued for another way of looking at the persistence of this problem.

“The point of all this is that black men were brought here as a source of cheap labor.  They were indispensable to the economy.  In order to justify the fact that men were treated as though they were animals, the white republic had to brainwash itself into believing that they were indeed animals and deserved to be treated like animals.  Therefore, it is almost impossible for any Negro child to discover anything about his actual history.  The reason is that this ‘animal,’ once he suspects his own worth, once he starts believing that he is a man, has begun to attack the entire power structure.  This is why America has spent such a long time keeping the Negro in his place.  What I am trying to suggest to you is that it was not an accident, it was not an act of God, it was not done by well-meaning people muddling into something which they didn’t understand.  It was a deliberate policy hammered into place in order to make money from black flesh.  And now, in 1963, because we have never faced this fact, we are in intolerable trouble.”

In his book Racism, Revolution, Reaction—1861-1877 the late Peter Camejo gave the historical background to support Baldwin’s statement. Specifically, I believe Camejo would have taken issue with Hannah-Jones statement where she gave her opinion as to why the radical reconstruction governments established after the Civil War were overturned. Hannah-Jones argued, “Faced with this violent recalcitrance, the federal government once again settled on Black people as the problem and decided that for unity sake, it would leave the white South to its own devices.”

To begin to understand Camejo’s point of view, we need to look at the background to this history.

Today we are routinely barraged with the idea that the United States isn’t just a democracy, but that it is the freest nation in the world. Peter Camejo gave the evidence of how the first government of this country made sure that the majority of the population of the United States would be ruled by a tiny minority.

The system used to ensure this rule of the minority is called “checks and balances.” There are three branches of the federal government. These are the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. The legislative branch is made up of the congress and the senate. While representation in the congress is based on population, the representation in the senate is not. Only with the passage of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution in 1913 was the Senate elected directly by the population of each state. Before that time the senate was elected by state legislatures. 

The President is elected by the electoral college. Supreme Court members are appointed to that position. Any of these three branches can veto decisions by the other branches. This system has ensured that the moneyed interests of this country maintain the power over the majority of the population.    

After the revolution of the thirteen colonies, the United States government was split into two factions. These were the federalists and the anti-federalists. The federalists supported the northern capitalist interests, while the anti-federalists supported the slave interests.

Initially, most northern capitalists who were composed of merchants and financial interests went along with slavery. Clearly there were many enterprises in the north that profited from slavery. In fact cotton, produced by slave labor, as well as the money invested in slaves, represented the most lucrative investments in this country before the Civil War. 

However, in 1830 this started to change largely because of the invention of the cotton gin. So, starting in 1830, merchants and bankers increased their investments in manufacturing enterprises. As a result, manufacturers became the dominant capitalist force in the North.

The manufacturers had different interests from the enslavers. The enslavers wanted an agrarian nation where slave agriculture would spread from coast to coast. Manufacturers wanted a nation that would be dominated by industry. 

To overcome the power of the slave interests, the northern manufacturers made alliances with the small farmers, workers, and the abolitionists who were opposed to slavery. This alliance took the form of the Republican Party.

The Republicans managed to elect Abraham Lincoln to be President. That election meant that the enslavers no longer dominated every branch of the government. This was the primary reason why the officials that dominated the southern state governments decided to secede from the Union. As a result, the Civil War erupted.

We might consider that in the highland areas in the southern states there was significant opposition to slavery. These were the areas where small farmers worked the land. Affluent slave owners controlled the most lucrative lands in the lowland areas. There is also a recent film titled The Free State of Jones that documented how there were white farmers in the south who favored abolition.

The role of Irish workers during the war

During the Civil War a rebellion broke out in New York City. Historians generally attribute this rebellion to racists of Irish descent who opposed the Union Army in the Civil War. Peter Camejo gave a different analysis of that rebellion.

During the Civil War about one-third of the working class of this country were immigrants. While Black people were the most exploited sector of the working class, Irish immigrants were the next most exploited sector.

