Broken Heart of America

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Broken Heart, Chap 6b: The St. Louis World’s Fair

The St. Louis 1904 World’s Fair was billed as the celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase. Launched in the summer of 1904, the Fair brought in 20 million visitors over seven months. Walter Johnson lists the highlights in some detail, including dozens of babies living in incubators and rotated into cribs, a nine-acre reconstruction of the Tyrolean Alps, and an eleven-acre reconstruction of the Holy Land. On the grounds of Washington University the 1904 Olympics took place “as a sort of sideshow,” remarks Johnson. [The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States.

Among the featured scholars and scientists at the fair were Frederick Winslow Taylor (“time management”), the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies (society vs. community), and the historian Frederick Jackson Turner (“frontier thesis”). As Johnson sees it, however, it was anthropology that framed the message. Frederick Skiff, the manager of the exhibits, said they were “registering not only the culture of the world at the time, but indicating the particular plans along with which different races and different people may safely proceed, or, in fact, have begun to advance towards a still higher development” (204).

In what Johnson describes as a “human zoo,” ten thousand people were exhibited in reconstructions of their “native habitat, including:

  • Ainu people from Japan
  • “Patagonians: from the Andes
  • 51 of the First Nations of North America, including
    • Chief Joseph of the massacred Nez Perce
    • Quanah Parker, the Comanche soldier
    • Geronimo, the Apache chief, posing for 5 cent-photographs with white leaders and
      • playing the part of the Sitting Bull in daily reenactments of the Battle of Little Bighorn
  • Ota Benga,  one of seven other people sold to Samuel Verner as Mbuti “pygmies” from the Congo Free State
    • exhibited at the Fair as a “cannibal”
    • danced with other enslaved Africans for  as many as 20,000 people at a time
    • later exhibited in a cage at the Bronx Zoo
    • in March 1966 built a fire, danced, then shot himself through the heart in Lynchburg, VA

The exhibits were intended to represent a “march of human progress,” placing the savages of the Congo at one end and white humanity at the other. As Walter Benjamin wrote fifty years later, “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (“Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), no. 7.

Although the United States had concluded the war in the Philippines in 1902, American troops were still fighting insurgents in 1904. Despite the conflict, the U.S. War Department transported one thousand Filipinos and 400 additional Philippine Scouts, U.S. aligned soldiers, to the most-visited exhibit at the Fair, the “Philippine Reservation.” William Howard Taft, the US military governor of the Philippines argued that the Fair would exert ” a very great influence on the pacification of the Philippines” by influencing the Filipinos through the exhibit of the wonders of modern civilization and reconciling them to their fate as conquered people. Johnson called the Philippine Reservation a “civilizationist psyop, an act of psychological warfare.”

Within the Reservation the tribes were assigned different levels of civilization:

  • the Visayans – “intelligent”
  • Islamic Moros – “fierce”
  • Bagobo – “savage”
  • Negritos – “monkey-like”
  • Igorots – “picturesque”

The near-nudity of the Igorot made for controversy and fascination at the Fair. Some worried that the naked dark bodies might horrify or stimulate the white women attending the Fair. Government officials thought they would undermine the case that the US was civilizing the Filipinos. The Anthropology Department thought they should represent the authentic culture of their tribe. President Theodore Roosevelt settled the debacle by requiring codpieces worn in strategic areas to create the impression of both the primitive and the civilized.

According to the leader of the Fair’s Anthropology Department, William McGee, “There is a course of progress running from lower to higher humanity, and all the physical and human types of Man mark stages in that course” (207). The working theory was that civilization could take the place of racial violence as a tool of “racial progress.”  The conclusive activities of the Filipino war were vindicated by these exhibits. However the Black soldiers who served as “adjutants” in the Indian wars, the Spanish-American War, and the Philippine -American War were not allowed on the grounds in uniform.

In fact, African Americans were only represented at the Fair as actors on “the Old Plantation,” where they sang minstrel songs, staged a religious revival, and cakewalked. The music of Scott Joplin, who had composed a piece to accompany a waterfall called “The Cascades,” was banned from the grounds. Ragtime was considered a challenge to the beaux arts classicism that pervaded the Fair.

