Americans have often wanted to believe
they are propelled toward common goals by a shared set of ideals. In fact, they
have struggled to find agreement on even the most basic principles of how their
society ought to be ordered. They have argued, fought, and died over questions
of citizenship, racial hierarchy, and the control of labor. Americans distilled
these intersecting problems into their most potent form in the eruptions of
violence and social revolution accompanying the Civil War in the nineteenth
century and the Black freedom struggle in the twentieth century. The latter era
roiled with echoes of questions asked but not satisfactorily answered in the
former. Who counted as a citizen, and would all citizens be equal in practice?
Would the United States continue to be a White supremacist republic? Who would
have the power to deploy labor and enjoy its fruits? Examining the Civil War
and civil rights revolution as periods in which these interrelated queries
became intensely contested reveals both change and continuity across time.
This article offers a sketch of
American history with conflict in the starring role. The problems of
citizenship, racial hierarchy, and labor control were the fields on which this
conflict was concentrated. Yet consensus is more than a bit player in this
story. As competing visions of social order clashed, the idea of consensus
exerted a strong pull on the American imagination. The very intensity of
conflict brought forth concerted campaigns for consensus at crucial moments. In
the aftermath of social revolutions, many Americans longed to believe that what
bound them together was greater than the forces pulling them apart. Thus the
article concludes with an argument for a conflict
and consensus model as a way to understand the ebb and flow of the American
experience across time. Rather than casting these two possibilities as
opposites in contradiction to each other, this article asserts that they have
existed in a dialectical relationship. Periods of conflict produced powerful
sentiment for consensus, but such consensus proved unstable, containing within
it the seeds of further conflict.
The
Civil War Era
The early American republic held together by
a fragile settlement giving wide latitude to states to pursue disparate paths. Crises
with the potential to tear the Union apart were not so much resolved as skirted
or delayed. In every decade of the antebellum era Americans grappled with
renewed centrifugal forces that threatened to expose their most basic
disagreements and burst the boundaries of their delicate settlement. By the late 1850s,
successive controversies had narrowed the room for maneuver and brought the
country to the precipice of war. Conflicts over the intertwined meanings of
citizenship, labor, and racial hierarchy were central to the war’s causes and
conduct, and would be implicated in the contested outcomes the war produced.
Finally, in the decades after the war surging reconciliationist sentiment shaped
a White supremacist accord that would be fatally undermined by the very people
it excluded.
Right up to the brink of the fateful decision
to fire on Fort Sumter, it is conceivable that civil war could have been
avoided. The “irrepressible conflict” of William Seward’s imagination was not
inevitable.[2] But it is revealing that a statesman such as Steward thought it so. A former
anti-slavery Whig from New York who had become a leader in the new Republican
Party, Seward embodied the changes that destroyed the antebellum party system. Americans
were arguing not because of a failure of political leadership but because they
had so much of substance to argue about. The North and South had diverged
dramatically in their visions of the ideal society. Increasingly, they came to
see the opposing vision as a mortal threat to their own.
During the secession crisis, the
Vice-President of the new Confederacy offered the southern corollary to
Seward’s “irrepressible conflict.” Alexander Stephens declared that the
founders had been wrong when they claimed all men were created equal. “Our new
government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea,” Stephens said. “Its
foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the
negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery…is his natural and normal
condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world
based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”[3] Americans were on the brink of war not because of misunderstanding but because
the two sections had incompatible ideas about race, labor, and citizenship.
The fledgling Republican Party
Stephens inveighed against had coalesced around a powerful free-labor ideology.
Republicans envisioned a society in which the ideal citizen was a free White man
who could keep the fruits of his labor and rise on the strength of his own
merits. Both the race and gender of this ideal citizen was implicitly assumed
if not stated directly. This vision at once naturalized the inequities of
northern society and scolded the deficiencies of the South. Slavery represented
the antithesis of free-labor ideology. Detestable on its own terms, slavery
also degraded the labor of free White men who had the misfortune of being near
the institution. Worse, when Republicans looked at the South they saw a
grasping, expansionist “slave power” that dominated the Union and bent it
toward pro-slavery agenda. Armed with this understanding, Republicans believed
the future course of the continent was at stake.
