The Civil War didn’t erase slavery’s harm

On June 18, the day before a Congressional hearing on reparations, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested that the Civil War already took care of American slavery.

“I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago, for whom none of us currently living are responsible, is a good idea,” McConnell said, adding, “We tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war.”

This week, McConnell reiterated his opposition to reparations after an NBC News report revealed that his ancestors owned slaves.

Texans are in a better position than most to see what McConnell’s perspective on the Civil War misses.

That war did lead to abolition and the emancipation of 4 million people. But slavery did not end cleanly or on a single day. It ended through a violent, uneven process that failed to fully “deal with” slavery’s harms.

McConnell would know this if he examined the history behind a holiday started in Texas and celebrated last month.

Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, when Major General Gordon Granger issued an emancipation order in Galveston. It signifies freedom for African Americans. But the fact that Granger’s order was needed — two years after the Emancipation Proclamation — is also a reminder that slavery died hard.

One Texas newspaper reported in August 1865 that many in the state were still “under the bondage of their former not unfrequently cruel masters.” By January 1866, federal officials in Texas had hundreds of reports of crimes against freed people, many committed by planters from other states who had forced slaves there to evade emancipation.

White southerners also immediately sought substitutes for slavery. James Throckmorton, one of Texas’ postwar governors, publicly accepted abolition. Privately, though, he predicted that Texas could “adopt a coercive system” to replace slavery after the departure of U.S. troops.

U.S. troops were not entirely innocent of coercion themselves. In the months after Juneteenth, many federal officials in Texas forced freed people to stay on cotton plantations. Even Granger’s order told them to stay with ex-masters.

In Washington County, a speech by another army official explained that although former slaves might desire to “celebrate their emancipation by a day or two of recreation,” such an “indulgence” was forbidden.

And in July 1866, one Mississippian who had brought some 300 enslaved people to Robertson County in 1863 reported that U.S. soldiers there were beating freed people to make them work. They used their military dress swords “in place of our old strap.”

With friends like these, freed people did not need outright enemies. They had those, too. White southerners fulfilled Throckmorton’s prediction by adopting coercive systems like convict leasing, which Texas first tried in 1867.

The remains of 95 victims of convict leasing recently discovered in Sugar Land testify to what the system became by century’s end — a deadly regime that targeted formerly enslaved people and their descendants while enriching former slaveholders and the state.

Convict leasing, disfranchisement and segregation also robbed ex-slaves of the political power they would have needed to win reparations while former slaveholders still lived, though they did try.

Henrietta Wood, one of those people brought to Robertson County from Mississippi during the war, managed to file a lawsuit against a former enslaver in 1870 in Ohio. Nearly a decade later, she won $2,500.

But Wood’s victory proved exceptional. When another formerly enslaved woman, Callie House, launched a mass movement for ex-slave pensions in the 1890s, she was harassed by federal officials who falsely accused her of fraud. No pensions were paid.

As Wood and House show, the demand for reparations is not new. It dates back more than 150 years. Yet those demands already confronted opponents who foreshadowed McConnell.

Many postwar northerners claimed that the Civil War actually made freed people indebted to the nation, instead of vice versa. In return for being freed, said one official in Texas, “they must show by their industry and perseverance that they were worthy of freedom.”

In a New York tract titled “Friendly Counsels for Freedmen,” a minister told ex-slaves at the end of the 1860s that “the sooner you stop leaning on government and on the help of the whites, the better for yourselves and for all concerned.”

In short, far from redressing the wounds of slavery, the Civil War generation allowed fresh wounds to open, all while offering former slaves little more than “friendly counsels” to work hard.

No wonder, then, that the struggle to deal with slavery goes on.