Over the past generation, historians of the United States have begun to conceptualize the U.S. Civil War as a global event, instead of just a purely national reckoning with slavery.Footnote 1 Historians of Reconstruction should follow suit. The failure of U.S. Reconstruction to create a more just, equal society was not a unique “American” tragedy, but a hemispheric political process, involving peoples and nation-states across the New World. The transnational abolition of slavery unleashed social processes, such as the demands of ex-slaves for citizenship and land, which were followed by the violent reaction against such demands across the Americas. This essay will explore how African Americans in two American republics—Colombia and the United States—utilized remarkably similar discourses and arguments to justify their pursuit of citizenship and land; furthermore, those politicians and capitalists who opposed African American activism similarly echoed each other’s rhetoric and rationales.Footnote 2
These two American societies, Colombia and the United States, mirrored each other with an almost eerie fidelity. Both abolished slavery in the context of a civil war, resulting in alliances between African Americans and liberal, democratic political parties. Post-emancipation, the freedmen (and at times women) in both societies demanded the equality of complete citizenship and land redistribution from the plantations where they had toiled in order to secure a meaningful citizenship. These demands for land and citizenship engendered a reaction in both societies, fracturing the alliance between the liberal, democratic parties and African Americans, in favor of policies more amenable to capitalism. Land expropriation and redistribution failed in both societies. Thus, full citizenship for people of African descent, enjoyed for a time in both the United States and Colombia, was rolled back by this reaction, and a more open racism, which had been previously challenged, justified the exclusion of Black citizens.Footnote 3
Despite these similar processes, while the U.S. Civil War is now understood as a global event, and there is a long history of transnational studies of the social history of post-emancipation societies, many U.S. historians still conceptualize Reconstruction, especially its politics and political culture, as unique to the United States.Footnote 4 Eric Foner’s magisterial Reconstruction set the tone: “Alone among the nations that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century, the United States, within a few years of emancipation, clothed its former slaves with citizenship rights equal to those of whites.”Footnote 5 But the United States was not alone; Colombia had already done so in the early 1850s (as had other American societies, some, such as Mexico, even earlier). Most Spanish American republics had abolished openly racial laws after independence in the 1820s, and would also precede and surpass the United States in pushing for equality after abolition. Richard White sees transnationalism as less important than national developments in the age of Reconstruction: “Most of the changes examined in this volume took place on national and regional scales, not the transnational.”Footnote 6 If U.S. comparative histories exist for this time period, they tend to focus on Western Europe, not on the sister republics of Spanish America, whose political systems (and histories of plantation slavery) more closely resembled the United States.Footnote 7 Foner did compare post-emancipation societies with the United States in his book Nothing but Freedom, but chose Haiti and the British Caribbean as comparisons, not the much more similar Spanish American republics.Footnote 8
These limited assessments emerge out of a history of American exceptionalism, a practice and idea few U.S. historians would publicly defend but that most implicitly practice—in how they conceptualize history, what secondary sources they read (only in English, of course) and cite, and how they imagine historical change. While most authors do not comment directly on Reconstruction as a national event, and are too sophisticated to publicly defend American exceptionalism, such an understanding is implicit in their work.Footnote 9 For example, Kate Masur’s Until Justice Be Done makes no grand claims to U.S. exceptionalism, but conceptualizes processes that were hemispheric—such as African American demands for effective citizenship and the struggle for birthright citizenship—as solely a national story.Footnote 10 Reconstruction’s legacy is still understood primarily as a particular American story of early success and later retrogression. But this history is truly American, in the broader sense of taking place across the Americas. U.S. historians are beginning to recognize this; David Prior argues that “transnational history and Reconstruction scholarship have yet to develop a self-sustaining conversation,” while attempting to start that conversation.Footnote 11 Don Doyle also argues for a broader vision of Reconstruction, while recognizing that “the story of the United States’ postwar Reconstruction era is usually told within a tightly bounded national narrative wholly disconnected from the world beyond.”Footnote 12 This must change. While certainly more historiographic reconsiderations are needed, I instead hope to present the words and actions of historical actors, especially African Americans, in each society to note the impressive commonalities of discourse and political repertoires.
Reconstruction and the reactionary movements to roll back the democratic political and social gains made by African Americans are best understood not through standard comparison, which often has a “penchant for stressing national difference,” and not even through the study of connections (as useful as these are) that show the influence of U.S. Reconstruction elsewhere.Footnote 13 After all, at first glance, Colombia and the United States were so radically different as to make standard comparisons inapt. Colombia had many civil wars—the United States endured one massive, bloody conflict. There were millions of slaves in the United States on the eve of abolition—but only tens of thousands in Colombia. Colombia had a free population of color much larger than its number of enslaved people upon abolition—the opposite was the case in the United States. In the United States, slavery’s proponents were concentrated in the South, the slaveholding region, but Conservatives in Colombia were spread across the country, and antislavery Liberals actually politically dominated certain slaveholding areas as abolition neared. Likewise, while there were some direct connections between the societies—some U.S. African Americans looked to Colombia as a true “land of liberty” in comparison to the United States and Colombians followed U.S. politics closely—these connections did not directly touch most people.Footnote 14
I will argue that despite these structural differences, the processes of Reconstruction and conservative reaction played out almost exactly the same in both societies. The hemispheric discourses and demands of African Americans superseded local conditions after emancipation. The demands of capital, in both Colombia and the United States, would play a similar role in restricting and denying those demands (and capital’s defenders would employ a similar discourse of justification in both societies). We should consider that the processes of abolition, claiming citizenship, demanding land, and the subsequent capitalist reaction were not really national political processes at all. In addition to the necessary national studies, we should be studying the historical processes of post-abolition claims-making and capitalist reaction themselves, which transcend national boundaries. Footnote 15 U.S. Reconstruction was not a unique national event, but simply one campaign in a hemispheric struggle by African Americans demanding liberty and equality. Likewise, the reaction against popular political and social gains in both Colombia and the United States was part of a global struggle, unbound by national borders, for capitalism’s ascendancy over democratic republicanism.
