In some ways, the Civil War was the analogue of the Terror for Americans: It was the bloodthirsty incestuous violence that allowed the nation to move onward to a full embrace of democracy, joining itself to Europe as the world began to tip toward democratic ideas and ideals.
White Supremacy
Stephen Kantrowitz's biography of Benjamin Tillman demonstrates how he can be seen as a symbol for an entire cohort of Southerners of his generation, people (mostly but not exclusively men) who could neither understand nor tolerate the new order that had formally instituted itself after Emancipation. They could not understand a world in which black men were suddenly their legal equals. Tillman, and others like him, lived in a world that told them that blacks had to be treated like equals even though many white Southerners did not see their black compatriots as even being fully human.
This set up an internal conflict that many chose to act out by adhering to a philosophy of White Supremacy, a philosophy that allowed them to deny the political realities of Reconstruction and to plan (in ways that only partly proved to be ineffective) in which the old order would persist in fact if not in law. White Supremacy allowed white Southerners to put aside the inconvenient realities of a world in which black men could vote, hold land, marry as they wished, take their fate into their own hands.
All these rights had been recognized by the Constitutional amendments that recognized the rights of black men (and to a lesser extent black women). For racist Southerners, such rights simply did not exist: It was not that they did not want to recognize the rights of blacks; rather men like Tillman instituted a worldview in which only whites has rights. They wished to return to a "truth" stated in the Constitution -- that black slaves were "worth" only three-fifths of what a white man was worth.
Tillman created coalitions around three of the most important and enduring principles of white supremacists from Reconstruction through the Civil Rights Movement: To deny blacks any real access to the franchise, to punish whites who attempted to bury the traditions of the past with a more egalitarian vision of what the future might be, and to limit the power of the federal government both the create political policies and to enforce those policies through economic sanctions.
Kantrowitz emphasizes not the morally problematic nature of Tillman's thoughts and actions; he takes these as obvious from our historical perspective but the reasons that it proved to be so ineffective. Tillman focused on the change in legalities that had occurred during the Civil War and so missed the larger social and cultural changes, changes on a scale that could not be dismissed by a retrograde racism. The New South (and the nation in large measure) would be built upon the foundation of connections between freed blacks and whites who were either proponents of integration, just saw a good business opportunity, or both.
Tillman, who treasured the values of the Old South, was limited in his vision of what the future could be. These limitations on his vision are what brought about his failure and the failure of others like him. As Kantrowitz describes him, he was a revolutionary but not a radical, and his ideas of what could be accomplished were too small to overcome the momentum of the new South.
The New South
Political orator and sometime-journalist Henry Grady popularized the term the "New South" as a part of his campaign to knit together the states after the Civil War. His father had been killed in battle and Grady himself had been a witness to much of the most terrible violence of the
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