Irish immigrants came to this country escaping the Irish Potato Famine. Because these immigrants had no resources, they settled for some of the worst jobs. Ralph Waldo Emerson commented on the conditions Irish workers faced. 

“We work the poor fellow very ill. To work from dark to dark for sixty or even fifty cents a day is but pitiful wages for a married man.”

Many Irish workers lived in New York City. The Democratic Party dominated the politics of the city at that time. The Democratic Party also organized the system of slavery in the southern states.

Today Democratic Party politicians argue that they are the party that represents the interests of Black people. They attempt to back up this claim with the fact that Barrack Obama was the first Black person to be elected President.

However, Democratic Party President William Jefferson Clinton signed his Crime Bill that radically increased the prison population in this country. Black people are grossly over-represented in the dungeons of this country. So, here we see a profound contradiction in what Democratic Party politicians say and what they in fact do.

This hypocrisy of the Democratic Party was made clear in the years of the Civil War. Democratic Party politicians argued that there were British supporters of the abolitionist movement. Irish workers had justifiable reasons for their opposition to the British government. However, the British industrialists, in fact, supported the slave owners interests who exported cotton to the British textile mills.

So, because of the Democratic Party’s support of slavery, officials in that party argued that Black people were the enemy and that workers had nothing to gain by supporting the Union Army. As a result of this agitation, a rebellion broke out in New York City during the war. Workers who lived on the knife edge of survival were being asked to support a war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. 

Because the trade union movement was in its infancy, many workers went along with this idea. A minority of those who engaged in the rebellion carried out a pogrom against Black workers, where scores of Blacks were murdered. However, we might keep in mind that in spite of this atmosphere, there were large numbers of Irish soldiers in the Union Army.  

The aftermath of the Civil War

After the Civil War, the former slave owners faced an economic disaster. They had compiled enormous debts before the war. During the war they invested in confederate war bonds that were now worthless. What they thought were their most valuable assets, slaves, were no longer slaves. So, these former enslavers found themselves at the mercy of northern capitalists.

Today, many people are not aware of the fact that the political party that organized the system of slavery was the Democratic Party. Because the main contributors to the Democratic Party were financially ruined, that party initially had very little influence after the war.

Andrew Johnson became President after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Johnson claimed to represent farming interests but opposed equal rights for the former slaves. Johnson was also adamantly opposed to redistributing the large tracts of land that had been owned by the most affluent enslavers.

The radicals in the Republican Party opposed Johnson and almost forced his impeachment. However, with the failure to impeach Johnson, the idea of giving the former slaves 40 acres and a mule, died. 

Instead, the government adopted the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. These amendments outlawed slavery, except in cases of penal servitude, gave everyone born in this country citizenship rights, and gave all men, excepting the confederate soldiers, the right to vote.

Republican Party politicians campaigned for office in this period by waving a “bloody shirt.” This symbolized all the Union soldiers who were injured or murdered by the confederate army in the Civil War. This sentiment appealed for the votes of Black people who had recently won the right to sell their own labor. 

While the Republican Party wanted the votes of Black people, most republican government officials, as well as capitalist interests, were opposed to giving these freed workers land. However, these same politicians had no problem in giving the owners of the railroads huge tracts of land to support their immensely profitable enterprises.

While the government refused to confiscate the land of the former slave owners, they had no problem with confiscating the land of Native Americans in Oklahoma. President Andrew Jackson signed a treaty with Native American nations where those nations were to have the land in Oklahoma “forever.”

The stolen land in Oklahoma was given away to settlers free of charge. However, Peter Camejo argued that most of the land given to settlers was eventually gobbled up by large landowners. 

However, saying this, we can also say that had the large tracts of land owned by the slave owners been parceled out to Black and white farmers, those farmers would have been in a much more advanced condition. However, the United States government was determined to advance the rule of the tiny minority consisting of the capitalist class.

