Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Until Justice Be Done with Kate Masur

Episode Date: July 10, 2023

Today on Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, Sharon talks with author Kate Masur, whose book, Until Justice Be Done, shines a light on what we can consider to be the first Civil Rights Movement–the movement for free Black Americans to gain equality from our country’s inception through Reconstruction after the Civil War. We often think of the fight to gain rights as a movement that happened in the 1950s and 1960s, but even in the early 1800s, there was an organized effort to resist racist laws and policy. Special thanks to our guest, Kate Masur, for joining us today. You can order Until Justice Be Done here. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Guest: Kate Masur Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining me today. I am chatting today with historian and author Kate Masur, who has written a book called Until Justice Be Done, America's first civil rights movement from the revolution to reconstruction. So this is the fight, the struggle for racial equality from this country's inception until right after the Civil War. And I think it's going to give you a lot to think about. It's going to be very illuminating. And the better we understand our history, the more we can be empowered to make positive changes now and in the future. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting.

I am really excited to be chatting today with Kate Masur, who has written just a phenomenal history book called Until Justice Be Done. And I'm so grateful for your time today. Thanks for being here. It's great to be with you. The subtitle is so interesting and really illuminating about what the book is about, America's First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction. First of all, give us a high-level overview about what is this book even about? Well, thanks so much. As the subtitle suggests, it's about what we could call the first civil rights movement in the United States. We're talking about struggles over the

rights of African Americans, again, as the subtitle says, from roughly the American Revolution until the Civil War, and really pressing questions about racial equality, about the extent to which different states, different jurisdictions, the federal government are going to recognize the rights of free Black people. And so part of what's surprising, I think, to some people about the book is that it really gets into the history of free African-Americans, particularly in the North, in a time period when I think many people are more accustomed to focusing on slavery, because one of the central stories of this period is the history of slavery in the

United States, the expansion of slavery over the course of the decades before the Civil War. And this book is telling a different story about struggles for racial equality among free people. But one of the points is that these struggles in the free states really were a precursor to what would go national when the Civil War happened and slavery was finally abolished completely in the United States. And then the nation as a whole had to grapple with the same questions that people in the free states had been discussing for many decades. We learn about history in school, or we have our own sort of general understanding of how things went. We have this sort of like Northern States good,

Southern States bad, Northern States, everybody was equal. Everybody was free. Nobody was enslaved. Meanwhile, things are going to hell in a handbasket south of the Mason-Dixon. I think that is often just sort of a pervasive mindset. Have you encountered that in your teaching, in your conversations with people, that it's surprising for people to hear that there wasn't actually racial equality in the North? I think so. I mean, it's interesting because I've talked to a lot of teachers about this book since it came out. And I definitely have the feeling that one of the things that's

still very much like in the curriculum and teaching is this idea of North good, what sometimes people call racial innocence of the North, the idea that like, oh yeah, of course everyone was considered equal. There was no racism, there was no slavery. And then South Bad, that's where slavery was. And that one of the things that people find interesting about the book is it paints a more complicated picture. One of the things I'm not saying is life for African Americans was just as bad in Ohio as it would have been in Virginia. The conditions were quite different. But it's also quite right that there's a lot of complexity about how white northerners approached questions of race and racial equality in this period, for sure. Totally. There's a difference between the beliefs of groups and

the beliefs of this church or the beliefs of that civic organization and what was the law of the land. Just because something was illegal didn't mean that everybody was like, we agree that everyone's equal. Just because the law didn't permit enslavement doesn't mean that the people that lived there believed in racial equality. Even further than that, and this is one of the things that I was really turning over in my head a lot when I was writing the book. The free states just north of the Ohio River, so Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, they did not legalize slavery, but they actually proactively passed laws that discriminated based on race. I mean,

that explicitly said free Black people can't testify in court cases involving whites. Free black people have to register when they want to live in a county. They have to pay a fee to county officials and prove their freedom. When schools started opening in these states, public education, it was said that this public education was for white children only. And so, you know, really thinking about the possibility that the United States would have developed, I mean, another road not taken would have been a regime in which slavery was abolished, but a kind of racial apartheid system was the law in the states or across the country, right?