White southern elites found the
northern view of labor equally appalling. In their view, the quintessential
free and virtuous American was a White man (again, specifically a man) who
could control and deploy the labor of racialized others. If the North and South had
simply disagreed about what to do with newly acquired western territories their
differences might have been resolved. But they both feared that the labor
system of the other would engulf the continent. White southern elites shared
alike with northerners the assumption that the institution of slavery, if restrained
to its current domain, would wither on the vine and die. Consequently, the
ambitions of White elites in the South were nothing less than hemispheric. If
they had their way, Cuba and Central America would be absorbed as part of “a
truly global vision of pro-slavery empire.”[6] Would
the Western Hemisphere be a place of upward mobility for small White farmers,
or would a slaveholding elite dominate? The attempt of both sides to answer
this question in their favor turned the politics of the late 1850s into a
zero-sum contest for supremacy between contrasting ideals.
 |
| Sojourner Truth |
Black people themselves drove this
contest to a much greater degree than Whites wanted to admit. Black Americans
developed their own politics that challenged the White mainstream in both
sections, and by their actions forced their demands into the national debate. Enslaved
people escaped to the North in significant numbers throughout the decade
(approximately 1000 per year), keeping up a continual drumbeat of resistance
that forced White Americans to deal with Black people who confounded their
ideological beliefs. Free Black communities
heightened tension between North and South by publishing abolitionist
literature and launching repeated volleys of anti-South propaganda. African
Americans laid claim not only to an abolitionist ethic that challenged the
South and did much to bring on the Civil War, but made citizenship claims that
unsettled the North and shaped the War’s course.
Once begun, the Civil War
intensified beyond any participant’s ability to control its consequences. Given
their ideology, it is not surprising that Confederate elites attempted to
establish their nation on a narrow citizenship base—women and slaves did not
count as political actors. Even among White men it was hard to maintain the
pretense that non-slaveholders had equal citizenship in fact. This narrow,
elite-driven project would prove unequal to the rigors of war and revolution.[9] Enslaved people put abolition on the agenda right from the start, and the
Republican Party eagerly obliged. Though desire to preserve
the Union continued to animate many White Union soldiers more than abolitionist
sentiment,
most Republicans believed that restoring the Union and crushing the “slave
power” were inextricably linked. The war was not the battle between brothers,
the unfortunate quarrel, taught to generations of schoolchildren. It was
instead a catastrophic conflict to determine the future of a continent.
Yet the war created as many
questions as it answered. During Reconstruction Americans bitterly contested
the boundaries of citizenship, labor rights, and racial equality. African
Americans moved across the southern landscape seeking better opportunities for
their labor and the reestablishment of family ties slavery had broken. White
southerners perceived such Black mobility as deeply threatening in both
economic and social terms. As one White southerner wrote to the Governor of
South Carolina, “this question of the control of labor underlies every other
question of state interest.” Southern states’ attempts
in the immediate aftermath of the war to impose Black Codes to control African
American labor enraged Republicans and helped provoke
 |
| Black legislators in Virginia during Reconstruction. |
the onset of Radical
Reconstruction.
The passage of the 14th and 15th amendments represented
nothing less than a constitutional revolution as Republicans established new
rights of citizenship and voting without regard to race. The majority of White
southerners never accepted the legitimacy of the new constitutional order.
Rampant terrorism and political violence ensued. Finally, every reconstruction
government in the southern states fell to so-called “redeemers” eager to
reassert White supremacy. President Hayes meekly admitted, “The people will not
now sustain the policy of upholding a State Government against a rival
government, by the use of the forces of the United States. If this leads to the
overthrow of the de jure government
in a State, the de facto government
must be recognized.”
