The Civil War
The North could never accept the opening of the West to slavery, and in 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected President in a purely sectional vote – he was not even on the ballot in the southern states. The Republican platform on which Lincoln ran pledged not to abolish slavery but to prevent its extension. Lincoln even offered to support a constitutional amendment protecting slavery in the states in which it already existed, but he would not budge on the territorial extension of slavery. Lincoln despised slavery, but his first concern was the preservation of the Union.
The southern response was secession and civil war. For two years, under Lincoln's leadership, the North fought the Civil War for limited goals: to convince the South that it could return to the Union with slavery intact in return for renouncing all claims to the expansion of slavery. Eventually, the military and political pressures produced by a prolonged and bloody war, and Lincoln's conviction that slavery was a moral evil, led to the limited Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. The real abolition of slavery was accomplished by the 13th amendment in 1865. But, the fate and legal status of some 4,000,000 emancipated slaves, more than 1/3 of the South's population, remained uncertain. Despite having lost the war, the white South was unwilling to accept full citizenship and equal rights for their former slaves. By late 1865, many of the defeated southern states had adopted Black Codes, remarkably similar to the old Slave Codes. Freedmen (i.e. recently freed slaves) were compelled to work for low wages, could not testify against whites, or bear arms. In limited cases, they were segregated in public places.
Jim Crow Laws and Plessy v. Ferguson
The facts indicate that from 1865 into the 1890’s the South was groping for an institutional mechanism that would assure the continuation of white supremacy – in short, for a legal substitute for slavery. By the 1890’s that mechanism – segregation or Jim Crow – began to emerge. Ironically, the separation of the races had been neither practical nor necessary during slavery and was, in many respects, new to the South. It had been the free black population of the North that had been regularly segregated in transportation, theaters, restaurants, hotels, churches and schools.
In 1890, the Louisiana legislature enacted a law which provided for the separation of the races on railways. Separate cars would be provided for blacks, or, if only one car were available, blacks would be confined to a clearly marked and separate section. Louisiana blacks challenged the constitutionality of this segregation statute, and in 1896 the case reached the Supreme Court. In Plessy v. Ferguson , the Court (with only one dissenting vote) upheld the legality of segregation, arguing that the goal of equality before the law could not abolish distinctions based on color and that laws requiring separation in places where the races are liable to be brought into contact do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other.
In short, racially separate facilities were legal as long as the separate facilities were equal. The Court cited as a key precedent an 1849 case in which the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts had upheld the legality of segregated schools – in Boston. Over the years, the separate side of the equation would be strengthened and the equal side largely forgotten. It was as if a dam had broken. Over the next decade "White Only" and "Colored Only" signs seemed to appear everywhere as the southern states enacted a bewildering variety of laws creating segregation in almost every conceivable situation in which whites and blacks might come into daily contact. Jim Crow became firmly established on trains and streetcars, in waiting rooms in public places, in entrances and exits to public buildings, in rest rooms and drinking fountains, in parks, theaters, restaurants, baseball fields, pool halls, circuses, hospitals, churches and schools. In North Carolina, not only were schools segregated, but the law required that textbooks from the segregated schools had to be stored during the summer months in segregated warehouses. Most states required that taxicabs clearly indicate which race could be carried. In Georgia, baseball teams of different races were prohibited by law from playing within two blocks of each other. In Alabama, it was declared "unlawful for a Negro and a white person to play together" at dominoes or checkers.
The rapid spread of Jim Crow legislation was also accompanied by the systematic disenfranchisement of blacks. Black people had limited voting rights in the South from Reconstruction into the 1890's. But a series of legal devices -- the white primary, the grandfather clause and the poll tax -- effectively ended black participation in southern politics. In 1896, for example, 130,000 black people had voted in Louisiana; by 1904 that number had dropped to 1,300.
Segregation and the loss of the vote were accompanied by literature and "scientific studies" in which blacks were viciously stereotyped and depicted as unfit for any rights at all. The titles of two popular and influential books of the period make the point clearly: The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization and The Negro: A Beast . Inevitably, this repressive atmosphere fueled an upsurge in race riots and lynchings. And, in 1913, President Woodrow Wilson ordered the segregation of federal departments and offices in Washington.