That that was an option. And that is the option that these Southern Midwestern states took at the very beginning of their lives as states. So let's talk a little bit about sort of the different viewpoints on things like racial equality that were prevalent amongst Northern states. Was it regional? Was it religious? How do you define sort of the differences between groups? Because certainly there was a spectrum of beliefs in the North. Right. How did those break down? It's a kind of big and complicated question. So first of all, there were the states that were kind of like the original states that were colonies

before the American Revolution. So these are like the oldest states and they're toward the eastern seaboard. And some of those states abolished slavery gradually after the American Revolution and others do not, right? So one of the big things that happens in the period of the American Revolution, before the American Revolution, slavery was actually legal in the British colonies, in all of them. And there were enslaved people in all of the British colonies. Now, there were more enslaved people in the southern colonies because those colonies ended up having these plantation economies that depended on enslaved labor. But in the wake of the American Revolution, so you have these older states, the northern tier of them begin to abolish slavery.

And that in and of itself is a very big deal. It's a transformative thing in American history. If they had not, there wouldn't have been even really the way of talking about sectional divisions or a north and a south if those states hadn't proactively decided to abolish slavery. Yeah. Which state did you find the most political division amongst? Was it Ohio? Was it Kansas? Which one rose to the top of like, dang, these people do not agree?

Ohio was the one I got the most interested in because Ohio offers us the example of the success of this first civil rights movement at the state level. Just to give a sense of the lay of the land, in any of these northern states, particularly in the Midwest, African Americans were a pretty small minority of the population. So the Black population of Ohio was only about 1%. And so in order to repeal the laws that were on the books, African Americans who definitely opposed these racist laws really wanted them repealed, but they had to persuade a sufficient number of white people to want to repeal them if anything was going to change. And there were white activists in Ohio who

wanted to see that happen, who prioritized repeal of what were called the Ohio Black Laws. And so Ohio is the state where there's a real struggle where Black Ohioans and white Ohioans push and push and try to amplify the idea that these laws are unjust, that they're embarrassing, that discriminating against Black people is a relic of slavery, that we should get rid of it, that we need to repeal these Black laws. And in 1849, they actually succeed in doing that. And so it's part of what I describe in the book is what that struggle looked like, the political strategies they used, and how they eventually succeeded, which was something that did not happen in the neighboring states of Indiana and Illinois. Those states, there wasn't enough of a political coalition willing to take that step. And so the Black Laws remained on the books in those states. The civil rights movement

of the 1950s and 60s is one that most Americans are rather familiar with, at least familiar with some of the major players and exactly what people were asking for and things of that nature. what people were asking for and things of that nature. And it's well known for being largely, you know, a grassroots movement. And it was groups of ordinary people, not government officials, ordinary people who came together and mobilized in sufficient numbers and power, and gotten enough public attention and kept at it long enough to make a difference. And I think you did a great job of highlighting exactly sort of the depth and breadth of the struggle and the amount of commitment that it required. And when you think about actually what an achievement it is in a state like Ohio to have no voting block, to have no ability to actually influence the outcome of elections, to be able to mobilize of the vast population who was

at best indifferent to the issue, to make them care enough about the issue that change occurred. That's not an easy thing to convince anyone of. So the amount of effort that it had to require, decades, a lifetime, is how long people worked on this. And I think that's worth highlighting, not because it's discouraging, but because in some ways I find it encouraging. Not that injustice lived longer than it needed to, but encouraging in the sense that if change is slow to come today, it doesn't mean it never will. It has come at other times through even greater effort and change still happened. through even greater effort and change still happened. One of my personal groups of interest in the United States,

we all have our own, Kate. I'm sure you can share some of your own too, where you're like, I just really love that group of people. They're just really interesting to me. One of mine are the Quakers. Quakers, super interesting, outsized influence, small group, outsized influence. Give me some ideas of their involvement or lack of involvement on some of these topics, because there's been scholarly debate over how involved they actually were. were. Absolutely. And I was really interested in this too. One of the things that's a sort of benchmark for a lot of historians and also when teaching history is 1830s is associated with the rise of radical abolitionism. And so one of the questions that people have asked is like, well,