To show these transnational processes, I first focus on post-emancipation African American social movements to claim citizenship. Then I turn to how Colombian and U.S. African Americans employed similar discourses to demand land, the guarantee of social and economic freedom. Finally, I explore the hemispheric efforts, largely successful, of capital, conservatives, and even the freedpeoples’ former allies against African Americans’ democratic demands.
Demands for Citizenship after Abolition
The United States was a laggard in abolishing slavery. In the Americas, only Cuba and Brazil trailed the United States—all the countries of independent Spanish America in which slavery was economically important had already abolished slavery by 1865. They did so either soon after obtaining independence in the 1820s (Mexico) or mostly in the 1850s (Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Argentina, and Venezuela).Footnote 16 But apart from timing, and the immensity of bloodshed and violence in the United States—the process was almost exactly similar to other American societies. African Americans acted to end slavery, through voting, fighting, migrating, writing, and campaigning—but they were only able to do so by allying with democratic political movements, usually Liberal or democratic republican parties (the Liberal Party in Colombia, the Republican Party in the United States).Footnote 17 In the United States, African Americans laid the groundwork for abolition for decades through activism, but it took the great and terrible Civil War to secure abolition. The freedmen themselves were quick to point out that hundreds of thousands of Black soldiers had served in the war effort.Footnote 18
In Colombia, the 1851 Civil War between the Liberal and Conservative Parties cemented the abolition of slavery. Liberals had come to power electorally in 1848, under the presidency of Liberal José Hilario López, promising a host of reforms to end the legacies of feudalism and colonialism in Colombian society—slavery being the most prominent—to usher in a new republican and democratic future.Footnote 19 Many Liberals also hoped that by abolishing slavery, they would secure volunteers to fight against Conservatives in this and future civil wars: “these manumitted Blacks … will not flee on the day of danger.”Footnote 20 Congress passed a law on May 21, 1851 abolishing slavery on January 1, 1852.Footnote 21
While in the U.S. South, paranoid Southerners rose in revolt over the mere possibility of abolition, in Colombia it actually had been decreed. Horrified by this attack on property rights and the social order, and eager to retake power, Conservatives rebelled that spring in the southwest of Colombia (the heartland of slavery), spreading in June throughout the country. While Black soldiers were vital to the Union efforts, they were even more central to securing the Liberal Party’s victory. A provincial governor noted that “the blacks knew that the revolution had, in part, the object of impeding their liberty and they let it be known that they were ready at any moment to go and fight for their freedom and that of their children.”Footnote 22 Afro-Colombian soldiers would form critical parts of Liberal armies for the next thirty years, securing the dominance over Conservatives through multiple civil wars. The alliance between Afro-Colombians and the Liberal Party was so intense that, in some regions, Conservatives conflated the Liberal Party with blackness: “All that belong to the Liberal Party in the Cauca [the southwest] are people of the pueblo bajo (as they are generally called) and blacks.”Footnote 23 Stephen A. Douglas similarly referred to “Black Republicans” when deriding that party’s antislavery commitment.Footnote 24
Contemporaries saw these civil wars as not only national events, but part of a hemispheric struggle for liberty, equality, and democracy.Footnote 25 The Nation, in its opening issue of July 5, 1865, declared: “It is not simply the triumph of American democracy that we rejoice over, but the triumph of democratic principles everywhere … [the Civil War was a] conflict of the ages, the great strife between the few and the many, between privilege and equality, between law and power, between opinion and the sword … ”Footnote 26 A year earlier, the Colombian Juan de Dios Restrepo, writing in the context of the U.S. Civil War and the recently ended 1860–1862 civil war in Colombia, asserted in the newspaper El Caucano: “The situation of America is dire; the fight is between the colonial system and the modern liberal spirit, between the paganism of the Roman priests and the evangelical Christian idea, between those that dream of re-establishing slavery, privilege, monarchy, theocracy and those that believe that all of those abominations should remain in Europe.”Footnote 27 As we will see repeatedly, the discourse appearing in El Caucano and The Nation are not simply comparable, but essentially parts of a whole. In both the United States and Colombia, many people imagined a vast combat in the Americas, far surpassing the territorial limits of any one nation-state, between the forces of progress and democracy (the U.S. Republican and Colombian Liberal Parties) and those of aristocracy, slavery, and retrogression (the Confederacy, the Conservative Party, and European imperialists, as in Maximillian’s Mexico).Footnote 28
However, for people of African descent, these struggles against aristocracy and privilege were quite immediate, practical, and of utmost necessity if their hard-won freedom was to be maintained and made meaningful. While in both the United States and Colombia the battle was joined on multiple fronts, it centered on two great desires: for equal citizenship and for land.
In the United States, abolition occurred with no clear consensus in Washington about the legal condition of the former slaves (and vituperative debates erupted both within and without the Republican Party). For the freedmen themselves (the options for freedwomen were considerably narrow), however, there was a clear objective: equal citizenship. Freedpeople who described themselves as “citizens of the County of Pike” (but a description of their petition, written by another hand, described their petition as “Memorial of Colored Citizens of Pike County,”) wrote to the State Congress of Missouri to insist on legal equality as citizens: “the State demands obligations and duties at the hand of all citizens without distinction, the correlative rights and privileges of all those citizens should be conceded without distinction.” They demanded that Missouri lead the way “in removing all legal distinctions of whatever kind on account of race or color.”Footnote 29
Of course, a key difference between the regions is that Afro-Colombians after emancipation did not have to demand removing racial legal distinctions—this had already been won during the Wars of Independence in Colombia, in which appeals to racial equality (for free people, if not for those still enslaved) had become a marker of American liberty versus European oppression.Footnote 30 Indeed, after independence, people of African descent rarely referred to themselves by race, preferring to emphasize republican equality (their Conservative opponents were not so reticent). Yet, as in the United States, Afro-Colombians long struggled, after abolition, to force white elites to accept them as legal, political, and social equals, not as ex- (and possibly future) slaves. Afro-Colombian boatmen demanded that, “We should be treated like citizens of a republic and not like the slaves of a sultan.”Footnote 31
While citizenship was the presumed prerogative of men in both societies, women still asserted their rights (including demanding suffrage), especially to control their children (whose labor former masters in both societies tried to maintain after abolition).Footnote 32 Eliza Lawson, “free woman of color,” wrote to the County Probate Court to demand her children be released from the control of John Lawson, their former master. They were being held as apprentices, but Eliza claimed they were being held “against their wishes and in violation of the rights” of Eliza herself; this unwanted apprenticeship infringed on “their liberty.” Eliza Lawson won her petition.Footnote 33 In Colombia, Sebastiana Silva petitioned for help in the return of her son, who was being forced to work as a domestic servant. The family had refused, “as if we still were in the barbarous times in which the government allowed the slavery of men. Today, thankfully, we have a republican and democratic government that will not allow such monstrosities.”Footnote 34 Silva and Lawson asserted that liberty, rights, and democracy belonged to them as well.