One memorable distinction between savagery and civilization was the rumor that the natives of the Philippine Reservation ate dogs. One of the neighborhoods near the exposition grounds is today known as”Dogtown,”  because it was supposedly where the Filipinos got their dogs.

The theme song “Meet Me in St. Louis” made a salacious reference to dancing the “Hoochee-Koochee,”  a reference to a dancer at the Columbian Exposition in 1893. Under the name “Fatima,” Fahreda Mazar Spyropoulos, danced so suggestively that she was banned from the St. Louis World’s Fair. The “hoochee koochee” was considered a “racially tinted sexual promise.”  The subtext of the lyrics was a white woman lured by interracial desire and a white man who had lost control of his girl.

Walter Johnson concludes that two important lessons were established by the St. Louis World’s Fair.

  1. “to codify the history that had begun with Lewis and Clark–the history of nineteenth century St. Louis and the imperial project it sponsored–into a set of lessons that would guide the United States in the twentieth century.” e.g. President Roosevelt announced while touring the grounds that the United States “would reserve the right to intervene in the internal affairs of nations anywhere in the Western Hemisphere,” i.e. would become its “policeman.”(214).
  2. “It tried to channel all of the violence, steamy desire,, and brittle masculine anxiety that characterized both the history of the city and its daily life into a set of pat lessons about white supremacy and racial progress”( 215).

 

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Broken Heart Chap 5b: Westward Imperialism

In historical narratives the story of Reconstruction in the South has overshadowed the  genocide taking place in the West at the same time. Historians today argue that the de-humanizing of the Indian nations in the West paved the way for the lynching and domestic terrorism in the East. The balance of Chapter Five of The Broken Heart of America,  follows the events in the West concurrent with Reconstruction.

President Abraham Lincoln’s base was the “free soil” wing of the Republican Party, which Walter Johnson describes as:

  • antislavery
  • white supremacist
  • imperialist
  • removalist

The white supremacy was born out by a desire to segregate, despite the “antislavery” plank in the platform. Lincoln, himself, had hoped to claim land in Panama or the Caribbean that could be reserved strictly for Blacks to inhabit apart from white society. Days before he died he wrote of the Black Army Veterans: “I believe it would be better to export them all to some fertile country with a good climate, which they could have to themselves” (qtd in Johnson: James D, Richardson, The Messages and papers of the President, 1789-1897 (New York:Bureau of National Literature, 1902, 127.)

As for the “removalist” plank, that referred to removing Indians from their land. The essence of it, according to Johnson was “the idea that land in the West was there to be used as the standing reserve of white freedom, settler, liberal or radical. All of the elements of the party were imperialist, and all grounded their politics and their hopes on Indian land” (Johnson 161). This removal of Indians from their land was as natural as the air breathed in the nineteenth century. If there were any dissenting voices, they were faint.

The Homestead Act (May 1863) provided white settlers free access to 160 acres if they settled west of the Mississippi. 1.5 million settlers took advantage of the offer following the War, taking 300 million acres of the West. In August 1862, Dakotas swept down on what is today known as Minnesota against white homesteaders, killing as many as eight hundred in a thirty-seven day war. Two thousand of that tribe were rounded up by the US Army and 392 were tried for murder.

On the day after Christmas in 1862, a week before he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln ordered  the simultaneous  execution by hanging of thirty-eight Dakota men, in an exemplary act of retribution that remains the largest mass execution in the history of the United States ( as well as marked contrast from the emergent laws of war that governed the treatment of Confederate prisoners of war). (163)

