Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

off the former plantations at bayonet point by Union
soldiers. While the Afrikans had coolly told returning
planters to go - and pulled out weapons to emphasize
their orders - they were not able to overcome the U.S. Army.
In 1865 and 1866 the Union occupation disarmed and
broke up such dangerous outbreaks. The special danger to
the U. S. Empire was that the grass-roots political drive to
have armed power over the land, to build economically
self-sufficient regions under Afrikan control, would inevitably
raise the question of Afrikan sovereignty.
Afrikan soldiers who had learned too much for the
U.S. Empire's peace of mind were a special target (of both
Union and Confederate alike). Even before the War's end
a worried President Lincoln had written to one of his
generals: "I can hardly believe that the South and North
can live in peace unless we get rid of the Negroes. Certainly
they cannot, if we don't get rid of the Negroes whom we
have armed and disciplined and who have fought with us, I
believe, to the amount of 150,000 men. I believe it would
be better to export them all ..."
Afrikan U.S. army units were hurriedly disarmed
and disbanded, or sent out of the South (out West to serve
as colonial troops against the Indians, for example). The
U.S. Freedmen's Bureau said in 1866 that the new, secret
white terrorist organizations in Mississippi placed a special
priority on murdering returning Afrikan veterans of the
Union Army. In New Orleans some members of the U.S.
74th Colored Infantry were arrested as "vagrants" the day
after they were mustered out of the army. Everywhere in
the occupied Afrikan Nation an emphasis was placed on
defusing or wiping out the political guerrillas and militia of
the Afrikan masses.
The U.S. Empire's second blow was more subtle.
The Northern settler bourgeoisie sought to convince
Afrikans that they could, and should want to, become
citizens of the U.S. Empire. To this end the 14th Amendment
to the Constitution involuntarily made all Afrikans
here paper U.S. citizens. This neo-colonial strategy offered
Afrikan colonial subjects the false democracy of paper
citizenship in the Empire that oppressed them and held
their Nation under armed occupation.
While the U.S. Empire had regained its most
valuable colony, it had major problems. The Union Armies
militarily held the territory of the Afrikan Nation.
But the settlers who had formerly garrisoned the colony
and overseen its economy could no longer be trusted; even
after their attempted rival empire had been ended, the
Southern settlers remained embittered and dangerous
enemies of the U.S. bourgeoisie. The Afrikan masses,
whose labor and land provided the wealth that the Empire
extracted from their colony, were rebellious and unwilling
to peacefully submit to the old ways. The Empire needed a
loyalist force to hold and pacify the colony.
The U.S. Empire's solution was to turn their
Afrikan colony into a neo-colony. This phase was called
Black Reconstruction.* Afrikans were promised
democracy, human rights, self-government and popular
ownership of the land - but only as loyal "citizens" of the
U.S. Empire. Under the neo-colonial leadership of some
petit-bourgeois elements, Afrikans became the loyalist
social base. Not only were they enfranchised en masse, but 40
Afrikans were participants and leaders in government:
Afrikan jurors, judges, state officials, militia captains,
Governors, Congressmen and even several Afrikan U.S.
Senators were conspicuous.
This regional political role for Afrikans produced
results that would be startling in the Empire today, and by
the settler standards of a century ago were totally
astonishing. The white supremacist propagandist James
Pike reports angrily of state government in South
Carolina, the state with the largest Afrikan presence in
government:
"The members of the Assembly issued forth from
the State House. About three-quarters of the crowd
belonged to the African race. They were such a looking
body of men as might pour out of a market-house or a
courthouse at random in any Southern state. Every Negro
type and physiognomy was here to be seen, from the
genteel serving-man, to the rough-hewn customer from the
rice or cotton field. Their dress was as varied as their
countenances. There was the second-hand, black frockcoat
of infirm gentility, glossy and threadbare. There was the
stovepipe hat of many ironings and departed styles. There
was also to be seen a total disregard of the proprieties nf
costume in the coarse and dirty garments of the field.
"The Speaker is black, the Clerk is black, the
doorkeepers are black, the little pages are black, the Chairman
of the Ways and Means is black, and the chaplin is
coal black. At some of the desks sit colored men whose
types it would be hard to find outside the Congo. It was
not all sham, nor all burlesque. They have a genuine interest
and a genuine earnestness in the business of the
assembly which we are bound to recognize and
respect.. .They have an earnest purpose, born of conviction
that their conditions are not fully assured, which lends a
sort of dignity to their proceedings."
This dramatic reversal outraged the Confederate
masses - who saw their former "property" now risen
over them. The liberal Reconstruction governments swept
away the social garbage of centuries, releasing modern
reforms throughout Southern life: public school systems,
integrated juries, state highway and railroad systems, protective
labor reforms, divorce and property rights for
women, and so on.
What was most apparent about Black Reconstruction
was its impossible contradictions. Now we can say
that while it was a bold course for the Empire to embark
upon, it so went against the structure of settler society that
it could only have been temporary. Afrikans were organized
politically into the loyalist Union Leagues (which were
often armed), organized militarily into state militia companies,
and all for the purpose of holding down some
Euro-Amerikan settlers both for themselves and for the
U.S. Empire. Yet, at the same time the Empire wanted
Afrikans disarmed and disorganized. This neo-colonial
bourgeois government of Black Reconstruction was
doomed from its first day, since it promised that Afrikans
would share the land and the power with settlers.
The Afrikan petit-bourgeois leadership in government
made every effort to stabilize relations with the