 |
Heavily armed White militias launch a successful coup against
the interracial government of Wilmington, NC. 1898. |
How had the righteous zeal of
Reconstruction declined to the point that the President of the United States
claimed helplessness in the face of military coups? The northern retreat from
Reconstruction involved not just an effort to find some common ground with
White southerners; it reflected the real fear that pressing sectional
disagreements to their breaking point could provoke civil war anew.[15] Beneath the violence of Reconstruction, there had always been grounds on which
White Americans might come to a settlement. For one, northern anti-slavery
sentiment had never implied a broad-based preference for social equality or
equal citizenship across racial lines. In this sense, the
Reconstruction amendments demanded of the South something that many northerners
did not even want for themselves. Moreover, the desire of southern White elites
to control Black labor aligned nicely with northern business interests seeking
to invest capital in the South and return the region to its antebellum status
as the nation’s dominant exporter of raw materials. And Republican free labor
ideology, with its romanticization of sturdy individual farmers coupled with
anxiety about the dangers of dependence on federal aid, made northern officials
reluctant to pursue land reform or other means of robust support for
freedpeople. Instead, all too often Freedman’s Bureau agents helped facilitate
onerous labor contracts between Black workers and White landowners. In the decades after the
Civil War, Republicans increasingly retreated on questions of citizenship and
labor, professing to believe that if only African Americans retained their
access to the ballot they would be able to use the vote to assert their other
rights. But by the turn of the century, in most places African Americans lacked
even that.
 |
| The war remembered. Veterans at Gettysburg, 1913. |
 |
| The war as it was. Body parts in open field at Gaines Mill. |
This narrowed vision helped pave the
way for a national White consensus. In the aftermath of Reconstruction’s
failure, northern Whites would give southern Whites a wide berth to solve their
“race problem” and in return White southerners would rededicate themselves to
the national union. A strong reconciliationist impulse hastened the accord as
White Americans came to remember the war as a tragic battle between two noble
sections fighting for high ideals. As they honored their dead, they buried
their old quarrels with them and looked forward to a new day of national
greatness.
Doggedly pushing against this sentiment, Frederick Douglass knew that all the
dead were not alike. “Death has no power to change moral qualities,” he
maintained. He vowed to always remember the difference “between those who
fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery.”
The dominant narrative cast Douglass’s
emancipationist remembrance to the fringe, leaving little room for African
Americans in the nation’s story of reconciliation. At the turn of the century
fully ninety percent of Blacks remained in the South, the vast majority poor
and landless, rendered invisible in national debates. Indeed, racism had become
more “deeply embedded in the nation’s culture and politics than at any time
since the beginning of the antislavery crusade.” It was not at all obvious
the southern demagogue Ben Tillman was wrong when he stood on the Senate floor
and declared, “We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot [Blacks]. We are not ashamed of
it. The Senator from Wisconsin would have done the same thing. I see it in his
eye right now.”
Pervasive racism seemed to provide the glue of a durable consensus in American
life. White supremacy would reign nationwide, Blacks and other racial
minorities would constitute laboring classes, and the practical rewards of
citizenship would accrue to Whites while remaining paper promises for people of
color. Yet the consensus was more fragile than it at first appeared. It
depended upon the continued restriction of Black mobility and Black labor in
the South. And it depended upon Black demands remaining invisible and
politically inert. It rested, too, on a gendered hierarchy that Black women
began to upset even as Black men were systematically disfranchised. As events would prove, none
of these conditions were stable. Black people, more than anyone, made sure of
that.
The
Black Freedom Movement
The civil rights movement era has
been popularly understood as an integrationist narrative in which respectable
African Americans sought inclusion as full citizens of the nation. African
Americans won the battle for equal citizenship by tearing down Jim Crow, in the
process gaining access to the ballot and public places. This interpretation is
implied in the name ascribed to the period: the civil rights movement. Such a
narrative downplays the radical nature of Black demands and the extent of the
conflict rending American society during these years. For African Americans
sought not only a narrow vision of political rights, but a broader sense of
freedom that put issues of labor at the very center. Equal citizenship and the
eradication of White supremacy would mean not only the right to vote and
integrate a lunch counter, but the right to a decent job at a fair wage. The
African American struggle for freedom thus did not call forth an easy consensus
from which only backward southern bigots dissented. It represented instead a
frontal assault on ideals that many White Americans in both the North and South
held dear. From Communist and other leftist radicals in the 1930s to the March
on Washington Movement of World War Two, from local battles to force cities and
states to pass Fair Employment Practices laws to scuffles over affirmative
action in the 1970s and beyond, Black activists refused to decouple the
interconnected problems of labor, citizenship, and White supremacy.