Remembering the Largest Mass Execution in U.S. History

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg5ymYY09l8

  • September, 1863 – US army attacked Dakota and Lakota in the summer killing 400, mostly women and children (163).
  • November, 1864 – Colorado volunteers under Colonel John Chivington massacred 200 Cheyenne and Arapahos at Sands Creek, Colorado territory, celebrating with a desecration and sexual mutilation of the dead (163).
  • 1868- Treaty of Fort Laramie allowed the construction of the transcontinental railroad through territory of the Cheyenne, Arapaho and Dakota and in turn granted 70 million acres of present-day South Dakota and Wyoming, including 32 million acres of “permanent reservation.”  This has become the legal grounds for their descendants to sue for this territory, which is considerably larger than the small tract on which they currently reside.
  • 1867 – U.S. Grant, commanding general, declared the completion of the transcontinental railroad would “go far toward a permanent settlement of our Indian difficulties.”
  • 1871 – A federal law is passed that the United States would make no further treaties with the Indians. The strategy was to herd them onto reservations or keep driving them west.
  • 1874 – Grant’s successor, the Civil War hero W. T. Sherman moved the army headquarters to St. Louis, saying, “We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians stop the progress [of the railroads].”

The railroad represented the colonization of the West and a linking with the nations bordering the Pacific, so the financial ambitions of the merchant class drove the completion of it at all costs. Johnson emphasizes how the armies of both the Union and Confederacy were redeployed to St. Louis to train  at Jefferson Barracks for the clearing of the West. “In these years the reunification of the United States was accomplished not through the pacification of the southern whites and the revolutionary elimination of white supremacy, but in continental conquest in the service of capitalist expansion” (166).

The Black soldiers of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalries (“Buffalo Soldiers”) were also trained at Jefferson Barracks and made up ten percent of the army’s mounted units. Johnson objects to the romanticizing of these soldiers as “men so devoted to freedom that they were willing to suffer injustice in order to exemplify a better pathway to their white antagonists” (166). Rather, it was sadly ironic that the segregated and abused Black unit participated in the domination of another oppressed race to fulfill the white man’s dreams of exploiting the West for profit.

Carl Schurz,  German-born and formerly of St. Louis, was now Secretary of the Interior and took control of Indian removal and re-education through the infamous Indian boarding schools of the nineteenth century, such as Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. The founder of Carlisle was William Henry Pratt, a retired lieutenant from the Tenth Cavalry. He was famous for the philosophy “kill the Indian, save the man.” Schurz was a big fan of the model, according to Pratt. Three-quarters of Native children were taught in Boarding Schools run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, one-third in off-reservation schools.

In the latter nineteenth century St. Louis was a commercial and transportation rival to Chicago, building on the growth of the railroad and commerce with the southwest into Mexico. In 1874 the completion of Eads Bridge across the Mississippi was the first East-West connection. The designer Eads developed an underwater caisson inside of which the bridge piers could be built up to the surface, but rapid decompression in the workers’ bloodstream caused 119 men to become severely ill and 14 died, as the bridge was completed at human cost. Subsequently the financier J. P. Morgan used suspect financial maneuvers to take control of the bridge.

The pursuit of land in the southwest for the railroads (Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad) provoked the Red River War of 1874, which drove the Comanche, Kiowa, Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho from their lands and onto small reservations.

In 1894 the massive Romanesque Union Station was completed, and St.Louis had the most railways converging through it in the United States– twenty-two. The financier Jay Gould controlled enough of the traffic across the Eads Bridge that he was able to  set rates from transportation of coal across the river.

Other industries that depended on the transportation and or provided industry to St. Louis:

  • meat-packing (“Republic of Red Meat”)
  • milling flour
  • pressed cotton
  • brewing beer
  • cigar manufacture
  • streetcar, carriage, railcar, locomotives
  • stove-works
  • shoes
  • rifles, revolvers, ammunition
  • horses, mules, saddles

The merchants and manufacturers of St. Louis were enthusiastic proponents of the 1898 Spanish-American War, because of the opportunity to extend their markets to the Philippines and Cuba and northern Mexico. Anheuser-Bush reported a 50% rise in global sales over 1899. “By 1900, the city’s power brokers had come to be known collectively as ‘the Big Cinch.’ The heirs of the old families and sons of the new ones lived within a few blocks of one another and the corner of Lindell and Kingshighway (and Vandeventer Place), and their names –Carr, Glasgow, Maffit, O’Fallon,Lucas—still adorn the street signs and city limits that define the space in the St.Louis metropolitan area” (177).

