Winding Road to American Racial Conflict

Both wars began with the hope of inaugurating a new era of peace, prosperity, and justice. Both ended with bitter disappointment and continued racial strife. Fueled by classical liberal ideology, the American Revolution promised to bring liberty, justice, and prosperity for all. However, when Thomas Jefferson penned the famous words ”all men are created equal,” neither he nor other members of the American elite sought to extend this statement to Native Americans or African Americans. Instead, a war was fought to bring freedom to the country, but not to the half-million slaves whose labor helped generate revenue for the war effort. The American Revolution, therefore, added yet another dimension to the growing American paradox, and slavery would continue to have a firm base in the land of freedom.

Although it would be difficult to label slave rebellions as race riots, in many ways they became violent attempts to overthrow the white southern aristocracy and to challenge white supremacy. Gabriel Prosser, Charles Deslondes, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner each led movements that sought-at the very least-to kill whites who directly benefited from the labor of the enslaved. Only two of these rebels-Charles Deslondes (1811) and Nat Turner (1831)-managed to carry out these plans. While abolitionists fought each other over the right of slaves to rebel against their masters, one particular abolitionist-John Brown-took matters into his own hands. His 1859 raid on the Harper’s Ferry federal arsenal was a clear attempt to foment an anti-white, anti-slavery revolt in Virginia. Although his attempt was ultimately unsuccessful, Brown did force the nation to address the central paradox in American society, and his raid was one of a series of events leading directly to the Civil War.

One of the worst race riots in U.S. history occurred in the midst of the Civil War. In July 1863, a mostly Irish mob engaged in an orgy of violence in New York City that left eighteen dead (not including the more than seventy black men reported missing) and dozens injured, and caused more than $4 million in property damage.2 Convinced that the Civil War had become a crusade for the benefit of African Americans and angered at losing industrial jobs to black men because they were drafted into the Union army, thousands of unskilled Irish workers attacked draft offices and any African Americans they could find. Ironically, a number of Irish were convicted and hanged in 1741 after they had allegedly formed a conspiracy with slaves to destroy New York City and establish a biracial regime. A century later, there was no room for such collaborations and any appeals to the common ground between the black and immigrant poor fell on deaf ears. Again, a unique sense of racial consciousness allowed Irish workers to attack black workers, but not the wealthy whites in New York who could purchase exemptions from the draft. Nor would they think to attack white factory owners or other employers who actively hired African American men as cheap labor or used them as strikebreakers and scabs. Even as late as 1863, the doctrines of race consciousness, white supremacy, and racial scapegoating-promoted two centuries earlier by Nathaniel Bacon-continued to determine race relations in North America.