In the year 1873 the United States experienced an economic depression. By 1877 railroad workers, driven by horrendous conditions, went on a national strike. The government ordered the military to murder striking workers, so the profits of Cornelius Vanderbilt would be protected.        

The Republican Party had very little competition within the government in the years after the war. As a result, Republican politicians cashed in, and took advantage of huge increases in government expenditures. These were the years when Ulysses S. Grant became president.

The reconstruction governments were the most democratic in the history of this country. For the first time they established an educational system for Blacks as well as whites. They championed the interests of all workers including women and Native Americans. In the following passage we see what the educational system looked like in the South during those years.

TEACHER: Now children, you don’t think white people are better than you because they have straight hair and white faces?

STUDENTS: No, sir.

TEACHER: No, they are no better, but they are different, they possess great power, they formed this great government, they control this vast country.  .  .Now what makes them different from you?

STUDENTS: MONEY. (Unanimous shout)

TEACHER: Yes, but what enabled them to obtain it? How did they get the money?

STUDENTS: Got it off us, stole it off we all!

Well, here we can see how the northern capitalists who are determined to gouge out profits might not appreciate this atmosphere. So, the Republican Party spit and a Liberal wing formed its own faction apart from the radicals. This new liberal wing consisted of former supporters of abolition who now favored a consolidation of capitalist interests.

Those who supported capitalist interests in the South viewed this shift and went into action. Initially they formed the Ku Klux Klan that attempted to terrorize supporters of the reconstruction governments. 

The radicals in the federal government initially opposed this, and passed a law making the terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan illegal. So, several new racist and terrorist organizations emerged who had the same goals as the Klan. As a result, over 20,000 people were murdered by terrorists in the years of radical reconstruction.

The liberal wing of the Republican Party blamed these mass murders on Black people who were demanding their rights. The Union Army oftentimes took a neutral role in the face of these mass murders. Armed militias of Black workers were organized, but government officials worked to ensure those forces would be ineffective.

South Carolina was the state where Black people had a clear majority of the electorate. Peter Camejo quoted Martin W. Gary who was in charge of organizing the “election campaign” supporting the Democratic Party in South Carolina. That so called “election campaign” eventually overturned the reconstruction government. Heavily armed terrorists were determined ensure Democratic Party politicians took power. 

Gary demanded that “every Democrat must feel honor bound to control the vote of at least one Negro, by intimidation, purchase, keeping him away or as each individual may determine, how best to accomplish it.”

Gary gave specific instructions as to what to do when these terrorists met resistance from Black people. 

“Never threaten a man individually. If he deserves to be threatened, the necessities of the times require that he should die.”

We might think about the fact that the Union Army, that lost close to 400,000 soldiers in the Civil War stood by and allowed these heavily armed terrorists murder and intimidate anyone who might be thinking of voting for the Republican Party. Politicians who in the past waved the bloody shirt memorializing those who died in the war stood by and allowed these terrorists to flagrantly violate the law.

In spite of this war aimed at taking power away from the Reconstructive government, the Republican party won the majority of the vote in South Carolina in the year 1876. However, because of the military advantage of the terrorists, they merely ignored the election and took power in the state.

Here we see how the government ordered the military to carry out genocidal war against Native Americans so capitalist interests would be advanced in the West. They also ordered the military to murder striking workers in the railroad strike of 1877. However, when it came to defending the rights of Black people, this same government sat back and allowed terrorists to overturn elected governments.

We also might consider the fact that during these years Chinese railroad workers were instrumental in building the transcontinental railroad. These Chinese workers built tunnels by doing the unimaginably difficult work of dynamiting through granite mountains.

Black people built the foundation of the economic system in this country by working as slaves picking cotton for decades. The government's reward for this horrendous work was Jim Crow segregation.

Chinese railroad workers transformed the economy of this country by opening up the west to development with the transcontinental railroad. The government rewarded them with the Chinese Exclusion Act that barred Chinese nationals from immigrating to this country

What does the word freedom mean?