On May 8, 1900 3,325 streetcar workers struck to receive recognition of their union and the ten-hour workday. The battle for supremacy raged most of the summer with protest marches and the occasional brick-throwing. Eventually twenty of the striking marchers were arrested and a counter posse of 2500 deputies was raised. By September the strike was broken asserting the power of a ruling class. The streetcar workers were forced to apply for their old jobs. On this note St. Louis entered the twentieth century.

Streetcar strike supporters

Image courtesy Missouri History MuseumPro-union commuters jam a horse-drawn wagon during the streetcar strike. The union organized alternative forms of transportation. The company and its posse tried to block the wagons when they could. Image courtesy Missouri History Museum

 

 

 

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Broken Heart Chap 5a: Radicalism and Liberalism

The Integration of Black soldiers

What historians called “Reconstruction” was more of a “reinvention” in St.Louis, based on the influx of refugees from the South and entrepreneurs from the East, the population doubling from the Civil War to 1900, when it reached 600,000 (W. Johnson, The Broken Heart of America).  From 1860 to 1870 the Black population increased by 600 per cent. With the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, these would be free Black citizens, yet, “The broad consensus shared by both the Free Soil Republicans and the proslavery Democrats who supported the Dred Scott decision was that there was no place in St. Louis (nor really in the United States of America) for free Black people”(Johnson, 143)

This despite the significant contribution of Black soldiers to the Union cause during the Civil War. The first regiments of US Colored Troops were formed in Benton Barracks, St. Louis (62nd, 65th, and 67th US Infantry). Forty per cent of the eligible Black men of Missouri, 8000 volunteers, served in the U.S. Army during the Civil War.

Oh Fremont he told them when the war it first begun,

How to save the Union and the way it should be done,

But Kentucky swore so hard and Old Abe he had his fears,

Till ev’ry hope was lost but the colored volunteers. (“Give Us a Flag”)

Following the war the Black soldiers helped organize “the largest hospital in the West” in Benton Barracks, today the site of Fairgrounds Park.  Yet segregation prevailed on streetcars until a ruling in 1868 and other public places (hotels, concert halls, ballrooms) were permitted to set their own standards for segregation.

Although schools were segregated, the St. Louis School District opened three public schools for Black children in 1866. Maya Angelou graduated from Toussaint L’Ouverture Elementary School. Sumner High School became the first public high school for Black students west of the Mississippi in 1875. W.E. B. DuBois wrote later, “Had it not been for the Negro schools and colleges, the Negro would to all intents and purposes would have been driven back to slavery” (148).

The Post-bellum White Immigrants

Tens of thousands of impoverished Whites migrated to St. Louis in the post-bellum period, but they had no society with the Black migrants. Galusha Anderson, the antislavery minister wrote, “They regarded manual labor as a disgrace. They had been taught in the school of slavery that honest toil was servile and ignoble.” In many ways their plight was similar: subject to curfew, to surveillance, to rumors and to confinement in the downtown “slave pen.” Despite working the same jobs with the same hardships, white immigrants refused to align themselves with Blacks.

Under the Missouri Constitution of 1865, the politics of the state came to be preoccupied with questions about white life, white politics, white rights, and white reconciliation in a way that foreshadowed the course of Reconstruction nationally (Johnson, 151).

For example southern whites had to earn their citizenship by signing a “Test Oath,” which detailed the many ways they might have supported the Confederacy and swore them to renounce any association. There was nothing a Black citizen could do to earn the vote until 1870 with the Fifteenth Amendment.  The so-called “liberal” wing of the Republican Party, including the Germans of south St.Louis, abandoned the right of Blacks to vote. It was widely believed that empowering Blacks this way would have attracted Black labor from other states, displacing whites from manual labor. The champions of Black suffrage were considered the “radical” left wing of the Party.