did that just come out of nowhere? Where did that come from and what was going on in the 1820s or before that? And so one of the people who I found to be tremendously interesting, both in terms of what he did institutionally and what he did in terms of his ideas was a Quaker named Benjamin Lundy. And so he was well into adulthood in the 1820s, publishing a newspaper in southeastern Ohio. Well, he started publishing this newspaper called The Genius of Universal Emancipation, which is also kind of an awesome name. He came out of a Quaker background. And actually, interestingly, and sort of weirdly enough, southeastern Ohio had this kind of pockets of white Quakers who were very abolitionist in their orientation.

And they live not that far from the Ohio River. So southeastern Ohio crossed from what's now West Virginia, but in those days was Virginia. And so they were positioned in a place where they might see people escaping from slavery, crossing the Ohio River into their general region, yet they were not in Virginia. So they were able more freely to publish their opinions. And in this pocket of Southeastern Ohio germinates a lot of really interesting ideas. So his newspapers and the one that preceded it, they are publishing stuff opposing the Ohio Black Laws as early as the 18-teens. And then Benjamin Lundy is talking in the 1820s about the rights of

free African-Americans in the North. He's talking about how we should be looking to erase these racial distinctions in law in the Northern states. So fast forward to the 1830s, Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in Alton, Illinois in 1837 by an anti-abolitionist mob. They killed this editor and threw his printing press in the Mississippi River, destroyed his printing press because they wanted him to stop talking about trying to end slavery in the United States. wanted him to stop talking about trying to end slavery in the United States. And at that point, Lundy, who was quite old by then, decided to move to Illinois, move his publishing operation, his newspaper to Illinois, as a way of like a gesture to the anti-abolitionists in Illinois, like, oh yeah, we're still here. And then he ends up getting sick. But another white abolitionist editor named Zabina Eastman moves out to Illinois from the East Coast to help him publish his paper.

So once Lundy dies in Illinois, Eastman takes over and he publishes this really wonderful newspaper called The Western Citizen, eventually in Chicago, that again, publishes all this stuff about opposing the Black laws of Illinois, working with African Americans in Chicago and other places in Illinois, and really publicizing the idea that these laws and these conditions are very, very oppressive. So the abolitionists were organizing and planning. They weren't just writing, right? They were also touring around and giving speeches, trying to persuade more people to join the movement. And they often faced violent mobs who wanted to make sure that they didn't have an opportunity to speak, right? And would, before the violence would come, well, we don't have anywhere. We don't have a venue in our town where you can speak. Sorry, there's just nowhere where you can go. And then maybe they would

finally find a church or a hall where, or a park where they could do a lecture. And then people would, you know, throw things at them, throw stones at them, run them out of town, sometimes with weapons and basically saying, you know, you cannot speak here. You cannot bring your, your message of disunity here. And white abolitionists face that and black abolitionists or black speakers faced it even more so, right? That the idea that it would be an African American person who is the purveyor of this message, it was that much more dangerous for them to try to go out there and speak publicly than it was for white speakers. So there is just a lot of both underlying threat of violent retaliation and then actual violent retaliation against this movement. I'm Jenna Fisher.

And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's Steve Carell in the studio! Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from The Office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus,

on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. When you say that saying you can't come here and give your message about racial equality, we don't want to hear any of your disunity. What did that mean to them? What did disunity mean? So let's just think about white northerners for a second in general. I mean, why would they have cared one way or another about slavery? Why would they have supported the idea of the continuation of slavery when most people, quite honestly, it's not like people didn't think it was a cruel

system, an unjust system. Some white Northerners were literally financially invested in slavery, like their fortunes depended on it because they were profiting from the production of cotton that was making its way into Northern factories and things like that. So there was that, but there was also this belief starting pretty early on that the formation of the United States and the U.S. Constitution had required compromises on the question of slavery. And that through the magic of the framers of the constitution, the nation had come together and made these important compromises on slavery, which allowed slavery to continue in the places where it already existed and to expand into new places.