The more triumphal civil rights narrative
of popular memory has deep roots. Gunnar Myrdal’s massive and influential 1944
book, An American Dilemma: The Negro
Problem and American Democracy argued that Americans of all backgrounds
shared a broad consensus—a set of ideals Myrdal called “the American Creed.” In
their hearts, Americans believed in freedom and justice for all. The treatment
of African Americans represented not an opposing set of ideals but merely “a
century-long lag of public morals.” White Americans had only
to live up to their stated ideals and America’s racial problems would be
solved. In such a narrative, Black activists and their allies stood for the “American
Way” while those who resisted them were backward and reactionary. This dramatically understated
the extent of the conflict. If there was an American Creed, Americans held deep
disagreements about its contents. As Rogers M. Smith has demonstrated, for most
of American history White elites “pervasively and unapologetically structured U.S.
citizenship in terms of illiberal and undemocratic racial, ethnic, and gender hierarchies.” The efforts of Black
activists to overturn these hierarchies represented not an inevitable
culmination of American ideals, but a particular understanding of citizenship
with which many other Americans disagreed.
Seen in such a light, the drama of
the civil rights era looks different. Resistance to the movement is not
sufficiently described with terms such as “backlash.” Black activism provoked a
White countermovement that was deliberate, strategic, purposeful, and not
confined only to the South. This was so because, as
in the nineteenth century, the conflicts dividing Americans in the twentieth
century were not incidental—they cut to the heart of disparate understandings
of how to order society. Casting opponents of the civil rights movement as
“rabid” or absurd obscures both the seriousness and continued relevance of
their ideals.
In an America so deeply riven by conflict, the Black freedom movement could not
win a comprehensive victory.
 |
| Leaving the South |
But it could crack the old White
supremacist consensus wide open. Beginning around World War One, the push of
agricultural mechanization and the pull of industrial employment in the urban
centers of the North launched a massive African American migration out of the
South. Despite discrimination, the North’s burgeoning factories represented
economic opportunity for African Americans at the same time the demand for
their agricultural labor declined. By 1930 there were almost a million tractors
on the nation’s farms. The migration slowed
during the 1920s and 1930s before reaching its height during and after World
War Two. The migration undercut the nation’s White supremacist consensus in at
least two ways. In the South, it again raised the specter of Black mobility and
the fragility of White labor control that ostensibly had been settled with the
defeat of Reconstruction. For African Americans not only moved out of the
South; they moved to urban centers within the South. In these spaces Black
Americans were more likely to be able to vote and find a modicum of economic
success. And in the North, where discrimination was pervasive but voting rights
relatively secure, African Americans turned themselves into a key political
constituency that northern representatives ignored at their peril.
 |
| New arrivals in Chicago. |
As a result, for the first time
since Reconstruction Black Americans succeeded in putting their concerns on the
national political agenda. In 1937 the House of Representatives passed an
anti-lynching bill. Though blocked in the Senate, it was a portent of things to
come. Of more vital long-term
importance were sweeping changes in labor relations. The number of unionized
Black workers soared during the Great Migration decades. Despite the
discrimination they faced in their working class jobs, the opening up of unions
to African Americans combined with the pro-labor New Deal state “generated a
kind of industrial citizenship” that was a marked improvement over the old
order. And African Americans
were not content to leave that newfound citizenship on the shop floor. Many
embraced a “civil rights unionism” that insisted on both economic and political
rights in the workplace and beyond.
The Second World War proved to be a
watershed in Black Americans’ struggle for freedom. Belying popular memories of
the war bathed in nostalgia, African Americans aggressively used the global
conflict as an opportunity to make demands upon the nation. The Pittsburgh Courier launched a “Double V
Campaign,” demanding victory against fascism both at home and abroad.
