Mixed Race Studies

Reconstructing Race

The Western Historical Quarterly
Volume 34, Number 1 (Spring, 2003)
pages 6-26

Elliott West, Distinguished Professor of History
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

During what might be called the Greater Reconstruction, 1846–1877, territorial acquisitions as well as southern slavery forced a new racial dialogue between West and South, unsettled racial relations and presumptions, and finally led to a new racial order encompassing western as well as southern people of color.

I live in a town that doesn’t know where it is. Fayetteville is in northwestern Arkansas—that’s clear enough—but when somebody asks us locals to explain just where in this wide republic that is, things get dicey. The architecture and the lovely fall colors suggest the Midwest. The pace of life, the accents, and the studied eccentricities all speak of the South. Some put us elsewhere. At a party soon after I arrived, I told a colleague’s wife my field of study. “Oh, the West is a wonderful place to live!”she said in her soft Carolinian rhythm. I asked when she had lived there. She looked at me, as if at a slow nephew, and answered: “Why, now.”

Living and working along the seams of national regions is a fine encouragement to wonder about the differences and continuities among them—in appearance, in habits and points of view, and beneath all that, in their histories. Two things I know for sure. The South thinks it is different from the rest of the country, and it is race that southerners use most often to explain their separateness. The tortured relations of black and white, slavery and its rage and guilt, the war that ended slavery and the tormented generations that followed, the centuries-long embrace, intimate and awful on so many levels—all that, we’re told, has set southerners apart and has made the South the central stage of America’s racial drama…

…If anybody back then was curious about the shiftiness of race relations and categories, they should have visited the area where I live now, the area called at the time “the border,” a southwesterly arc of a thousand miles from western Missouri and eastern Kansas down to what is called the border today, the Rio Grande Valley. Here, where South touched West, was a grand display of the seemingly limitless combinations of racial arrangements and identities. Imagine a tour of the border during the fifteen years after the war. We would start in Kansas with a new look at the Exodusters, whose move from South to West was, paradoxically, both a rejection of, and an aggressive claim to, a traditional racial order. We might listen to the freedman J. H. Williamson praising former slaves as the rightful inheritors of manifest destiny. In cultural terms, he was saying, blacks were whites, and out West they would fulfill the promise of Jamestown and Plymouth, saving the wilderness from those who would never do it justice. “The Indians are savage and will not work,” he argued. “We, the negro race, are a working people” who would, he implied, subdue the land and build towns, churches, and schools. Frederick Douglass also reminded white America of the freedman’s privileged status as an insider. The only reason the African American had not been hunted down like the Indian, he told the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1869, was that “he is so close under your arm, that you cannot get at him.” This closeness, however, had made “the Negro . . . more like the white man than the Indian, in his tastes and tendencies, and disposition to accept civilization. . . . You do not see him wearing a blanket, but coats cut in the latest European fashion.” From Kansas we would move southward into Indian Territory among the Creek freedmen. These former slaves argued, to the contrary, that they were Indians, or at least so mixed in blood and history that distinctions were meaningless. The point was worth making, since being Indian meant keeping the political power and an economic stake that mixed blood leaders were trying to take away. Here we might listen to the ex-slave Warrior Rentie ridiculing his mixed blood opponents, those “Indians, or rather would be Indians, . . . who have the strong vein of Negro blood . . . [men] who hardly know whether [they are] black, red or white.”

Next we would travel to central Texas into a variation of what Albert Hurtado calls in California an “intimate frontier” full of households of whites, Indians, blacks, Hispanics, and mixes of all four. We would see this familial snarl helping create new social and legal forms on this piece of the border. This troubled region was the temporary home of Buffalo Soldiers, black and Seminole cavalrymen who fought Plains Indians and who also patrolled southward along our final stop, the national boundary with Mexico. Here we would see these blacks and Indians and black Indians clash with Hispanics moving as always back and forth across this porous border.  If our visit was in 1875 we would see the racial ambiguities mixing with changing politics, with bewildering results. When black troops clashed with Mexican Americans not far from Brownsville, Texas, authorities—Redeemer Democrats hardly known for their Hispanic sympathies—suddenly embraced these locals as noble white citizens most dreadfully abused by degraded black invaders sent by foul Republicans. Philip Sheridan shook his head at the confused identities along the stream that itself was always shifting restlessly in its bed. “It is hard to tell who is who, and what is what, on that border, . . .” he wrote William Sherman. “The state of affairs is about as mixed as the river is indefinite as a boundary line.”…

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