And that if you really rock the boat on that, and if you really started to say, you know, yeah, we know that we permitted slavery to continue after the constitution, but we also think it's really bad. So we want to stop it from expanding, let's say, right? We don't want it to go into new territories. That even to say that, and implicit in that is a moral judgment about slavery, right? That it's wrong, that, you know, we would like it to go away, that that would be a betrayal of this original compromise with slavery, that that would be rocking the boat too much, that you would be really outraging Southern slaveholders in a way that could create disunion. So when we see the abolitionist movement really getting off the ground in the Northern states, you also see a lot of white Northerners coming back and saying, stop rocking the boat. This is not American. I

mean, they literally said, you know, it's un-American to come out and speak against slavery because this is going to destroy the nation. And that is, you know, it's un-American to come out and speak against slavery because this is going to destroy the nation. And that is, you know, that's quite interesting to think about, right? Like when calls for civility, for not talking about certain things, like what kind of work is that doing in our own time? What kind of compromises have Americans made again and again with things that we actually don't generally think are very good or morally right. It's so interesting. That's such a unique way of looking at it. And I think it actually is very instructive about some of the movements that are going on in the United States today. You know, I have mentioned this to people many times, and I want to hear your

thoughts on this, that there has never been a more progressive political party than the early Republicans, where they were bound and determined to make huge societal change in a short order. You know, we think of Republicans as being conservative today, wanting to preserve things that they value. But if you think about just the concept of a president coming to power, writing an executive order that takes away your property and completely changes your way of life. Now, of course, it wasn't like the Emancipation Proclamation, just like,

whoop, I fixed it. I wrote it and it's done. Of course not. But that is ridiculously progressive. The likes of which we have a movement we have never seen again, that level of progress in a short period of time. What is your take on that? I think that's, you know, I think you're, you're basically right. And we can add a lot more data points to that. I mean, the Emancipation Proclamation is an example of, as you're saying, it's radical in the sense that it is a presidential proclamation. It's basically an executive order that is saying that, you know, slavery is abolished in the places that are currently under occupation and with no compensation. So in a way, from the way that slave owners saw it, their property was being taken away

from them with no compensation. But it was a wartime measure. It was an emergency measure. A fair number of the decisions that he actually made in real time during the war also had to do with what is his sense of the best way to win this war, right, militarily. Although Lincoln also did loathe slavery from the beginning of his political career. So I just want to add like two additional things to kind of reinforce the point you're making. First of all, these Republicans also believed in domestic spending to create prosperity and development. So they were pursuing what had been an agenda set up by the Whigs, you know, who were never able to accomplish it, partly because of slave owner resistance to infrastructure development. So some of the things they do

during the Civil War that don't really have to do with the war itself, but have to do with them being a majority in Congress is they pass land grant college act, the moral act, which establishes land grant colleges that out of a belief in robust public education, a belief in agricultural development, in research into new technologies that are going to help America be more prosperous. They invest in railroads, they invest government money in railroads. They invest in modernizing the financial system in the United States. And so these are people who are not particularly associated with a laissez-faire approach to the economy. They're putting public funds into the economy, both for civilian purposes and for military purposes. And then the other thing I

would add, just following on the questions of race and those type of policies, you know, they also then, these Republicans pushed for the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, radically changing the United States Constitution in a way that went in the direction of greater racial equality or a ban on racial discrimination, particularly, right, against slaves, that also translated into principles of anti-discrimination that applied to people of Asian descent, to some extent applied to Native Americans, that applied to Latinos in the future. So they established a new way of organizing the United States government, new protections for individual rights, new powers for Congress to enforce those rights.

