An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle for Equality in Washington, D.C. (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle for Equality in Washington, D.C. Janette Thomas Greenwood An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle for Equality in Washington, D.C. Kate Masur. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8078-3414-5, 376 pp., cloth, $39.95. In this deeply researched, beautifully written narrative, Kate Masur tells the story of Washington, D.C., “as a laboratory for experiments with democracy and [End Page 108] racial equality” during the Civil War and Reconstruction (1). Under the jurisdiction of Congress, and unhindered by constitutional limits on federal power that circumscribed civil rights policies in the South, Washington emerged as “an example for all the land,” in the words of Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner. Spurred on by the District’s heterogeneous African American community, made up of a free black elite, the newly emancipated, and northern migrants, the Republican-controlled Congress initially enacted a broad range of laws, including enfranchisement for black men, as well as antidiscrimination laws on streetcars and railroads. But just as Washington became a laboratory for racial equality, it soon became an experimental venue for taking those same rights away, a precursor of “redemption” and disfranchisement. Washington, then, in many ways, followed the overall trajectory of Reconstruction, from fluid experimentation to retrenchment. But Masur’s close study is so much more than a retelling of a familiar story. Full of many fresh and weighty contributions, An Example for All the Land does an exceptional job of teasing out the meaning of a surprisingly understudied concept in American history: equality. As the author notes, the meaning of “freedom” has received the lion’s share of attention from Reconstruction historians. But equality—unlike freedom, generally defined as an individual’s ability to act as he or she wishes without constraint—is a policy issue: “When people demanded equal rights, they were in essence asking for government measures” (4). Equality, as Masur elegantly shows, was a surprisingly complex concept in the nineteenth century, with little resemblance to contemporary perceptions. Whereas Americans embraced an individualistic equal rights tradition embodied in the Declaration of Independence, they also understood the social order as corporate and its members “less as individuals than as members of different and overlapping groups, differentiated by such attributes as race, sex, economic status, and length of residence in a community” (5). Thus, citizenship itself was hierarchical, a reflection of natural inequities and social groupings. Even though the Civil War and emancipation “exploded” many of these notions, providing “an opportunity for reconstituting the nation along more egalitarian lines,” older notions persisted (6). Moreover, nineteenth-century Americans broke down “equality” into subsets, differentiating civic, political, and social equality. While civic equality usually meant that laws and legal proceedings should not discriminate based on race, some, including African Americans and their Radical allies, pushed for a broader definition, demanding access to all institutions regulated or [End Page 109] chartered by the government, including public accommodations and schools. Political equality generally meant access to voting, jury duty, and office holding. As Masur notes, Republicans disagreed among themselves on the political equality of blacks, as such equality was traditionally associated “with elevated status” (9). Many Republicans felt that as blacks were incapable of making good decisions, they could not be politically equal to whites. Finally, definitions of “social equality,” were even more equivocal, but the term was most often “used as a container for everything they [opponents of black equality] considered anathema” (9). As Masur deftly shows throughout her book, the tension between multiple and competing definitions and concepts of equality was at the crux of many Reconstruction conflicts. Viewing these battles through the framework of equality brings much-needed clarity to these disputes. For example, Masur delineates a series of “upstart claims” made by black Washingtonians, demands for rights and privileges that preceded legislation. These were not claims to existing rights; instead they built on and even merged both the individual rights and privileges traditions. Upstart claims to public space, including access to the U.S. Capitol and Executive Mansion, as well as streetcars, were grounded in traditional notions of respectability, demonstrated by blacks...