Module: HST5380 America in the Age of Capital: From the Gilded Age to the Great Depression
By: Jayden Fitzgibbon
Steven Hahn’s ‘A Nation under our Feet’, is an extremely engaging insight into the narratives of African Americans in the rural South, from the decades of slavery, to their status as freed people during Reconstruction and Great Migration. The author’s rich study on black political action both in the domestic and electoral sphere, considers ways in which grassroots resistance was fundamental to the integration of slave and freed politics on a national level, where black people in the South represented “political actors in a society that tried to refuse them that part.”[1] Hahn frames his narrative in three thematic sections, where in part one he describes organized slave resistance in the rural antebellum South as revolving around the spread of rumours, abandonment of labour duties, and establishment of kinship ties. In section two, he measures the impact of ‘Radical Reconstruction to the political order of the Confederate South’[2], examining the emergence of civil rights leaders in the electoral arena. Finally, in part three, Hahn conveys black nationalism and Garveyism as political ideologies that challenged Jim Crow, encouraging black people to identify with their unique heritage. Therefore, Hahn’s exploration of resistance as interconnected with the constitutional aims of American democracy, implies African Americans developed their own political agency and equality in a racially divided society.
In his opening chapters, Hahn conveys everyday slave resistance in the antebellum South as a means of contesting political inferiority to slave masters, where he considers slavery, ‘a system of extreme personal domination…where nothing was more central to the character of the institution or more debilitating to the slaves as human beings and political actors.’[3] Indeed, while recognising enslaved people as legally bound to the sovereign authority of their masters as ‘chattel property’, Hahn suggests the enforcement of southern state law could only work in theory as slaves increasingly challenged the status quo of their slaveowners. For example, kinship networks of bondsmen formed between farms and plantations acting as a mechanism to resist paternalist oppression, while many engaged in assertive forms resistance after the Nat Turner rebellion of 1831, with runaways, petty production, provisioning, and exchanges between slaves and slave households. Although organized collective resistance like runaways did not prevent slavery that persisted in the South until after the Civil War, Hahn considers this a political challenge to authorities as it ‘added to the size of these communities, troubled the consciences of otherwise indifferent northern whites, and provoked a direct political crisis in the relations between the slave and free states.’[4]
In Part Two of Hahn’s monograph, the author examines the role of Republican party leaders in community networks of black resistance, such as ‘congregations and churches’ in the early years of Reconstruction. Like kinship ties and communications between enslaved people in the antebellum South, Hahn explores how ‘congregations and churches had an unrivalled ability to mobilize community sentiment and action, and to unify rural African Americans across district and country lines.’[5] However, the distinction is that congregations and churches acted as ‘political institutions’[6] for blacks to establish solidarity with Republican organisations such as the Union League, whose leaders are described by Hahn in chapter four, as ‘working to mobilize a community that was already multi-generational and bound together by extended ties of kinship.’[7] As a result, black people in the South engaged in communal and religious brotherhoods of resistance against white state authorities, demonstrating their growing political agency during the Radical Reconstruction.
Noteworthy also, is Hahn’s consideration of white supremacists whose violence reflected negatively against Abraham Lincoln and his anti-slavery Republican campaigns, while also prohibiting black leaders and grassroots organisations from extending political rights for southern blacks during Reconstruction. For example, Hahn stresses the normality of violence against African-Americans for their support of the Union army in the Civil War, where paramilitary groups such as the Ku Klux Klan were predominantly led by young white male soldiers of the Confederate army. As vigilantism expanded, Hahn explores how patronage networks of the KKK grew; its private armies became increasingly politicized; and it soon developed ‘shadow governments’[8] of local Confederate leaders, who were a distraction for the Union League in delivering political reforms during the post emancipation period. Many attempts were made to destroy the league’s leadership, and in response local black leagues were formed to suppress white supremacist vigilantism, which ‘combated the social and political repercussions of Radical Reconstruction.’[9]
In the final chapters, Hahn considers alternative responses from African Americans in dealing with challenges to their political agency in the post-Reconstruction era. For example, he describes grassroots emigration to Africa as foreshadowing ‘Garveyism’, a pan-African movement that gained increasing popularity among southern migrants during the Great Migration. Organised by black nationalist and political leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Marcus Garvey, the post-war movement established itself across the United States as well as in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa, where it advocated for repatriation for the African-American community. Hahn points out the significance of Pan-African ideology during the mass migration of black people to the urban North, where collective opposition to Jim Crow segregation inspired philosophies of ‘black self-determination’ and ‘self-emancipation.’[10] Thus, Garveyism is considered a pivotal turning point in black political rights during a period of growing activism from Civil Rights leaders, while many black people also joined biracial parties such as the Readjuster Party and Farmer’s Alliance, expanding their political and cultural power that contested liberal integration with the white community.
Overall, Steven Hahn is successful in achieving his agenda as he challenges the widely held view that enslaved and freed black people were segregated from American politics in contemporary political narratives, instead arguing they attained political agency. By observing an extensive period of slavery from the antebellum period to Reconstruction and Great Migration, Hahn identifies collective forms of slave resistance such as the development of kinship networks and runaways, as inspiring future generations to exercise democracy in the face of isolation from civil and political life. The author recognises that even after the war and Great Depression, African Americans were successful in gaining elective franchise, establishing political parties, and integrating themselves into the urban world. Therefore, Hahn’s book is effective in providing a broad analysis of black political action, throughout the history of America. however would have been improved with more focus on mass emigration of former slaves to the industrial North during the Gilded Age, that improved the standard of living and political agency for freedmen, in turn foreshadowing the Great Migration.
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