On the eve of the Civil War, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens declared in his “Cornerstone” speech: “African slavery as it exists amongst us — the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. [Thomas] Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as ‘the rock upon which the old Union would split.’ What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact.”
Concerning the newly formed Confederate States of America, he said: “They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error… Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
Some of our nation’s founders really did want America to be a land of the free for all, including African slaves. They just didn’t have the moral will to provide the leadership to do it. In fear they wondered, what would the millions of freed slaves do? As a result of slave laws, Black people had no money, no education, no property, and no homes. If freed, would they revolt against their out-numbered masters and start a race-war?
Rather than address this problem, America allowed slavery to continue, hoping that it would somehow simply end with time. But that didn’t work. Moral indifference in leadership never does.
Now war was upon the nation and its outcome would determine if slavery would continue or if it would end. The question this article will pursue is did the Civil War move us closer to becoming a nation where all people are free and all people are treated with the dignity of being image-bearers of God?
The Civil War
The contention of the South was that the U.S. Constitution was wrong to assume that all men were created equal. They believed negroes were not. So the South seceded and the Civil War began. 1
In his second inaugural address, President Lincoln rightly attributed the Civil War to God’s hand of judgment against America for slavery. He exclaimed:
“If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
The Civil War, in fact, has turned out to be our bloodiest war. “Roughly 2% of the population, an estimated 620,000 men, lost their lives in the battlefield. Taken as a percentage of today’s population, the toll would have risen as high as 6 million souls.” At that great cost, the North won the Civil War, and the Thirteenth Amendment to the constitution was ratified legally ending slavery. Four million (in today’s numbers that would be more like 40 million) black men, women and children were freed from bondage. This was a giant step towards racial reconciliation!
However, the battle won on the field by the North was conceded back to the South in Congress. When the Union removed its soldiers from the South, Congress allowed the South to establish laws called “Black Codes.” They are more popularly known today as Jim Crow laws. By law and custom America segregated itself socially, and culturally by color, white over black, for the next 100 years.
The “Black Codes”
Can you imagine an America if this hadn’t happened? Can you imagine if Lincoln hadn’t been assassinated and instead, as he prescribed, freed slaves were given their 40 acres and a mule?
Instead, Black Americans would continue to be denied the fundamental liberties enjoyed by White Americans—the right to the reward of their labor, the right to pursue education, jobs, business ownership, loans, the neighborhoods of their choice etc. Socially, Black people were forced to accept a humiliating, self-effacing posture next to White people. They couldn’t eat at White-owned restaurants. They were degraded in public spaces by “Whites Only” signs. They were forced to assume deferential places such as the backs of buses.
Every aspect of American society was racialized, and Black people were given the short end of every stick. Black Poet Langston Hughes captured the hopeless disillusionment of Black people in his “Let America Be America Again” poem, decrying the injustice that “America never was America to me.”
This sad hierarchy of races in America was not confined to the South. Black Americans lived under overt systemic racism in the North too. They couldn’t vote in the north. They were paid slave wages and had no voice of appeal in factories. Through redlining-laws, Black Americans could not move into White neighborhoods, even when they gained the financial means to do so.
What was worse is that many of these degrading social and cultural practices were enforced with police brutality. To uphold a racialized color segregated America, a racist culture had to be ingrained within the halls of law enforcement in order to assure that police would carry out those unjust laws exclusively against Black people. This continued the previous policing practices in the Southern States created to capture and terrorize slaves to ward off any slave uprisings.
In extreme cases, public lynchings were used to subordinate African Americans. Lynchings were understood by many to be, “necessary supplements to the criminal justice system” and “at least one-half of the lynchings (were) carried out with police officers participating.”
In 2015, Equal Justice Initiative researchers released a report documenting more than 4,400 lynchings that took place between 1877 and 1950. The new study, titled Reconstruction in America: Racial Violence After the Civil War, brings the overall death toll between 1865 and 1950 to nearly 6,500. In addition, domestic terrorist groups began to form, like the Ku Klux Klan, where again it was not uncommon for law enforcement officers to be among their ranks.
These horrors realized the deep fears of the abolitionists, who were soon forgotten after the Civil War. They contended that:
“[h]elping escaping slaves did nothing, they felt, to get to the root of the problem. Abolitionists wanted to destroy slavery root and branch, not pick up its fallen leaves. [Abolitionists] drew on unmistakably Christian premises, especially on one crucial point: slavery was sin. Sin could not be solved by political compromise or sociological reform, abolitionists maintained. It required repentance; otherwise America would be punished by God.”
Our national problem is that America never repented as Lincoln lamented, and so God gave us a bloody war to free the slaves. Since there was no real repentance, neither could the Civil War produce fruit in keeping with repentance. The deep-rooted societal sin of racism simply traded in its old name, slavery, for a new one: “Black codes,” Jim Crow,” “Segregation.” Even in the church, the denominations refused Blacks membership, refused to open their seminaries to train Black pastors, refused to partner and work with Black churches. So racially divided our nation began for 250 years (1607-1865) under slavery and legally, culturally and even religiously racially divided it continued for the next 100 years under “Black codes.”