If women were excluded from voting, for men the suffrage became a key marker of citizenship. The New Orleans Tribune, founded to serve the African American community in 1864, argued for “universal suffrage,” to “strip the right of suffrage of all qualification of property, of color, of class.”Footnote 35 After abolition, some Republican and Liberal politicians sought to form an alliance with these new Black voters. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase wrote to William T. Sherman in 1865, arguing suffrage for freedmen would prevent “the ascendancy of the disloyal elements … as soon as the military pressure shall be removed.”Footnote 36 Chase merely echoed the plans of Colombians Liberals, as one liberal priest wrote to President López, “The complete extinction of slavery is the magnum work to which we must consecrate all of our efforts: 27,000 men that become citizens weigh something in the electoral balance.”Footnote 37
In the United States, the Republican Party, in the words of the Louisiana chapter, demanded “universal suffrage.”Footnote 38 They succeeded, for a while. Radical Republicans were able to extend suffrage to Black men (by December 1867, 80.5 percent of whom had suffrage, up from 0.5 percent a year before).Footnote 39 In Colombia, suffrage had not been restricted by race, but by class (with literacy and property requirements for voting), with class often serving as a proxy for race. However, Liberals drafted a new constitution in 1853, which guaranteed the right to vote for all adult men. When yet another new national constitution was enacted in 1863, it gave the states the ability to define suffrage rights; states that Liberals controlled with large Afro-Colombian populations largely kept universal suffrage.Footnote 40 And vote African Americans did. A Colombian conservative ruefully commented that his party had lost an election due to “1,600 black votes,” cast by “manumitted blacks” led by “one or two somewhat civilized mulattos.”Footnote 41 In the United States, freedpeople in Norfolk bargained with the Republican Party for the right to do the same: “give us the suffrage, and you may rely upon us to secure justice for ourselves, and all Union men, and to keep the State forever in the Union.”Footnote 42 African Americans across the hemisphere desperately wanted a political party to call their own, which they would support with their votes and their blood; for a while, in each society, they had such a party.
Demands for Land after Abolition
As important as legal citizenship was, African Americans knew that full social citizenship needed a base of economic independence.Footnote 43 Without land, citizenship would be a sterile conquest. In both Colombia and the United States, people of African descent asserted their rights to the land, controlled by plantations or haciendas, that they had worked as slaves or tenants. In spite of differences in land tenure systems and in forms of labor coercion (which also were evolving and disparate during this time), African Americans nonetheless employed four shared arguments: 1) they had lived and worked on this land, often for generations, enriching the planter class; 2) they deserved the land for recompense for their service as citizen soldiers; 3) the planters and hacendados were the enemies of the republic and deserved to lose their land; 4) land was the only secure path to true citizenship, liberty, and equality.Footnote 44
First, following a long tradition of popular agrarian sentiment, African Americans believed that land should belong to those who labored on it, especially those who labored without compensation as slaves. The U.S. freedman Wyat Bayley simply stated in 1866 “that we has a right to the land where we are located.”Footnote 45 Why did Black Americans have this right? Bayley argued it was due to the labor they had performed on that land, land bought by planters with the profits from the sale of “our wives, our children, our husbands.”Footnote 46 The New Orleans Tribune argued for a redistribution of plantation lands as it was better economically to have greater (as in the North) rather than fewer landholders (as in the South) and because “The land tillers are entitled by a paramount right to the possession of the soil they have so long cultivated.”Footnote 47 On the Colombian Pacific coast (a heartland of the Afro-Colombian community), self-described “Colombian citizens,” of a small mining town reported that local authorities “have deprived us of our right” by threatening to kick them off the land unless they paid rent. The villagers believed that they were entitled to use the land because of “our right as cultivators.”Footnote 48 When ex-slaves from Quilcacé requested to be made owners of land of the hacienda on which they had toiled they claimed it was a “just demand for the rights of this village and for our own interests.”Footnote 49 The owners felt differently, complaining that the “blacks” thought the land was theirs, “enjoying to their satisfaction the hacienda, building their houses where they want … and they refuse to pay the land rent for where they live and have their animals and fields.”Footnote 50