And they pass then, in addition to changing the constitution, they pass the first federal civil rights statutes. So they are big believers in the idea that if the states are not going to protect the basic individual rights of people, the federal government can step in and do work there. So yes, they are a tremendous force of change in that period. And a difference in our belief that the federal government can and should wield its power for the benefit of the country. I just think it's something that we don't learn, right? Like we often don't learn how radically progressive the Republicans were at their inception, both in the sense of creating massive societal change, but also to your point with the idea

of wielding the power of the federal government to protect civil rights and to develop the country economically. It's very interesting. There's been a lot of criticism about Lincoln lately. Have you noticed this? There's been a lot of criticism about him when it comes to, you know, like he's viewed as the great emancipator, but he also nevertheless had really abysmal treatment of Native Americans, oversaw, you know, one of the largest executions of Native Americans in Minnesota, things of that

nature. How did Lincoln reconcile those ideas in his mind that some people were worth going to war over and other people were not? That's a good way of putting it. And I'm glad you brought that up. I mean, I think, first of all, to give a little even more context, Lincoln has always been controversial around the question of, did he really oppose slavery? Did he really believe in racial equality, even for African Americans? And then I think somewhat more recently, more attention and rightfully so on the question of how Lincoln has approached Native Americans, which was a very live issue during his presidency, right? And during his whole career,

he also participated in a minor way in the Black Hawk War as part of the militia here in Illinois. So one of the main distinctions between how he thought about the U.S. government and white Americans' relationship to Native Americans in relation to African Americans is that Lincoln and just about all of the powerful Republicans and Democrats of his era really believed that the United States and white Americans had a right to the land. You know, we're entitled to be on the land, to turn this land that had been used and inhabited by Native Americans since long before Europeans were ever here. They sincerely believe that they were entitled

to take that land, to divide it into segments, to turn it into a commodity that they could sell and profit from, and to push Native Americans off of it or in whatever varying ways, right? To confine Native people to only certain parts of the land, to approach it as assimilating Native Americans into colonizers ways of using the land, right, or in the last event, right, to go to war with them, to kill them

is a way of subduing them. And it all had to do, I think it all went back to both, I mean, primarily the desire of these folks to just have the land. And then secondarily, the rationale that had to do with race, which was about how white people, people of European descent know how to use it better, are more entitled to it because they will farm it, they will commodify it. Whereas in their view, native peoples were not using it in a way that really entitled them to keep it. And so both situations have to do with questions of sort of race and oppression in different ways. And yet they're not parallel in a lot of ways because the contexts are so different. Is it that Lincoln didn't view Native Americans as Americans?

That the federal government's relationship to Native tribes was it treated them as separate sovereigns in many ways. And, you know, like, listen, we came in, we beat you, you lost. You're a different country, so to speak, than we are. Not in the exact same sense as like Mexico is a different country. It's complicated. But was it that part of the attitude of like, y'all are separate than us? You're not Americans. You know, the people like Lincoln were very kind of talked out of both sides of their mouth on

this. You know, for some purposes, they recognize the sovereignty and treaty making powers of native tribes. But then on the other hand, some of their policies, and increasingly so after Lincoln's presidency, like under President Grant, the policies were more like, you know, we're going to less and less recognize your sovereignty and more and more divide up the land right into allotments and encourage you to live on the land as farmers in the way that they considered, you know, was quote unquote civilized and things like that. So these government folks like Lincoln and Grant were not necessarily consistent in the ways that they approach Native people. And they sort of changed depending on what seemed most suitable to US policy. Before we wrap up, we got to talk a

little bit about Reconstruction. And we got to talk about Andrew Johnson, who is widely regarded as being in the bottom tier of U.S. presidents. Would you agree with that assessment? Would you put him in the bottom tier of U.S. presidents? Yes. And in so many ways. He was a pretty effective senator. It was interesting that he was the only U.S. senator from a Confederate state that seceded who remained in the Senate. And he was an adamant unionist who rejected the idea of secession. He was a Democrat right before