The End of Reconstruction

The election of the liberal Republican Rutherford Hayes in 1876 was part of a brokered deal to end military occupation  of the South, leaving Black citizens to fend for themselves, and promoting the railroad and tariff in the capital interests of the liberal Republicans. This signaled not only the end of Reconstruction in the South, but the promotion of White capitalism and settlement in the West. As Johnson observes,

 . . .the end of Reconstruction represented not simply the unleashing of white supremacy on the South, although that was surely part of it, but also the alliance of white supremacy with property, for as both the most radical and most conservative among nineteenth-century observers noted, the right to hold human property might have been the first to have been challenged, but there was no reason that it should be the last. It was, then, no accident that the counter-revolution of property had its earliest political precursors in the politics of Missouri, where the most radical wartime critique of both slavery and the rights of property had taken root (155).

The last gasp of workers against their masters came in the General Strike of 1877 originating in St. Louis. Among the grievances shared with railway workers from the East were, dangerous working conditions, wage cuts, speedups, and blacklisting of union members.  The strike was both national and inter-racial, gathering ten thousand workers in Lucas Market on the night of July 24. “To onlookers, especially unsympathetic onlookers, the most remarkable aspect of the strike was its interracial solidarity, cooly described by a reporter from the New York Sun as a ‘novel feature of the times”  (158).

The leadership in St. Louis ordered the suspension of outdoor meetings, turning authority to control them over to the police. Two days later US Army troops took control of the rail yard of East St. Louis. The leading men celebrated the restoration of order on October 5, 1878 the first night the “Veiled Prophet” patrolled the streets of St, Louis. In an invitation-only parade the city police commissioner, John G. Priest, played the role of the “Veiled Prophet,”  on a float described as ” a villainous looking executioner and blood-curdling butcher’s block.” The parade began a 140-year tradition in St. Louis

The Great Divorce of 1876

In 1869 the state government transferred the power to assess, tax, and audit property within the city to the County Court.  The wealthy business owners in the city organized a secessionist movement of the city from the county in order to avoid their taxes subsidizing their rural neighbors to the west.  A freeholders board was chosen in a special election to design separate governments for city and county and to determine the boundary, setting it at the western edge of Forest Park. This separation remains in place today, although it has become the economic bane of the city.

This chapter contains much more on the expansion of the railroad and the displacement of Indian tribes, but I will save that for the next blog entry.

 

 

 

 

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Broken Heart Chap 4: Emancipation in Missouri

John C. Fremont (1813-1890) Stock Photo

John C. Fremont (1813-1890)

Where and when were the first Southern slaves emancipated?  Long before Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation or the date celebrated by Juneteenth. It was in St. Louis under a proclamation of John Fremont, the rogue Union general, on August 30, 1861.  In Chapter 4 of The Broken Heart of America, Walter Johnson suggests that his early move for emancipation was influenced by two German immigrants, a journalist and a military officer,  and the liberally disposed German community of south St. Louis.

Fremont had no standing to change the legal status of slaves, and President Lincoln chastised him, because it would “alarm our Southern Union friends,” at a time he was desperately trying to hold the Union together. The official position of the U.S. government was that slaves were “contraband of war” temporarily held.

Fremont told the President he would not rescind the emancipation, but that the President had every right to countermand him publicly. Lincoln obliged and removed Fremont from command by November, 1861. He was brought to Washington to face other charges, for which he was eventually acquitted.

Fremont’s wife, Jessie Benton, met the President not long afterward and reported he was furious with her husband. “It was a war for a great national idea . . . . General Fremont should never have dragged the Negro into it” (Gerteis, Civil War in St. Louis, 151).  This was two years before the Emancipation Proclamation.

According to Walter Johnson, author of The Broken Heart of America the German immigrant community in south St. Louis had a strong influence on both the political journalism and the assembled Union army in  St. Louis. Not only bricklayers, the immigrants were liberal thinkers influenced by the writing of Karl Marx, Frederich Engels and their naturalized American publisher Joseph Weydemeyer.  Weydemeyer published the famous radical philosophers when they were considered subversive criminals in France and Germany, and he had to flee to the U.S.A. to avoid arrest.