African Americans in both societies realized that just claiming land for having worked it, however much they felt they deserved it, contradicted established property law in both societies. Much more powerfully, in the broader public sphere, was a rhetoric that declared they deserved land (and citizenship) for the sacrifice of their lives and blood as citizen soldiers. The “Colored Citizens of Norfolk” in 1865 did not just focus on the past war, but evoked the long history of Black men serving the country, from Crispus Attucks to the thousands fighting in the Civil War, proving “their patriotism and possession of all the manly qualities that adorn the soldier.”Footnote 51 The Colored Men’s Convention of Mississippi demanded aid against rebel sympathizers, reminding President Johnson, “Now sir, we stood by the Government when she wanted help, now we want help.”Footnote 52 On Edisto Island, South Carolina, a Committee of Freedmen asserted, “General we want Homestead’s; we were promised Homestead’s by the government,” which they deserved due to the “common faith between Its self and us Its allies In the war.”Footnote 53 Garrison Frasier, a spokesman for the freedpeople of Savannah, when asked how his people could take care of themselves and maintain their freedom, linked land and service together, “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land… . And to assist the Government, the young men should enlist in the service of the Government.”Footnote 54 Wyat was succinct and direct, declaring that the Union officers “told us if we would leave the Rebs and come to de Yankees and help de Government, we should have de land.”Footnote 55
Afro-Colombians also justified their demands for citizenship and land by reminding Liberals of their service as citizen soldiers (in not one, but several civil wars, especially those of 1851, 1860–1862, and 1876–1877). The Dagua boatmen reminded Liberals: “In our profession we have lent great services to the liberal cause, and more than a few times we have set aside the punting poles and oars in order to take up the gun.”Footnote 56 The Palmira Democratic Society (one of many such clubs that united elite Liberals with popular actors, including, in places such as Palmira, Afro-Colombians) petitioned for access to commons and public lands that haciendas had enclosed. The society reminded the Colombian president that “the poor class” has made “the very valuable contribution of their blood in order to defend our institutions… . These individuals have, at the very least, an unquestionable right to be protected by a liberal government.”Footnote 57 It was Cali’s Democratic Society (whose members counted many Afro-Colombians) that made the most explicit demands for land redistribution in exchange for its members’ service in the past war (which saw Conservative armies marching south to Cali from the neighboring state of Antioquia),
Although this may seem an extravagant request, it is not, if one weighs the criterion of justice, considering that those individuals, born here or elsewhere, that have promptly presented themselves to defend their country have the perfect right to live in the Cauca under the expressed terms [without tenancy and with their own land]. How can one think it just that those who have come every time to defend this soil that saw them born against the repeated and unjust invasions from Antioquia, invasions aided by those that call themselves the owners of the greater part of the Cauca’s land, live without a home?Footnote 58
The Democratic Society justified their demand by service (and by questioning the legitimacy of hacendados’ legal titles), but also via a third rationale: the enemies of the republic (be they Confederates or Conservatives) deserved to lose their land.
Just as Afro-Colombians thought it grossly unfair that their Conservative enemies, whom they had just defeated in the 1876–1877 civil war, “those that call themselves the owners” of the Cauca Valley’s great estates, should maintain their haciendas, so too did Black North Americans. Wyat railed against “the Rebs, who was fightin’ de United Sates to keep us in slavery and to destroy the Government” would get their land back instead of the freedpeople.Footnote 59 The New Orleans Tribune argued for a redistribution of plantation lands as punishment for planters’ treason: “His hands are red with a Treason unparalleled in the world’s history.”Footnote 60
Worse than the miscarriage of justice that traitors monopolized land while true patriots went without was the knowledge that, without land, the emancipation for which African Americans had sacrificed so much would be incomplete, and perhaps even reversed. Both peoples argued that without land they would never be full citizens. Wyat warned that without land “we shall be forebber made hewers of wood and drawers of water.”Footnote 61 The Norfolk community argued that without economic rights they would remain “in a state of serfdom.”Footnote 62 They continued, “The surest guarantee for the independence and ultimate elevation of the colored people will be found in the becoming the owners of the soil on which they live and labor.”Footnote 63 The New Orleans Tribune complained that when slavery was ended but the plantations remained, “The slaves were made serfs and chained to the soil.”Footnote 64 Without land, true liberty and equality were denied—slavery was replaced by serfdom.
Afro-Colombians employed a similar language of feudalism. The Tumacanos derided the efforts to monopolize land as an attempt to reestablish “a wretched feudalism” and demanded that the national government protect their “equality of rights.”Footnote 65 It was Cali’s Democratic Society that advanced this argument most eloquently: “ … the land cannot be occupied to such an extent that the other members of the community are deprived of the means of subsistence or are obligated to be the slaves of those feudal lords who do not admit onto their supposed properties any but those individuals who implicitly sell their personal independence, that is to say, their conscience and liberty, in order to be the peons and tributaries of an individual and ceasing to be citizens of a free people.”Footnote 66 Citizenship and social and political equality were intimately tied to the economic liberty landownership provided. African Americans would forever be “hewers of wood and drawers of water” and never become “citizens of a free people” without economic independence. Afro-Colombians knew this; U.S. African Americans knew this. So, unfortunately, did their opponents. In both societies, African Americans would push for land rights, enjoying for a brief time some support from Liberal and Republican allies.