the war. And there's been a lot of questioning of why the Republicans put him on the ticket in 1864 in the first place. No, of course, nobody thought he was going to end up being president. So Johnson came into the presidency, a lot of Republicans of the Lincoln stripe and people sort of to the left of Lincoln actually had high hopes for Johnson because Johnson had associated himself with sort of, he was himself, he was kind of from a modest background, although he did own slaves. He had associated himself with the sort of Southern yeoman class, small farmers against the Southern white elite. That's why he also opposed secession. And so people thought that

he would be amenable to enfranchising Black men in the South. They thought that he would be amenable to working with the Republicans. And so Republicans were very shocked to find that he ends up with a policy toward the Southern states that was really accommodating, right, to white Southerners, that was really sympathetic, almost like a restoration policy, the minimal possible changes that you could reasonably expect. And even to the point where this is well known that he says, well, except for the very wealthy Confederates, they're not getting pardons. They're disenfranchised and outside of the political sphere. And then he proceeds to pardon whoever wants a pardon during 1865 and 1866. So it's really, he is obviously very amenable to what white Southerners want

in the wake of the Civil War. And this gets him very much on the bad side of the Republicans. Do you think that it is fair to attribute the vast majority of the subsequent decades of Jim Crow to his reconstruction policies? Not at all. There's so much misunderstanding about the reconstruction period, and for very good reasons. I mean, it was taught in a way that perpetuated misunderstanding. So one of them is that, you know, people often ask me this, if Lincoln had lived, would Jim Crow have happened? If Lincoln had lived, would everything have gone well with American race relations, you know, in the subsequent decades? And, you know, first of all, no one person, no matter how good a president they may be, is capable of fighting back the impulses of such a large number of white Southerners who wanted to push back against what Reconstruction was trying to do. Johnson turned the Republicans against him in a highly effective way. And this is one of the

reasons he's a bad president is because he was bad at getting what he wanted. And he pushed all of these Republicans kind of into a coalition that they might not have otherwise been able to stay in. And they proceeded to pass a lot of really innovative policies, kind of as we were talking about before, but policies that enfranchise Black men in the South, policies that attempted to crack down on white supremacist violence in the South that were kind of effective in a limited way. But really who is responsible for the emergence of the Jim Crow order is white Southerners themselves, who pushed for it through every means at their disposal, violent and nonviolent, who basically overwhelmed the power of the federal government to enforce African-Americans' rights.

And so there wasn't really anything in particular about Johnson's presidency that made that happen. We could continue talking about this probably all day, but I just have one, I want to follow up with one last question. What do you hope people take away from reading this book, Until Justice Be Done? What is your hope that when the reader sort of closes the book, that one of their takeaways, hopefully they have more than one takeaway, but what would you love to have one of those takeaways be? It's hard to narrow it down to one. I think, you know, I hope that this is a book that tells a story of facets of American history that people aren't very familiar with, and that they would

close the book knowing that there was a lot more to this period of the revolution to reconstruction when it comes to questions of racial justice, that there was a lot more than just the question of slavery, which of itself was very important, but that there's this rich and important and pressing struggle over race and rights in the free states that has a cast of characters who we might not know very much about, but are very interesting and introduces us to a whole lot of new people in American history that results in making really important changes during Reconstruction, right? So we can begin to see both this movement in and of itself is really interesting and it's really important, and it joins a longer trajectory that we might be more familiar with the more recent aspects of it,

of this kind of longstanding, sometimes very frustrating, sometimes very disappointing, but sometimes successful struggle against racism in this country. And it can be sort of depressing and demoralizing to think about the length of these struggles. But at the same time, I think it should, I hope, make us feel a little bit better that those of us who are trying to make this country better, to do things that enhance and improve racial justice issues are involved in a generations long struggle. And it's not surprising, given what this struggle has been up against in terms of opposition, that it is so long, right? And so we can sort of think about it in this long way and feel more connected to that past. I love that. Thanks so much for being here today. I really love chatting with you.

Absolutely. You can buy Kate Masur's book, Until Justice Be Done, America's First Civil Rights Movement from the Revolution to Reconstruction, wherever you like to get your books. I'll see you next time. This show is researched and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And if you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform? That helps us so much. And we always love to see your shares and tags on social media. We'll see you again soon.