Membership in the NAACP soared. And as the Great Migration intensified to an
unprecedented size, African Americans demanded equal treatment in the federally-financed
factories churning out war material. A. Philip Randolph led the March on
Washington Movement, threatening President Roosevelt with the prospect of tens
of thousands of African Americans
descending on the nation’s capital. Such a possibility
so frightened White elites that Roosevelt yielded and signed an executive order
banning employment discrimination among federal defense contractors. Thus the forerunner of
the more famous March on Washington sought economic rights rather than narrowly
political ones. Though the later 1963 march would stand as a hallmark in the
popular remembrance of an integrationist consensus, it too demanded jobs and
challenged the structure of the American economy.
In the aftermath of World War Two,
as Black migrants continued to move into northern cities, there were increasing
signs that they were boarding sinking ships. Despite Roosevelt’s executive
order and the passage of many poorly enforced state Fair Employment Practice
laws, employment discrimination remained pervasive. Moreover, the growing
phenomenon of White flight represented not only the movement of White people
out of city centers, but an accompanying flight of capital, business
investment, and government services. Well before the heyday of globalization,
jobs began leaving the very places African Americans sought the promise of economic
opportunity.
This was crucial to the course of the Black freedom struggle. As White
Americans retreated to
new suburban spaces of racial privilege, they rendered
the economic suffering of African Americans invisible or naturalized while speciously
attributing their own success to market forces and hard work. This put consensus far
out of reach by the time the conflagrations of the 1960s exploded. For the
world of economic decay from which Black demands emerged and the world of
subsidized advantage in which Whites heard those demands had become
dramatically disconnected. When Black Americans linked the structure of the
nation’s labor markets to a broader language of freedom and rights, many White
Americans perceived this as un-American special pleading. By 1963, in a city
such as Philadelphia, building trades unions featured one African American
among their 7,300 members. For Black Americans such
statistics represented an effective denial of equal citizenship; for many
Whites they represented the just rewards of hard work.
Such a fundamental disconnect did
not prevent the deployment of consensus as an idea to obstruct Black progress.
In a pattern repeated in many cities, the White elite of Greensboro, North
Carolina, embraced a kind of civic boosterism that asserted their city had good
“race relations” and that everyone, Black and White, moved forward together in
a spirit of mutual progress. They saw Greensboro as a forward-thinking city
where reasonable people could talk through their differences and achieve
voluntary consensus. Paternalism figured prominently in this vision, but at
bottom White elites embraced a particular sense of civility, what William Chafe
has called “a way of dealing with people and problems that made good manners
more important than substantial action.” When Black residents in
Greensboro and elsewhere resorted to street protest to break through this false
vision of consensus, Whites usually responded with confusion and resentment.
Though the 1964 Civil Rights Act
banned employment discrimination and established an Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission, many Black activists sought more aggressive action to
make the promise of economic opportunity real for African Americans in the face
of persistent labor market exclusion. In this context affirmative action emerged.
The American economy exemplified and reproduced racial inequality; only by
taking deliberate ameliorative action, many thought, could a more equal playing
field emerge. Many White Americans who failed to reckon with the radical nature
of the Black Freedom Movement would come to see affirmative action as a sad
departure from the supposedly colorblind ideals of the civil rights movement.
In the closing decades of the
twentieth century, colorblindness emerged not only as a legal strategy to roll back
the institutional gains of the Black freedom movement. It also represented a
broader cultural shift as White Americans rejected assumptions of racial
supremacy and began to believe that racial harmony was in reach if only people
would stop highlighting race and focus instead on Americans’ shared values.
This contemporary consensus differed significantly from that of a century ago.
Then, White Americans came together in a common repudiation of Reconstruction. They
saw it as an obvious failure. In the aftermath of the Second Reconstruction,
the popular narrative celebrated the civil rights movement as a great victory
of which all Americans could be proud. Yet this consensus, too, was unstable,
for it relied upon a simplistic tale that obscured the scale of the conflict
that occurred and the extent to which it remained unresolved. In an echo of the
silencing of the emancipationist memory of the Civil War, the contemporary
consensus attempted to impose silence on racial matters even as forces that
reproduced racial inequality persisted. This consensus, always more contested
than its devotees would like to believe, may even now be crumbling. For the
problems of citizenship, racial hierarchy, and labor control are still with us
today in new and contingent forms.