Before the U.S. Civil War had ended, and encouraged by a meeting with Frazier and other freedmen, Sherman issued Special Field Orders, No. 15, in 1865, which appropriated 400,000 acres of land from South Carolina to North Florida to be given to ex-slaves, in lots “not more than forty acres.”Footnote 67 Sherman’s special field order did not give freedpeople outright ownership of the land, but use rights for an undetermined period of time.Footnote 68 But large swaths of property were distributed; Brigadier General Rufus Saxton, in charge of implementing Sherman’s special order, estimated he had settled 40,000 freedpeople on 400,000 acres.Footnote 69
Soon after the war, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens urged a much more radical, permanent, and far-reaching program of land redistribution, arguing that the property of wealthy rebels be seized: “Divide this land into convenient farms. Give if you please forty acres to each adult male freed man.”Footnote 70 He introduced his confiscation bill on March 11, 1867 (H.R. 29). Citizens of Lumpkin County, Georgia supported Stephens’ confiscation bill, petitioning Congress, “To give to the freedmen (at least each head of a family) forty acres of land out of the rebel property, or, if the land should be sold, the price of forty acres in money. The property held by the slaveholders does in equity belong to the freedmen as they earned it by hard labour consequently the passage of this or a similar act would be in accordance with the principles of eternal justice.”Footnote 71
Stevens agreed with those freedmen who understood true equality could only be secured with landholding, “It is impossible that any practical equality of rights can exist where a few thousand men monopolize the whole landed property.”Footnote 72 Stevens argued that without numerous small landowners, “the Government can never be, as it never has been, a true republic. Heretofore, it had more the features of aristocracy than of democracy.”Footnote 73
While in the United States, the period between abolition and a denial of most land redistribution was quite short, in Colombia, the struggle for land, in alliance with the Liberal Party, lasted far longer, extending from abolition in 1851 until the 1870s. However, the issues and discourse were similar, and as Stevens and Sherman promoted U.S. African American interests, in Colombia, Ramón Mercado and David Peña, Afro-Colombian himself, would champion popular land rights. Concurrent with the struggle for abolition, poor residents around Cali began knocking down fences of large haciendas and claiming the land for themselves.Footnote 74 Conservatives accused Liberals of not just promoting abolition but also offering the freedpeople “division of the lands and they [the masses] are so persuaded by this promise that now they considered themselves absolute owners of the lands.”Footnote 75 Just like Stevens, Mercado urged President López to push Congress to pass several key reforms, stressing the need to abolish slavery, increase the importance of the national guard, end monopolies (especially over aguardiente), make the judiciary more fair, “strengthen the principle of equality” and “procure land and industry for the poor classes.”Footnote 76 Both Stevens and Mercado saw abolition as just the first step in creating a true democratic republic and both knew leaving the old slaveholding aristocracy intact posed a grave threat to not just the freedpeople, but their own political program and power. Foner acknowledges that freedmen across the Americas desired land, but immediately follows it with, “Unlike freedmen in other countries, however, American blacks emerged from slavery convinced that the federal government had committed itself to land distribution.”Footnote 77 Of course, many Afro-Colombians believed the Liberal Party supported their claims as well. After each civil war, popular liberals demanded land, especially the redistribution of land seized from Conservative rebels.
The demands for land reached a fever pitch after the brutal 1876–1877 civil war. Conservatives, many of whom had fled to Ecuador during the war, petitioned Congress to complain about their property being confiscated, “offering to the ignorant multitude the terrible panorama of land redistribution.”Footnote 78 Most land seemed to end up in the hands of elite Liberals, but some was redistributed to poorer residents, including “Indians.”Footnote 79 While a greater Reconstruction in the United States brutally attacked Native North Americans as part of the project of extending federal power, in Colombia, Indians eventually forced many Liberals to reconsider their historic hostility to indigenous identity.Footnote 80 Conservatives complained that the land had been given to people “who had volunteered military service” to the Liberals during the war.Footnote 81
As we saw above, Cali’s Democratic Society had proposed just that, demanding an end to land rents and the right to settle on any uncultivated land (haciendas maintained vast reserves of underutilized land). David Peña wrote a more modest proposal, hoping the state legislature might pass it. It called for a five-year moratorium on all rents, and more radically, allowing those without land to claim up to three hectares of any land that was not fenced or cultivated by another.Footnote 82 However, as in the United States, Afro-Colombians’ dreams of land and true citizenship would be denied.
At almost the exact same time, in the late 1870s, the demands for land and true citizenship impelled a powerful conservative reaction—not just by Confederates or Conservatives, but by many wavering Republicans and Liberals as well. On his deathbed, the great ally of Afro-Colombian popular liberals, David Peña, sensed this shift. He pleaded for his Liberal Party to stay true to its alliance with Afro-Colombians: “I have worked for the liberty of the blacks and my efforts have been fruitful. As citizens, as soldiers, as republicans, they have more than fulfilled their duty and the Patria should forever recognize their services.”Footnote 83 Peña feared his Liberal Party wanted to abandon its popular mission and alliance with Afro-Colombians. His prescience was tragic. In both the United States and Colombia, Liberal and Republican Parties abandoned their working-class and Black allies to seek an industrial and capitalist modernity.
Regenerations: Land
In the United States, the project to find a place, both politically and economically, for freedpeople in the new country that would be rebuilt after the Civil War had a formal name—Reconstruction—that the same process lacked in Colombia. In Colombia, the reaction to this democratic project, which sought to roll back the political gains of citizenship won by Afro-Colombians (and other subaltern groups) and deny their economic demands for land in the name of protecting capitalist investment, had a formal name—Regeneration—that the same process lacked in the United States, except perhaps as Redemption.Footnote 84 Colombia’s Regenerators were led by Independent Liberals unhappy with the radical direction of their party, just as Republicans divided in the United States. Colombia’s Regenerators sought to close down the vibrant democratic political project that allowed popular groups considerable influence in the public sphere, just as many U.S. Republicans abandoned Radical Republicans’ commitment to a broader democratic moment. These projects of Regeneration gathered speed at the exact same time, the late 1870s, and would dominate both countries through the end of the nineteenth century. Both projects involved denying African Americans’ land claims, which was part of a broader concern with protecting capitalist development by securing property rights and reifying order—not liberty or equality—as the premier political objective. To obtain this order it was necessary to reject a democratic republicanism by removing demanding popular groups from citizenship, justified by both class and racial arguments about proper civilized citizens.Footnote 85
Land was the most contentious issue in both societies; while African Americans won substantial citizenship gains—albeit temporarily—demands for land were less successful, engendering harsh reactions. In the United States, even President Johnson had argued, at least initially, that “Their great plantations must be seized and divided into small farms … ”Footnote 86 But he soon changed his tune, blocking the July 28, 1865, Freedmen’s Bureau Circular 13, that had ordered the lease of confiscated or abandoned lands to freedpeople. Johnson also banned the Freedman’s Bureau from allocating land at all.Footnote 87 The Union ending up controlling 900,000 acres in the South; 400,000 acres were located in the Sea Islands, where 40,000 freedpeople had obtained land.Footnote 88 However, Congress would undo much of this within a year, returning the land to white Southerners.Footnote 89 Radical Republicans’ legislation around land redistribution, led by Stephens, was defeated in Congress.
