After the Civil War, the North decided not to create an American Bantustan, Joseph Fouché explains:
In The Soul of Battle, agricultural expert Victor David Hanson presents three great interventions of liberation: Epaminondas’s liberation of Messenia and Arcadia from Sparta during his first invasion of the Peloponnese, Sherman’s March to the Sea, and the march of Patton’s Third Army into Germany. The contrast between Hanson’s portrayal of Epaminondas’s intervention and Sherman’s intervention is telling. Epaminondas built fortresses for the Messenians and Arcadians, arranged them into potent and territorially contiguous confederacies, and armed them. Both confederacies outlasted Sparta, their former master, and, in the case of Arcadia, even absorbed Sparta’s weakened remnant.
In contrast to Epaminondas, William Tecumseh Sherman liberated the slaves but left them dispersed among their former oppressors, indifferently armed, indifferently protected, and vulnerable. In Freakonomics, Steve Levitt analyzed the pattern of lynching in the South. The number of lynchings were high in the initial decades after the Civil War but then dropped off.
Why?
Levitt makes a plausible case that, as time went by, lynching did its work. Those African-Americans who were most resistant to white rule had been killed. The community had been decapitated. Resistance to white rule had become muted and directionless for almost another century. The educational function of lynching, except for the occasional remedial lesson, was completed.
The best solution to protecting African-American civil rights would have been to relocate them to a single contiguous block of territory where they were a majority that could govern themselves, armed them, and ensured they had an adequate economic base. While the idea of a bantustan is abhorrent to contemporary sensibilities that favor racial integration, a bantustan was more feasible in the late nineteenth century than the racial integration pursued by the Radical Republicans. It would also correspond to the dominant ideological idea that emerged from the twentieth century: people would rather be oppressed by someone who looks like them and talks like them and acts like them than be ruled well by someone who does not look like them and does not talk like them and does not act like them.
In the early nineteenth century, many white Americans from Henry Clay to Abraham Lincoln already realized this. However, their preferred solution, the emigration of freed slaves to Africa, was unworkable because of the costs of shipping that many people back to Africa and, the major stumbling block, most African-Americans had no desire to emigrate. Ulysses S. Grant’s proposal to annex Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) and use it as a refuge for African-Americans was at least in the same hemisphere but foundered for the same reasons African colonization failed. Though the politics of the time didn’t favor it, a better solution would have been to set aside a substantial piece of American territory specifically for African-Americans. In the name of justice, this piece of territory should have been South Carolina, with its white, secessionist population expelled. Florida would be even better but even the territory that later became North Dakota or Arizona would have been preferable to decapitation through mob attrition.
This was not the solution selected. Instead, the solution selected was repeated Federal intervention. Certainly consistent Federal intervention could have protected the freed slaves from local Southern revanchists and, until 1877 and even into the 1890s, it did. However, the same discretion granted by the Fourteenth Amendment that allowed the Grant Administration to intervene in the South to protect African-Americans allowed the Hayes Administration to withdraw that protection.
Live by Federal discretion. Die by Federal discretion.