Conflict
and Consensus as a Model for Teaching American History
The forgoing narrative has tried to
demonstrate not only the central role of conflict in American history, but the
complex interplay between moments of conflict and consensus. Though this sketch
focused on the civil war and the civil rights movement and their attendant
questions of race, labor, and citizenship, this model can be fruitfully applied
to other subjects and eras in American history. For example, a broader story of
the ebb and flow of conflict between labor and capital could be told through
this lens, adding nuance to the narrative sketched here. After all, the very
decades in which America’s White supremacist consensus seemed strongest were
years of enormous labor strife. Even as Jim Crow consolidated and African
Americans became a sharecropping class, the dramas of Haymarket, Pullman, and Lawrence
showed that the place of labor in American life was far from settled. Why did
one arena of conflict become relatively quiescent while another flared, and
what is the relationship between them? In labor history intense conflict
eventually resolved into an uneasy stalemate: the famous labor-capital
mid-century consensus. That historians are now inclined to dismiss this accord
as largely illusory does not negate the hold the idea of such a consensus had
on American elites during the Cold War.
A conflict and consensus model can also
serve as a useful framing device for foreign policy. Though Americans have
often wanted to believe that politics stops at the waters’ edge, issues of war
and diplomacy have repeatedly divided them. From the Embargo Act of the
Jefferson administration to the war in Iraq, U.S. foreign policy has revealed
deep fault lines at home. Yet the idea of a strong and unified United States in
its posture toward the world has been a recurring theme in American history.
From revolutionary narratives that obscured the magnitude of loyalist
sentiment, to contemporary nostalgia for World War Two as a time when Americans
ostensibly acted in unison in the “good war,” stories of consensus have been
much more popular than stories of conflict.
Aspects of colonial history could be
explored through this frame as well. The “middle ground” of the pays d’en haut and the “zones of
interaction” of the Spanish borderlands represent intense spaces of conflict in
which no culture could fully impose its will. The resulting amalgam of
practices was something distinctly new, born of conflict. In the late colonial
and revolutionary era, the profound differences between the reality of messy
intercolonial conflict and subsequent remembrance of a supposedly united
citizenry offer a useful opportunity to teach students about the exigencies of
historical memory.
Precisely because conflict has been
so pervasive in American history and has often seemed ready to tear apart the
national fabric, drives for consensus have at times taken center stage. The
progressive era can be read as one such time. Zealous reformers with the hubris
to “remake the nation’s feuding, polyglot population in their own middle-class
image” were, in a sense, engaged in a manic campaign for consensus. Similarly, the “100
percent Americanism” phenomenon during the Great War reflected hope for national
unity, but its ugly and violent undertones just as surely indicated Americans’
fear that no such unity existed. Americans did not conjure
these concerns out of thin air. Mass immigration to the United States did create conflicts, both economic and
cultural.
It is the severity of those conflicts that helps to explain the urgency with
which some Americans embraced progressive reforms and nativist fears.
As with any model, there is a danger
of trying to shoehorn disparate events and processes into the boundaries of its
framework. But as a teaching device, such a model has real utility. It can
bring coherence to a survey of American history while remaining open to the
complexity of the past. Indeed, it is the malleability of the model that makes
it useful. It describes processes more than subjects, allowing any number of
themes—from gender to religion to diplomacy—to be explored through its lens. Yet
the flipside of the model’s malleability presents a second danger: terms such
as conflict and consensus are not specific and may lack analytical rigor. This
problem is not insurmountable. Using specific historical examples and precisely
describing the nature of the conflicts can alleviate much of this concern.
Conflict has propelled American history
forward. Repeated clashes of diverse peoples and cultures have produced the
contested results that often appear to contemporary Americans as natural. The
institutions and practices Americans take for granted did not arrive on the
wings of inevitability. Still less are they the result of an amorphous national
character. They emerged, instead, as contingent outcomes of grueling dissension
and discord in specific historical contexts. Yet the promise of consensus speaks
to a persistent motif Americans have often wanted to believe: that the values
binding them together are greater than the forces driving them apart. From the
constitutional convention to the election of a Black President, the American
people—raucous, feuding, and fractious—have wanted to believe they are building
the United States of America.