He eventually landed in St. Louis, where he founded the “Proletarian League” and the “Communist Club.” The communists were committed to “the abolition of private ownership of the means of production” and “the equality of all human beings, irrespective of color or sex.” This position naturally led Weydemeyer to become an abolitionist, but more in the cause of proletarian liberation than the crusade for human rights.

The German immigrants comprised a large percentage of the Union army in St. Louis, and they were led by Prussian officers Henry Boernstein and Franz Sigel, both disciples of Karl Marx. Boernstein brought his communist vision to a German language newspaper Anzeiger des Westens.  Sigel organized the working class German radicals into a paramilitary battalion that was ready to seize Camp Jackson (Jefferson Barracks) within a month after the firing on Fort Sumpter (April 12, 1861).

Boernstein and the Marxist publisher Joseph Weydemeyer promoted the cause of abolition in local German and English newspapers and recruited a host of immigrants to the battle to subdue the slave state of Missouri.  The native born citizens of north St. Louis were not easily recruited to the Union cause. When the Confederate prisoners were marched from Camp Jackson to the Arsenal for imprisonment, the German soldiers were pelted with rocks and shouts of “Damn the Dutch” and “Hurrah for Jeff Davis.” There was a stampede and social unrest in the city for days until finally the wealthiest families began to make plans to leave.

After seizing Camp Jackson Boernstein and Sigel began a march westward under  the command of Nathaniel Lyon. Walter Johnson comments, “Lyon’s march across Missouri has been largely forgotten by a Civil War historiography focused on the eastern theater and the Battle of Manassas, which was fought on July 21, 1861. Lyon’s battles in in Missouri, however, were the only Union military victories in 1861; more than that, the actions taken by his army presaged the course of the war” (129).

Johnson refers to the “actions” of accepting and recruiting runaway slaves to the Union army as they marched across the western frontier. “Revolutionary alliance with runaway slaves was a strategic imperative. It would take Abraham Lincoln and his eastern generals another year to absorb the lessons of Lyon’s campaign” (130).

General Lyons took Jefferson City without much resistance, but there was a strong slaveholder presences there. When Boernstein was left in charge of the city, he compromised on the liberation of slaves and found himself under-manned in holding the city, as Lyons marched on.

“As Lyons’ army marched west it relied on runaways for information about their owners, the landscape, and the whereabouts of pro-Confederate troops in the field” (131). Increasingly they were arming the fleeing slaves to fight alongside them in battle. In Springfield, the federal force was defeated, Lyons was killed, and they retreated to Rolla for the winter. Franz Sigel took over command.

Sigel, an avowed Marxist, welcomed the collaboration of the former slaves. Observes Johnson, “The politics of the camp in Rolla–the combination of the political radicalism of Sigel and the revolutionary action of the African Americans who joined his army– came for a brief moment to define the approach of the entire US Army Department of the West, still headquartered in St. Louis but now under the leadership of John C. Fremont” (132).

The German community of St. Louis were loyal supporters of Fremont even after his recall to Washington. The German press  spoke in favor of Fremont and Franz Sigel, to the detriment of Fremont’s successor, General Henry Halleck. In 1864 they were among the principal supporters of Fremont’s brief candidacy for president, as the nominee of the Radical Democracy Party. Notably the party was also supported by Frederick Douglass, Wendell Philips, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Despite Fremont’s abysmal failure as a Presidential candidate, his abolitionist connections with the German community of south St. Louis foreshadowed the Emancipation Proclamation and the eventual federal policy toward the liberation and arming of former slaves to the Union cause.

 

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Broken Heart Chap 3: A Black Life and a White Life that Mattered

Whenever the vicious portion of the population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure and with impunity, depend on it: the government cannot last. Lincoln, “Address by Abraham Lincoln Before the Young Men’s Lyceum.” 1838

In his early years Lincoln was more famous for this law and order speech than for civil rights, but he alluded to two victims of St. Louis hate crimes when he was s legislator in the Illinois House of Representatives– an editor and an “obnoxious person.”

