The Black History of the White House Read Free Page B

fought valiantlyto crush the pro-slavery forces. 8 Under pressure from the abolitionist movement, from influential public figures like Frederick Douglass, and simply out of military necessity, President Lincoln eventually permitted blacks to join the armed combat and enlist in the Union Army.
    Beyond the military imperatives of winning the war, the Lincoln White House found itself forced to address the black cause; racial issues had become so urgent they could no longer be ignored. The escalating crisis opened up the political space to allow not just piecemeal reforms on human trafficking or another Faustian compromise with politicians representing white enslavers from the South, but the dismantling of the system of slavery once and for all. President Lincoln’s personal views on the matter—whether those of a late convert to abolitionism, as argued by historian James M. McPherson, or of an unrepentant defender of the system who was “forced into glory,” as historian Lerone Bennett Jr. contends—ultimately became secondary as circumstances demanded he take action on whites’ legal right to enslave blacks, a demand that previous presidents had not had to address in a fundamental manner. 9 Although the Emancipation Proclamation, as a strategy against the South, freed only blacks enslaved to Confederate states that were in rebellion at the time, it nevertheless marked the beginning of a series of profound and irrevocable legal and societal shifts away from the barbarity of white domination and toward the democratic equality promised by the American Revolution.
    The Lincoln White House resolved the issue of slavery, but not that of racism. Among the other variables that led to the war was the rise of Northern financial interests, which supported the Republican Party and were in competition with the interests of the Southern agricultural-based aristocracy. The push by the Republican Party for “free” labor in an increasingly industrializingnation—meaning a mobile, wage-paid workforce—was not the equivalent of fairness to workers or labor equality between whites and people of color. To advance its agenda and that of its sponsors, the Republican Party needed to break the economic power of the South as well as its dominance in Congress.
    In the political openings created by the crisis and the transition of power from Southern interests to Northern ones, the experiment of Reconstruction was launched, wherein state authorities intervened on behalf of newly liberated women, men, and children, addressing the crisis of exclusion with political enfranchisement (for men), economic reparations (through the Freedmen’s Bank), and social inclusion (through educational opportunities at all levels).
    After the April 14, 1865, assassination of President Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth—the pro-slavery extremist who was impelled to commit the crime by the president’s promise of voting rights for blacks—Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson, began almost immediately to roll back the commitments Lincoln had made to black Americans. Republican Party radicals in Congress, led by Thaddeus Stevens, countered the Johnson White House and for nearly nine years pushed through groundbreaking legislation that granted new political rights and protection to blacks.
    However, the crisis of the 1876 presidential election, in which a dispute arose over the legality of black votes in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, redrew the political balance of power and once again saw the White House facilitate the subordination of blacks in U.S. society. The Hayes-Tilden Compromise was about more than just an election fiasco; it represented the reemergence of a modernized, post-slavery South that made an accommodation with its Northern counterpart. Once the urgent dispute over economic authority was resolved, there waslittle motivation on the part of the Republican Party to continue alienating large