So What Does The Bible Say?
1. The Bible affirms that all people reflect God’s image because we are human (Gen. 1:26-28)
The Bible, therefore, rejects the lie practiced both legally and culturally in America for 350 years that Blacks are an inferior race.
2. The Bible condemns dividing the church by ethnicity and class (Gal 2:11-14; 3:28; Philemon 15-17)
3. The Bible condemns personal prejudice (James 2:1-10)
4. The Bible condemns harboring and acting in prejudicial ways against an entire group of people
Jonah’s sin was his national idolatry. It seduced him to hate an entire people (the Ninevites) and refuse to extend mercy that God was extending to them and that he himself undeservedly enjoyed (Jonah 4:1-3, 11).
5. The Bible condemns oppressive tribalism
Genesis 11 explains how humanity turned in rebellion against God as a united group to make a name for themselves. All newly formed scattered groups have continued to try to make a name for themselves. They do this over and against God and any opposing group. This is tribalism. 2 We see it in Jesus’ time as the Jews had no dealings with the Samaritans (John 4:9). Inevitably what happens is that the stronger tribes will oppress weaker groups to make a name for their group. For thus says the Lord GOD: “My people went down at the first into Egypt to sojourn there, and the Assyrian oppressed them for nothing” (Isaiah 52:4).
6. The Bible condemns nations for oppressing vulnerable groups of people (Deut. 24:14; Zech. 7:10)
The Bible often uses the word justice in a restorative sense (restoring inalienable rights that were taken away by others), which we can see in the Exodus story. So the Bible calls God’s people to seek justice and righteousness in their societal living (Micah 6:8). This is how God’s people express the second half of the decalogue or this is how they express their love for their neighbors (Prov. 31:8-9; Jer. 21:12). If you look at all of the hundreds of occurrences of justice mishpat in the Bible, “Nine out of ten of them are uniquely focused and aware of the difficult situations of the vulnerable.” Observe Jesus’ dealings with the poor, vulnerable and weak over and against the pharisees who exploited them. Jesus, likewise, wants Christians to pursue restorative justice, Matt 23:23.
In his book, Journey toward Justice, philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff uses the phrase “the quartet of the vulnerable” to describe the biblically representative groups of often oppressed people: the orphan, the widow, the poor, and the foreigner. Yes, even powerful people can be robbed and abused, but Wolterstorff argues that the difference for the quartet is: “Their daily condition was unjust, or highly vulnerable to being unjust. They too would have suffered episodes of injustice: muggings, for example. But their daily condition was systemically unjust, or highly vulnerable to being systemically unjust.” So a just person before God helps the vulnerable (Job 29:11-14,) in contrast to how the wicked who oppress them (Job 24:2-9).
In summary, ending slavery was a huge step forward towards racial reconciliation. However, much was lost after the assassination of President Lincoln: the promised 40 acres and a mule would have done much in the form of economic justice. Instead, America instituted another 100 years of racist “Black Codes” and the brutal enforcement of them. Through the Civil War, we took only one step towards becoming a nation where all people are free, and all people are treated with the dignity of being image-bearers of God. In the next article, I will consider how the battle for African American Civil Rights affects our nation’s journey towards treating all Americans with dignity as image bearers of God.
Addendum
Does systemic racism remain?
There are a few common objections when it is argued that America’s treatment of Blacks has been systematically racist.
First, it’s argued that describing the plight of Blacks as systemic racism is a Marxist idea. In truth, systemic racism language can be used in a Marxist way. However describing oppression of one group over another doesn’t inherently make someone a Marxist. A Marxist advocates for anarchy as the means of overthrowing oppression in the hope that a utopian society of equality will arise out of the aftermath of the carnage. Christians believe that all people are sinners and sinners make sinful cultures. We advocate loving one’s enemies and seeking justice in righteousness to confront systemic racism—not anarchy. We have seen examples of different cultural groups sinning through oppressive tribalism in recent history. The Holocaust and the Japanese American Interment are clear examples of systemic racism.
A second argument raised against speaking in terms of systemic racism is when it is assumed that being a victim or a part of an oppressed group makes you virtuous. When the Bible talks about justice it is often linked to the word righteous. Everyone is a sinner in need of Christ’s righteousness. Therefore, there are no inherently virtuous individuals or groups before God. History clearly shows this when oppressed groups switch roles with their oppressors as was the case in the 1994 Rwanda genocide. When the oppressed Hutus came to power, they savagely killed the Tutsis in grotesque unrighteousness.
- My great-great-great grandfather March Dillahunt fought and died in the pivotal battle at Chaffin’s Farm for my freedom. Over a thousand black troops were injured or killed in this victory against the South that removed the last barrier for the Union Army to March into Richmond and secure the surrender of the South. https://twitter.com/pastorbscott/status/1274095118585192449
- I am indebted to my friend pastor PJ Tibayan for this idea.