Zinn Chapter 9

In chapter 9 Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom, A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn highlights on how blacks, throughout the history of the United States, were given freedoms, only to have those very same freedoms denied in order to maintain a system of white elitism.

Zinn covers the period of about ten years before the civil war to the early 1900’s. As always he provides ample evidence to support his thesis. His first subject is the pre-Civil War legal environment which leads to a number of organized slave rebellions. His intention is to illustrate the point that certain rights were afforded to blacks in law but were not being exercised. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (pg 135) is an example of a “deal with the devil” made in order to pacify the southern states. It enabled slave owners to recapture escaped slaves and return them to bondage. Unlikely support of the legislation was found in J. W. Loguen who was the son of a slave mother. Zinn characterizes the North as tacitly supporting slavery by not making a meaningful stand against it. Zinn later turns his attention to Abraham Lincoln as another case of a northerner who refuses to make a significant stand against slavery and the institutions that propped it up. On page 140 he illuminates Lincoln’s inaction on the issues surrounding the Fugitive Slave laws. Zinn later expounds on the rights of the freed slaves in post-Civil War America. He makes the point that blacks under the protection of the Union army were able to participate in society and many were elected to office (pg 148). After the withdrawal of occupation forces the whites of the South were able to engage in oppressive tactics to roll back the freedoms blacks enjoyed. The period gave rise to organized terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. The era was capped with the 1896 Supreme Court ruling in Plessey vs. Ferguson (pg 151). The ruling paved the way for the doctrine of “separate but equal”, which for all intensive purposes leads to inferior treatment for blacks.

A key point Zinn makes is that the North initially was not fighting the civil war for the abolition of slavery, but for reasons of economics, and the South could have neutralized the North’s ideological riotousness by letting blacks fight for the South or abolish slavery altogether. The Southern leadership was just too embroiled in hatred and loathing making this option feasible, but it is interesting to hypothesize what changes this would have made to history.

Zinn as always provides ample evidence to support his arguments, however he stubbles onto what I can only consider an inadvertent point which is the clear presentation of the limitation of our government to deal with issues of morality. It seems clear to me that the politicians of the North were idealistic enough to oppose the institutions of slavery, but were impotent to funneling it into a cohesive political agenda. The politicians fumbled and botched seemingly every opportunity to make a stand to limit or roll back slavery. The process of compromise seems to break down when one side (the South) is completely wrong. Any deals struck would naturally favor the pro-slavery crowd. The issue of slavery would only be decided through armed conflict and only when the North needs the ideological righteousness to overcome their military’s leadership inadequacies. As a nation we are lucky that the post war treatment of southern blacks did not require a second war to end discrimination, but the blacks of the time paid a heavy price for the inactions of the political leadership of the day.