In Colombia, elite Liberals joined with Conservatives in denouncing the seizure of Conservative property during the 1876–1877 war, warning of the “evils that could occur in the Republic” if such “expropriations” were allowed to continue.Footnote 90 Conservatives who had fled to Ecuador wailed that such expropriations “imply the abolition of the right of property in Colombian society and raise high the banner of communism.” Unless repressed with a “firm hand,” such ideas would spread throughout the pueblo and the poor “will invade, with increasing vigor, any farm, whether belonging to friend or enemy.”Footnote 91 Liberals too feared the seizure of property, even of their enemies, since for them property rights were “one of the bases on which rest the social edifice”: “if property doesn’t exist, neither does society.”Footnote 92 Liberal officials began to return land that had been seized, one declaring “the guarantee of property is and should be inviolable.”Footnote 93 By May 1878, most expropriations had ceased under state order and the land returned to the original owners.Footnote 94 Peña’s land bill was also defeated in the state legislature, if barely (as it passed the first reading).Footnote 95
The popular demands for land redistribution, from the point of view of elites, had the potential to undermine the capitalist system by threatening the sanctity of private property.Footnote 96 The Nation trembled that the threat was to property everywhere: “Property is no longer owned in South Carolina under the protection of the laws or Constitution; it is held until it is taken away by Beverly Nash, or Moses, or any of the gang who govern the State by means of the votes of the colored race. Farms are sold to pay taxes, the old, rich plantations are broken up; the whites are driven out of the State or disenfranchised, and a queer aristocracy of color is set up, with the rich Congo thief on top and the degraded Anglo-Saxon at the bottom.”Footnote 97 Liberals and Republicans, if at one time opposing slavery and perhaps sympathetic to political rights for freedmen, began to rethink their alliance with African Americans if it meant challenging private property and the capitalist system. In Colombia, President Julián Trujillo, a former Liberal hero, while president from 1878–1880, fomented the rupture between Liberals and their popular allies. Trujillo demanded confiscated properties be returned to the former owners, reminding his listeners of “the necessity to maintain sacred and inviolable the idea of the right of property, above all of landed property, that is the cornerstone on which the progress of modern societies is built.” Without this right of property, it would be impossible to attract “foreign industry and capital.”Footnote 98 El Deber insisted that the land “expropriations” have been the ruin of “many capitalists.”Footnote 99
The problem, for elites in both societies, was not just the land of the slaveocracy or Conservativism, but that land redistribution might raise the broader specter of communism. Bogotá’s La Luz warned that the constant anarchy and politicization of the “ignorant masses … has sowed in the impoverished peoples a seed of communism.”Footnote 100 In the United States, the argument that Reconstruction must end was not just about Southerners regaining local control, but about the threat to capitalism that Radical Reconstruction entailed. South Carolinian James Pike argued, “The energy of the American race, the nature of things, the demands of modern civilization, the pulsations of trade, commerce, public intelligence, and mechanic industry, throbbing through the intercourse by railroad and telegraph, and cooperating with the vital and pervading resources of the State, all seem to warrant the conclusion that a change must come.” That change was the restoration of the government to the control of propertied whites.Footnote 101
Regenerations: Order, Capitalism, and Race
In Colombia and the United States, these new governments of order for which Pike pined needed to act to restrict popular demands and protect capital. Instead of the right to the land the freedpeople had demanded, Republicans quickly turned to contracts between freedmen and employers, usually former slaveholders, as a way to regenerate both the Southern economy and as a tutelage to the newly freedpeople: “Republicans embraced contract freedom like a secular gospel.”Footnote 102 As Eric Foner argues, Republicans turned away from a more broadly popular agenda to embrace capitalism: “Thus, in the face of agrarian unrest and working-class militancy, metropolitan capitalists united as never before in defense of fiscal conservatism and the inviolability of property rights.”Footnote 103 Andrew Zimmerman also traces the divide between bourgeois liberals and popular workers’ groups, writing that those elites looked with “disdain upon the demands of freedpeople in the South for state protection of their freedom as they did on demands of workers in the North.”Footnote 104
As Foner and Zimmerman note, the problem was not just the freedmen, but the broader possibility of working-class demands. The same was even more true in Colombia where Afro-Colombians were always in an alliance with other white, mestizo, and indigenous popular liberals. The Nation pursed this argument relentlessly, directly linking support for industrialists against their workers with support for the Southern white elite against Black citizens. “This class [wage workers] has been powerfully reinforced by the political enfranchisement of the Southern negroes, until we have now, scattered over the soil from Maine to the Gulf, a large body of voters having the principal characteristics of a true proletariat—its restlessness, love of novelty, envy, indifference to remote results, profound distrust of persons of wealth and education, and eagerness to rely on the Government for comfort or even for sustenance.”Footnote 105 In a separate article, the Nation made clear that poor whites and poor Blacks were a common enemy: “Just as Tweed got the votes of the ignorant Irish in New York, or as Butler gets the votes of the ‘poor boys’ in the shoemaking district of Massachusetts, the carpet-baggers got the votes of the negroes.”Footnote 106
In both the United States and Colombia, this suspicion of the poor, be they white or Black, caused some elites to question the shared American project of democratic republicanism. Pike declared, “Are we to be told that these things are inevitable because they are the results of our theory of government, and that that theory must be sound? … If these are the legitimate results of it, then the theory is at fault, and its application must somehow be changed or modified. What the world is after is results—sound, wholesome, just results.”Footnote 107 In Colombia, a similar argument emerged. Cali’s El Ferrocarril also argued that results, especially the maintenance of order, mattered more than the theory of government: “We declare ourselves against all revolutions, because we are convinced that the worst government is better than the most perfect revolution.”Footnote 108 El Deber derided the Colombian pueblo as incapable of truly understanding politics and questioned if, therefore, democracy was proper for Colombia: “It is enough to know that among us a democratic Republic, truly, never has existed.”Footnote 109
Other Colombians went further, Eliseo Payán, once a fervent Liberal but later president of Colombia under the Regeneration, declared that due to “the violent attack on property” that the last civil war had engendered, “capital had fled or is hidden;” therefore, if elections did not produce a desirable government committed to order, “the path of dictatorship is considered justifiable as the way to obtain order and peace.”Footnote 110 If Colombia did not become a formal dictatorship, then Rafael Núñez, president and leading figure of the Regeneration, argued that at least “Republics should be authoritarian” or they risked falling into “permanent disorder” that would stifle all material progress, such as building railroads or promoting exports.Footnote 111 H.W. Brands’ claim about the Gilded Age United States applies equally to Colombia, “after almost a century during which the tide of democracy had risen ever higher, an ebb was setting in.”Footnote 112
The problem, from the point of view of U.S. and Colombian Regenerators, was that the poor simply did not understand true republicanism and its tenets of liberty and equality—hence their demands for land. Referring to the global agitation for workers’ rights, Harper’s Weekly declared, “… equality before the law, and an equal right of independent individual choice, is the only possible equality. Equality of condition, which is the Socialistic aim, is no more possible than equality of ability or physical endowments.”Footnote 113 The influential periodical railed against May Day strikers, declaring them nefarious criminals: “a mob is not the people, and … liberty depends upon civic order.”Footnote 114 In Colombia, Juan Ulloa was more succinct: “there is much work to be done in order to make the masses understand what real and true liberty and democracy are.”Footnote 115 Of course, as we saw above, African Americans knew exactly what liberty, equality, and democracy meant to them, and they knew that to maintain their enjoyment of these rights they needed land to secure their citizenship. The political battles of the Regeneration were not just about the law, citizenship, and suffrage, but the organization of property and the meaning of equality as well.
