The Problem and the Promise: Black Life and the Coming of Freedom in Late Nineteenth Century America

The Problem and the Promise: Black Life and the Coming of Freedom in Late Nineteenth Century America By Michael B. McGee A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Darieck Scott, Chair Professor Ula Taylor Professor Bryan Wagner Summer 2018 Abstract The Problem and the Promise: Black Life and the Coming of Freedom in Late Nineteenth Century America By Michael B. McGee Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Darieck Scott, Chair This dissertation is a cultural investigation of the meaning of freedom in America from Emancipation to the early twentieth century. Since 1776, a liberal discourse of rights has framed what freedom means in the national consciousness. Defined as an inalienable right legitimated by an infallible authority, freedom was made the basis upon which subjectivity is recognized, governments are formed, appeals are made, and revolutions retain the allure of transformative possibility. However, this idea of freedom obscures the ways in which problems with legitimacy, authority, and the sociopolitical construction of subjecthood all impact the meaning of being free in America. These problems are most apparent concerning the nation’s racial politics. The lives of black Americans have exposed the aporia between the ideal of freedom and the reality of racialized existence. The dissonance between the freedom praised as America's most valued ideal and the experience black Americans lived allows for a way of reading the coming of freedom as problem—as a collection of discrepancies, contradictions, and scenes for the violation and subjection of black people. In this project, I read emancipation and the passing of the Reconstruction Amendments as narrative and performative events. By doing so, the freedoms extended to black Americans post-Civil War are neither bestowed by law or the radical ideals of Lincoln as emancipator or the Republican Congress, nor do black Americans initiate their own meaning of freedom of their own accord. In this moment of transition, the meaning of freedom was determined by both those in political power and those whose practices sought to negotiate the conditions in which they lived. However, as the meaning of freedom was shaped in this moment, it would be insufficient to address the problems of racial logic that restricted what freedom could mean for not only black Americans but the national body at large. This project is an attempt to trouble what we know about freedom as it regards emancipation, abolition, citizenship, and enfranchisement. It is a project that criticizes the narrative of victory around freedom in this moment and considers the ways in which the freedom celebrated in a national historical consciousness has been the very source of the problem in determining what it means to be free in America. 1 To Edith for leading the way i INTRODUCTION: PECULIAR PROMISES Between the regimes of slavery and Jim Crow segregation is the period we can qualify as the coming of freedom. This period is, in a sense, the testimony of decency against a history of shame, a moment of reprieve in the long and storied violent exclusion and subjection of black Americans. It is the triumph of good over evil written into a national past where evil was not evil but normal, acceptable, the ordained way of life. The coming of freedom is, usually, the story of the coup de théâtre that was emancipation and the series of radical amendments to the Constitution that wrote into law black Americans did indeed possess rights the white man was bound to respect. It is the victory of liberty over slavery, of the modern over the feudal, and of human rights over racial prejudice— that is, at least for a moment. What interests me however, are not the achievements of the period but the incongruities, those things unusual to freedom’s arrival, those accounts that could not be managed into the narrative of victory and celebration. The coming of freedom is a curious affair. Situated between what is described as the peculiar institution and the strange career of Jim Crow, one wonders to what extent does such a context affect the freedom arriving in this moment? What happened to all the peculiarity preceding freedom’s arrival? And at what point did the strangeness characterizing Jim Crow begin to congeal? From wartime emancipation policy to the effectively hollow Civil Rights Act of 1875, the coming of freedom did not provide the revolutionary break that could disrupt the ideological continuity between slavery and the anti-black violence and discrimination of Jim Crow. In part, this is why the radical agenda of Reconstruction’s idealism could not be sustained and was doomed to fail; this is why the period of legislative freedom victories for black Americans could be followed by—and in many places, exist simultaneously with—the advent of the nadir in American race relations. As such, reading the coming of freedom necessitates a reading of the ways the peculiar, the strange, the illogic of antiblack reason not only persist but also define the wartime and postwar successes. My interest in such a reading is to neither diminish the value of these achievements nor challenge their legitimacy or significance. Rather, it is to claim that the freedom celebrated with the advent of emancipation, abolition, citizenship, and enfranchisement is no less strange than the institutions of slavery before it and Jim Crow segregation after it. Central to understanding the significance of the coming of freedom is understanding it as a moment of transition, particularly as it concerned the making and remaking of black subjectivity. This became a matter of Congressional debate early into the Civil War over whether to classify slaves as property or persons—that is, whether slaves are property to be forfeited by the Confederacy and gained for Union service or whether they are considered human being, to which they would now be declared free.1⁠ Emancipation and Union victory paved the way for the destruction of slavery but abolition presented its own set of challenges. In theory, there were no more slaves, no more masters. In its wake, a new black subject would be constructed: the freedman. But ‘freedman’ is different from ii freeman and different from free man and free woman. The term ‘freedman’ is a passive construction; the subject is displaced as the actor initiating freedom and, instead, undergoes the action of freedom. To be freed is to be liberated by another’s hand and, as a result, what black Americans experienced was not a freedom of their own making but a freedom of concessions, allotments, surveillance, and control. In this remaking of black subjectivity, the end of slavery did not mean the end of subjection. Every iteration of ‘freedman’ is an iteration of black dependency, even in their nonenslavement. This was the coming of a peculiar freedom, one that brought with it new forms of subjection based on old assumptions about race and gender. This was, according to Booker Washington, the “severe American crucible” through which black Americans must pass. The burden of responsibility was on freed men and women to prove to bigots, prejudiced missionaries, and “unbiased” natural and social scientist alike black people’s fitness for inclusion in American society. Every aspect of black life was scrutinized—their work ethic, business acumen, propensity for economic independence, practice of bourgeois values, performance of gender roles, sexuality, entertainment; all things public and private, vocational and domestic—it was all subject to rigid standards of liberalism’s righteous individualism and bourgeois cultural values.2⁠ The coming of freedom was as much a release from bondage as it was the arrival of a new form of confinement. The significance of this transitory period is wrapped up in the paradoxical nature of the change it brought. Beginning with emancipation, the coming of freedom would mean the destruction of slavery, the reconstitution of free labor, and the emergence of black positions of power (albeit however fraught) as a result of their military participation.3⁠ On the other hand, the coming of freedom was the natal scene for slavery’s afterlife, the recoupment of white supremacy, and the reconfiguration of conditions of black abjection. In a single moment, the coming of freedom brought celebration and consternation, jubilee and despondency. The joys of independence after centuries of bondage were tempered with the sobriety of independence after centuries of the systematic denial of self- sufficiency. This celebratory pause is instructive in that it complicates an easy embrace of what is now unequivocally considered a victory for human rights and race relations in America. The emphasis on the accomplishment of emancipation, abolition, citizenship, and enfranchisement too readily obscures the problems accompanying these very achievements. Arguably, the significance of this period may be better evaluated by reading the ways in which the coming of freedom is more indicative of problem than solution or resolution. From the outset, the coming of freedom was characterized by the problem of articulation. What exactly was this freedom extended to millions of black people? What would be its parameters? To what extent would this freedom be the same or different from that enjoyed by the white citizenry? The attempts to bring definition to what it would mean for black people in America to no longer be enslaved is, perhaps, one of the central problems that not only undermined the realization of freedom in that moment but has also contributed to a legacy of elusiveness, competing interpretations, and the continued deferment of freedom’s fulfillment for black Americans. The Emancipation Proclamation declared slaves held in states in open rebellion against the Union “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” But the constitutional limitations of this emancipation, in addition to being an act of military necessity did not make this declaration of freedom for iii black Americans sustainable.

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