Abolitionist books and newspapers were illegal in the pre-war South.
Slave narratives and photos of mutilated slaves were illegal in the pre-war South.
President Andrew Jackson, a Tennessee slave owner, banned anti-slavery publications from the Southern mails in 1835. A pro-slavery mob two years later shot and killed abolitionist publisher Elijah Lovejoy near St. Louis, making good on threats to shoot and kill Lovejoy if he kept writing about slavery.
Northern representatives in Congress were barred from publicly discussing anti-slavery measures or introducing bills to limit slavery’s spread. This was possible because Southern states were permitted, under the Constitution, to count three of every five disenfranchised slaves toward their population totals – ensuring unequal and outsized representation for the slave South minority.
By the early 1840s every Southern state had passed laws outlawing anti-slavery speech of any kind. Possession of abolitionist publications was a crime. Teaching a slave to read was a crime.
Helping a slave escape captivity was a crime – and of course escaping as a slave was a crime.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 extended the hand of slave states into all states, federalizing Southern prerogatives regarding chattel property. The states rights of free states were nullified. Southern slave catchers worked the streets and wharves of New England.
In 1857, the Supreme Court, led by a conservative Catholic Chief Justice named Roger Taney, finally clarified the point under U.S. law: Blacks could not be citizens. Thus Dred Scott could not sue for freedom, and the nation rattled toward its fate at Ft. Sumter.
“One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves not distributed generally over the union but localized in the southern part of it,” Abraham Lincoln later noted, weeks before his murder by a slave state gunman. “These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.”
During the entirety of that war, wrote Ulysses Grant, “the whole South was a military camp … no opposition was allowed to the government which had been set up.” A marauding Home Guard militia menaced dissenters trapped inside this Southern military camp. Young children labored to support Confederate armies. Public education did not exist in the South.
After Appomattox, federal troops remained to enforce the peace. Within a year of surrender, rebels chartered the Klan. Within 12 years, federal troops were withdrawn and Old Jim Crow took roost. The Supreme Court got back to basics, ruling that racial segregation was legal in the United States. Poll taxes, literacy tests and extralegal Klan violence ended black democracy, a development Southern whites called Redemption.
Indiana has deep Southern roots and before the Civil War its constitution prohibited blacks from settling in the state. By the 1920s, Indiana claimed the largest Klan organization in the nation. Members included the governor and more than half of the General Assembly. The Indiana Klan was a fundamentalist, nativist hate group fueled by racism and anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-liberal scapegoating and violence, including lynching. Elkhart was a hotbed, Kokomo an epicenter.
During a spring break trip last week to the artist colony in Brown County, we drove through Kokomo on the anniversary of Ryan White’s death. A sick kid and his small family ostracized and terrorized by their neighbors, at least one of whom shot up the White family home. Many of whom threatened to kill local reporters for writing about AIDS bigotry and the abuse of Ryan White. Some of whom, after White’s death, repeatedly desecrated his grave.
Our trip also took us through Indianapolis, just days after the Kurt Vonnegut Museum was vandalized. That attack followed public comments from museum officials opposing book bans and supporting free speech and free expression in Indiana.
Music: "Back Home Again In Indiana" sung by Rosemary Clooney