For Liberals and Republicans, however, if the poor refused to accept more limited definitions of liberty and equality, then the question was how to restrict voting and thus popular influence. The answer, in part, was race: Race explained why democracy was not working (since some were too racially inferior to understand and enjoy it) and was a justification for reducing democracy’s reach.Footnote 116 Conservatives, in both societies, were eager to re-establish race as a central to citizenship. Robert Enoch Withers, an ex-Confederate, joined the new Conservative Party of Virginia in 1868, and determined the way to victory was to make race the central issue in the gubernatorial race: “I said that Virginia had always been governed by white men, and I was determined to use my best efforts to perpetuate their rule.”Footnote 117 He declared that Blacks “neither possessed information or intelligence sufficient to enable them to decide matters of State craft.”Footnote 118 James Pike, in 1874, reacted in horror to Black legislators in South Carolina, “In the place of this old aristocratic society stands the rude form of the most ignorant democracy that mankind ever saw, invested with the functions of government.”Footnote 119 But doubts on the racial fitness of Black citizens was increasing among Republicans as well. The Nation noted that elections in Virginia had become “a struggle of races:” Blacks “were reminded that the Conservatives once held them in slavery, and sold their families down South,” while whites “were met by Conservative references to the ravishing of an aged lady by two of Kellogg’s colored policemen.”Footnote 120 Another article in the Nation disparaged new Black citizens: “But the average of intelligence among the rest is very low—so low that they are but slightly above the level of animals.”Footnote 121
Open appeals to restrict citizenship based on race were more common in the United States than Colombia, with its longer history of promoting legal racial equality as essential to American republicanism. However, in private (and increasingly in public as the century progressed), powerful Colombians fretted about racial conflict and the fitness of Afro-Colombians for citizenship. Elite Colombians worried that soon a “caste war, whose horrors could be worse than those that took place in Haiti when the blacks took over the island,” was coming. “A horrifying demagogy” was on the loose in the land, pitting “blacks against whites”; if a race war erupted, one writer warned, rich Liberals would not be spared.Footnote 122 Bogotá’s El Conservador warned Colombians about the dangers of allowing those of the “Indian” and “Black” races to participate in a “democratic republic,” at least without the proper education. The result “has produced such devastation, that formally rich districts are now turned to deserts.”Footnote 123
The solution to all these dilemmas—of popular pressure for land or labor rights, the disorderly politics that threatened capital, and the racial unfitness of much of the population—could be solved by restricting citizenship and reigning in a vibrant democratic public sphere. However, in both the United States (due to the fourteenth amendment) and Colombia (due to a political culture of equality), restrictions on citizenship usually could not be directly based on race, although this did not stop many elites from demanding just that.Footnote 124 Harper’s Weekly and La Nación shared an almost identical discourse around restricting the suffrage. Harper’s Weekly approved the stalling of a Republican elections bill, noting that even most members of the party did not support it. The paper quoted Senator Wolcott as positing that “the present general ignorance of the colored race” made protecting their suffrage not a priority.Footnote 125 The popular magazine urged rejecting national legislation in support of “colored citizenship.” The writer urged restrictions on suffrage, but not based directly on “color.” After all, the author argued, “Universal suffrage exists in no State.” In New York, there were restrictions based on naturalization, age, residence, sex, and registrations, which excluded four-fifths of the population. The writer urged “some impartial and reasonable requirement of education and property” that would reduce the “unenlightened vote.”Footnote 126
Harper’s Weekly echoed La Nación, which had argued voting was not a “right,” for, if so, women, drunkards, and the insane should be allowed to vote. “To vote well, it is necessary to be intelligent and knowledgeable of public affairs.” “Universal suffrage” was an “error that we adopted in the Colombia in 1853 … without considering that we did not have a pueblo capable of exercising it with judgment, with independence, and with morality that supposed right.” The writer, probably José María Samper, suggested that to vote you needed to be literate and have either “an income derived from capital” or a job that “assured the means of existence” so that the voter was “independent” and had a “true interest in the conservation of social and political order.”Footnote 127
Furthermore, in a break with a tendency to not publicly endorse outright racism, La Nación lamented, “That mob—composed of Indians, black Africans and sundry mestizos—completely stupid, ignorant, abject and barbarous in their customs, without the least notion of political science or any aspirations for progress—form the great social mass.” The author continued, “That which we have in Colombia is a social mass (nine tenths of the total population) that does not know nor understand one word of republic, of democracy, of principles, of rights or duties, of what is civilization and progress, because it is generally ignorant, coarse, half-savage.”Footnote 128 Colombia’s people were “not capable of practicing a democratic republic.” Yet no pueblos were truly capable, “in any part of the world.” “In every country, civilized or barbarous, there is a relatively small number … in whose breast lies the intelligence, education, [and] wealth” necessary to govern.Footnote 129 Increasingly, many U.S. Republicans, to say nothing of Democrats, agreed.