Today historians routinely argue that the Civil War was responsible for freeing slaves. Karl Marx wrote about what it meant for workers to be free during the early years of capitalism in the first volume of his book Capital.

In those years, royal families and capitalists forced peasants off land their families had worked for centuries. Faced with starvation, those peasants became desperate for work wherever they could find it. Capitalists went on a determined drive to control every minute that workers were on the job. The government cooperated with capitalists by adopting laws pertaining to people who weren’t working and called them vagabonds.

If someone was caught not working, that person could be enslaved for a period of years. If this person repeated the crime of not working two other times, that person could be executed. 

For Marx, the idea of freedom meant that workers were free of commodities and were totally dependent on employers to survive. 

After the defeat of radical reconstruction black workers, because they didn’t have the means to support themselves, needed to adapt to the demands of racist employers. Black workers who were not working were in violation of vagrancy laws. While the British vagabonds became slaves, Black people who violated the vagrancy laws were sentenced to chain-gangs. Because the 13th Amendment to the Constitution allowed for slavery in penal servitude, a new system of slave-like conditions emerged with the defeat of radical reconstruction.               

Just as the politicians in the past supported the idea of abolition to remove slave owners from power, the new forces that favored capitalism supported what became Jim Crow segregation. The Jim Crow laws stripped Black people of citizenship rights in this country.

Isabel Wilkerson wrote a recently published book titled, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. I haven’t read this book. However, when I first learned of its publication, I questioned the title. I believed that in capitalist world society is made up of classes and not castes. 

However, Peter Camejo, who was a Marxist, used the term caste to describe the status of Black people in this country after the defeat of radical reconstruction. So, I looked up the definition of the word caste and found that it can mean discrimination based on race. So, now I believe that after reconstruction Black people became a caste in this country.

Peter Camejo went into detail describing how literally all the power brokers in this country went along with the denial of citizenship rights to Black people. These institutions included the three branches of the federal government. In particular, the Supreme Court issued several decisions that clearly violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution that is supposed to give everyone born in this country citizenship rights.

The news media, the universities, the publishing companies, and the film industry all fell in line attempting to rationalize why, in effect, Black people should be denied citizenship rights in this country.

During my years in public schools, I learned how the government falsified the history of reconstruction. Teachers taught me about how opportunist carpetbaggers took advantage of the people in the South. Some of the people those carpetbaggers took advantage of were the former slave owners who routinely tortured people they enslaved.

Most of the northerners who went to the South in reconstruction were teachers who established an educational system from scratch. My teachers never mentioned the fact that the reconstruction governments were the most democratic governments that ever existed in this country.

When we see the determination of people in power to deny Black people basic rights, we can also see why a tenacious struggle was required to achieve some of those rights in the years of the civil rights movement.

Today there is a national holiday celebrating the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. King was one of the leaders of the civil rights movement that forced the government to do away with the legal system of Jim Crow segregation.

However, today the world knows that police officer Derrick Chauvin felt that he had the right to murder George Floyd. Only because of a mass international movement that demanded justice for those who had been murdered by the police was Chauvin convicted of murder and sentenced to decades in prison. 

So, I believe we need to look at this history when we look at Nikole Hannah-Jones explanation for the defeat of radical reconstruction. “Faced with this violent recalcitrance, the federal government once again settled on Black people as the problem and decided that for unity sake, it would leave the white South to its own devices.” 

Northern capitalists did not abandon the reconstruction governments, “for unity sake.” Those governments were abandoned, as James Baldwin argued, “It was a deliberate policy hammered into place in order to make money from black flesh.” 

Another lesson we can learn from the defeat of reconstruction is that the demand of unconditional liberation for Black people needs to be at the center of the demands of the entire working class. If we fail to heed this lesson, the alternative would be a repeat of the horrors of Jim Crow segregation.