The following post is part of series on freedom and equality in U.S. history. Previous posts are below.
You’re probably familiar with a very old
and tiresome debate about whether the Civil War was really fought over slavery
or holding maintaining the Union. The key to understanding Lincoln’s
achievement as a politician, military leader, and moral visionary is the way in
which he was able to convince most of the American people that the only way to
save the Union was to end slavery, because the people who were trying to rend
the Union were using their slaves to aid the cause, and that only by depriving
them of this resource (by emancipating their slaves, enlisting African
Americans in the armed forces, and putting the whole issue to rest by ending
slavery everywhere) could the nation proceed.
In the long run – certainly not right
away, when he lost political support and suffered military setbacks – Lincoln
won that argument. He won it as a matter of military policy (the Emancipation
Proclamation), as a matter of law (the Thirteenth Amendment), and as matter of
enshrining as common sense that slavery simply didn’t work anymore, urging his
fellow Americans to dedicate themselves, as he put it in his Gettysburg
Address, to a “new birth of freedom.” Within a few years of the end of the
Civil War, even the seceded Southern states accepted this proposition, however
grudgingly, as the price of their reintegration into national life.
Not that former slaveholders, or their
many non-slaveholding allies, became any less racist. Indeed, in many cases
there were more determined than ever to keep the newly freed slaves in their
place, to use a phrase much favored by such people. Denied slavery, they turned
to the next best – maybe even better – thing: inequality. The principal, but by
no means only, avenue by which it was achieved was racial segregation. At
first, given the efforts of Northern, especially abolitionist, politicians to
hold the defeated region in check, segregation was primarily a matter of social
inequality, practiced on a local level. Later, as U.S. public opinion became
fatigued by the cost, literal and figurative, of the process of Reconstruction,
segregation became increasingly political as well. By the end of the 19th
century, a Jim Crow regime with pervasive legal, economic, and personal
dimensions was cemented in place, and would remain there for a half a century.
But it wasn’t slavery. That’s what we
kept telling ourselves. Poll taxes, literacy tests, even lynchings: not
slavery. Nor were other forms of inequality: discrimination against immigrants.
Exploitative wages that approached, if not crossed the line, into wage slavery.
A refusal to let women vote. You might not like these policies, they might even
be wrong. But they’re not slavery. Not chattel slavery, anyway.
For some kinds of inequality,
particularly those where it wasn’t easy to draw clear lines of race or gender
that could be used as an obvious basis of discrimination, there was another
tool at hand to justify the status quo: the doctrine of Equality of
Opportunity. Of course, not everyone is rich, this doctrine goes. But anyone can be rich. Or go to an elite school.
Or whatever. Equality of opportunity does not necessarily mean that one can
attain these things easily, or that it won’t be easier for some people than for
others. It simply says such things are possible
– effortlessly for some, perhaps, but attainable for anyone who wants them
badly enough. So it is that the principle equality of opportunity allows the
reality of equality of outcome.
Which, again, we all want too badly to
let go of. In fact, we want it so badly that we’re willing not to peer all that
hard about just how we define opportunity or just how broad it is. Having it
remain a little fuzzy makes inequality of condition easier to maintain.
In the twentieth century, however, those
old, seemingly clear, lines of race and gender became increasingly problematic.
The doctrine of Equality of Opportunity didn’t apply if there were formal rules
in place that barred you from even playing the game. In such cases, the gap
between theoretical inclusion and the reality of exclusion became glaring, even
frightening, in terms of what it might portend if allowed to continue,
especially on the part of elites anxious to justify their unequal status to
themselves, other Americans, and foreigners. Thanks to the Civil Rights
movement, many of these formal barriers were removed. No longer could
inequality be officially justified on the basis of race – or race alone. Women and people of other races
began appearing, usually in small numbers, at exclusive sites of privilege –
schools, clubs, neighborhoods – whose appeal, whose actual essence, was
inequality. The question now was how to protect minority status when anyone –
even those other minorities – could in theory participate.
Next: The uneasy marriage of meritocracy and affirmative action as partners in the quest for equality today.