In both societies, members of the Republican and Liberal Parties allied with Conservatives and Democrats to restrict suffrage. After the 1890s, across the South, Black voting collapsed, due to legal restrictions based on literacy, tax payments, and property requirements along with outright violence. In 1896, there were over 130,000 registered African American voters in Louisiana; in 1904, there were 1,342. Across the South, Reconstruction era voting rates of between 60 to 85 percent fell to less than 10 percent for Black men.Footnote 130 At almost the same time, in Colombia, the Regenerator’s new 1886 Constitution radically reduced suffrage and the broader public sphere (unlike in the United States, the new more centralist Colombian constitution allowed this to happen nationally, instead of state-by-state).
M.A. Caro, a leading Conservative intellectual and president of Colombia, insisted the state should have vastly increased power. Colombia, following the mistaken idea of “the rights of the people,” had ceded too much authority to “semi-barbarous peoples.” The state must reclaim this power to make itself “respectable” and to inculcate “stability, the indispensable base of morality,” which “will produce its natural economic results.”Footnote 131 State power and order, not democracy or rights, were key for economic growth. The 1886 Constitution hewed closely to Caro’s recommendations: to cast ballots for representatives to the national congress or for presidential electors, one needed to be literate and have an annual income of at least 500 pesos (or 1,500 pesos property), thereby excluding most Afro-Colombians.Footnote 132 Subsequent laws moved to restrict Afro-Colombians’ demands for land and their organizing in the vital Democratic Societies. A public order law in 1888 gave the president the power to imprison or exile anyone who was a threat to order or had committed “attempts against public or private property” and to dissolve any societies or clubs that “are a meeting place for revolutionary propaganda or subversive teaching.”Footnote 133 State power was always a double-edged sword, even when employed to protect rights, as African Americans in both Colombia and the United States had demanded. However, even during the most progressive phase of Reconstruction, state power in the U.S. West was employed to crush indigenous resistance to settler colonialism, paving the way for railroads and capitalist expansion.Footnote 134 This use of state power in the U.S. West foreshadowed its service to capital and “order” that would define the relationship of the state to society in the Regeneration era.
Of course, in the United States, racist violence, even more than the law, targeted Black political life.Footnote 135 In spite of stereotypes of Latin America’s violence, the United States was far more brutal, in general, against freedpeople. Southern whites killed thousands of African Americans immediately after the Civil War; in the case of the a village near Pine Bluff, Arkansas, a mob destroyed an entire Black settlement, hanging twenty-four, men, women, and children.Footnote 136 In Texas, over a thousand murders of Blacks by whites took place between 1865 and 1868.Footnote 137 The violence of the law and the noose acted, in both societies, to repress (but never completely eliminate) the vibrant democratic moment that African Americans had, by their sweat and blood, created.Footnote 138
Conclusion
American exceptionalism is still a powerful force in the study of U.S. history; like a black hole, it cannot be seen directly (at least among academics), but nonetheless warps everything around it. Overcoming American exceptionalism by using a hemispheric framework reorients our understandings of Reconstruction and Regeneration in national historiographies, including notions of historical causation. If such similar processes were happening in both the United States and Colombia, then it suggests the causes of such processes should be structural and cultural processes (especially emanating from political culture) shared by both societies. More critically, this approach foregrounds the critical agency of African Americans in insisting on citizenship, equality, and land, in contrast to the assumption that transnational history tends to minimize agency.Footnote 139
A transnational approach also suggests that while political culture and popular agency are key, the particular political battles, such as the U.S. election of 1876 (that obsessed both nineteenth-century actors and present-day historians), probably had lesser long-term effects. Adam Gopnik writing in The New Yorker, focuses on how if only Johnson had not been vice president and if only Lincoln had more harshly punished the Southern leadership, then Reconstruction might have ended better: “Contingency counts and individuals matter.”Footnote 140 Of course they do. But transnational studies suggest perhaps not as much as we might hope, or if not so grimly, that in addition to the agency of individuals we also should focus on the agency of social groups—the freedpeople, of course, but also their capitalist adversaries. And while contingency matters, we must also recognize the powerful economic structures (and, as the century wore on, imposed racial structures as well) limiting agency and tempering contingency in both places.
Or, perhaps, the contingency was not a single event of Lincoln’s assassination or the election of 1876, but much larger processes of the struggle between popular groups seeking an expansive vision of liberty and equality and the forces of capitalism. Political history tends to be most resistant to transnational approaches, as most politics appears to take place on a national level. However, considering Reconstruction transnationally reveals supposedly national processes were but one part of a broader, global contest over the meanings and efficacy of democracy. This struggle was also contingent—it was not destined to end the way it did—but the fact that it did end the same in both Colombia and the United States does tell us the long odds African Americans and other popular groups faced. Of course, even against those odds, that struggle did not end with the defeats of the Regeneration; our last similarity is the ongoing struggle for equality and liberty, so often led by African Americans, taking place in Colombia, the United States, and across the Americas today.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Seth Archer, Lawrence Culver, Angela Diaz, Niels Eichhorn, Nichelle Frank, Patrick Mason, Tammy Proctor, Eliza Rosenberg, and the anonymous reviewers for their generous reading of the manuscript. The Kluge Center at the Library of Congress kindly provided me space to conduct research one summer. Special thanks to the archivists and librarians at Utah State University and at the Biblioteca Nacional, the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, the Archivo General de la Nación, and the Archivo Central del Cauca in Colombia.
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