The Temporal Construction of Southern Politics: Contesting the Past

• In Event: Southern Politics and American Political Development

Abstract

Scholars of American political development often suggest that “history matters” and that we ought to take time seriously. As a response, many have incorporated temporality into their work through careful consideration of sequence, path dependence, multiple orders, and critical junctures. Others, including Elizabeth Cohen, Michael Hanchard, PJ Brendese, and Stephen Hanson, recognize that time itself has been used as a tool of both political oppression and liberation. Nowhere has this tool been wielded with greater consequences than the American South. In fact, I argue it is the purposeful construction and manipulation of time, history, and public memory that has defined southern politics. American slavery was at its essence an institution designed so that one group of people controlled the time of another group of people. After emancipation, white supremacists shaped perceptions of the past in their effort to secure power. State governments used time to control the distribution of rights through grandfather clauses, curfews, jail time, convict leasing, vagrancy laws, labor regulations, and other legal mechanisms. Landholders abused African Americans through a sharecropping system that relied on a variety of temporal constraints, including annual contracts (sanctioned and often required by the state) and credit arrangements with exorbitant interest rates on farming equipment, seed, and fertilizer. The result was a system of agriculture that more closely resembled slavery than free market capitalism. Public space and public history valorized whites and ignored or vilified Blacks. All the while, there were repeated pronouncements of a supposedly “New South” that had shed its legacy of slavery, oppression, and agrarianism to democratize and industrialize.

After defeat in the Civil War, many white southerners sought to obscure a heinous past while maintaining the racial hierarchy that past had produced. Black southerners, on the other hand, began a whole new historical experience that required constant advocacy and sacrifice to secure the rights they had been promised. They used public interpretations of the past, present, and future and the language of temporality to counter the work of white supremacists. Their efforts demonstrate that citizens and social movements, like governments, can wield time as a tool to shape politics. Over the course of American political development there has been an active contest between conservative white southerners and Black southerners (along with their allies) over the politics of time.

This paper is a chapter in a larger book project examining the manipulation of time in service of power and white supremacy in the South and the temporal response by Black southerners. Here I consider the effort to rewrite the southern past to exonerate slaveholders and valorize Confederate leaders and soldiers through the construction of the “Old South” and the “Lost Cause.” I then investigate the extensive rejoinder that highlighted the contributions of African Americans, both enslaved and free, to the nation, usually under immense suffering. These public narratives represented an attempt to correct the historical record in real time. Evidence includes written work by historians, politicians, other public figures, along with speeches, pamphlets, and newspaper accounts of those in power and social movements, like the Colored Convention Movement, seeking equality and basic rights. I reconsider the whitewashing of southern history through the rhetoric of temporality. I argue that the creation of this Dixie mythology around slavery and secession was essential to establish control the past so that those in power could continue to use time as a political tool in the present and the future.

Author

• Paul E. Herron, Providence College