The story of Francis McIntosh (the “obnoxious person”), a free Black steward aboard a steamboat docking in St. Louis, resonates with our modern Black on Blue tragedies.  McIntosh was barely off the boat when two sailors came running toward him followed by two other men in plain clothes, although they were Deputy Sheriff George Hammond and Deputy Constable William Mull.  McIntosh held them up in their pursuit, so they decided to take him in, instead of the sailors they had pursued.  In the struggle the Steward pulled out a knife and slit Hammond’s throat. Then he drove his knife into Constable Mull’s stomach. McIntosh fled down Fourth Street, but he was apprehended by about fifty men by the time he reached Walnut Street. They heard the cries of the pursuing Constable Mull, surrounded McIntosh, and took him to the local jail.

A crowd gathered outside the jail, along with Deputy Hammond’s widow and children. Their cries of grief incensed the crowd until a group of men forced their way into the jail and dragged McIntosh away. A few blocks away on Chestnut Street they tied McIntosh to a tree and built a fire around him. “Only as the flames arose around him did he begin to pray and then to scream. Some of those who watched in the crowd later remembered hearing him to beg to be shot as he was consumed by the flames.” (Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 8-9, 13, 31.)

McIntosh’s lynching was a national story, reported locally by the white abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy in his St. Louis Observer. The lynching occurred in April, 1836, and after a series of articles deploring the act, Lovejoy fled to Alton, Illinois in May under pressure from angry readers.

In November, 1837  a St.Louis mob crossed the Mississippi to set fire to the warehouse where Lovejoy kept his printing press.  He was shot when he arrived at the site of the arson and tried to save his press. The mob seized the press, destroyed it, and hurled it in the river below.  Lovejoy died of his gunshot wounds, and no one was ever convicted for his murder. John Quincy Adams called it “a shock as of an earthquake throughout the continent.”

The remains of Frances McIntosh were left under the burned tree at the corner of Seventh and Chestnut for years afterward, clearly a symbol of White supremacy and Black subordination. Even the voice of protest, Elijah Lovejoy, had been snuffed out. Instructing the members of the grand jury investigating the lynching of McIntosh the appropriately-named Judge Lawless said that the lynch mob had responded to a “higher law,” the need to avenge the murder of Hammond and “similar atrocities committed in this and other states by INDIVIDUALS OF NEGRO BLOOD AGAINT THEIR WHITE BRETHREN.”   Walter Johnson, author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States, commented, “The mob was moved by a spirit greater than that of law or constitutional order: the spirit of white rage.” (78).

The three white men arrested in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a black man who was chased while jogging in Georgia, were indicted on murder charges.

It is not hard to see comparisons between McIntosh’s confrontation with plains clothes policemen with the story of Ahmaud Arbery, the Black jogger accosted by two men in civilian clothes in Atlanta, who mistook him for a local burglar.  In the modern version, the Black man is unarmed and falls victim to a shotgun blast.  But the curse of jogging while Black resembles the curse of a man who thought he was defending shipmates against pursuers, when he stepped in front of the plain clothes policemen.  It was the fatal color of the skin that resulted in death.

Like many modern historians Walter Johnson sees parallels between the removal of Indian tribes from Missouri and its enduring identity as a slave state. He points to the Jefferson Barracks, home to U.S. Army battalions deployed to push Indian settlements westward during the expansion of white settlements in the first half of the century. He cites the pressure of white settlers to dispossess the Osage as they pushed west for room to live.  At the time of Missouri’s admission to the Union as a slave state (1820), the new state constitution stipulated that free Blacks and mulattoes were forbidden to enter the state from Illinois and surrounding free states, despite a substantial population of Black freemen in St. Louis already.

The non-slave-holding population of St. Louis was 86%, a large disadvantaged white population. “For the non-slaveholding and working class white men who predominated in the state, Indians were a barrier to cheap land and enslaved people and free Blacks were a barrier to high wages” (84). This turned the poor white against the poor black and poor Indian. It was not always the wealthy elite that turned their political power against the darker people.

Johnson takes many more pains to show the political polarization among the races and tribes, but I will only bring you to the end result: Dred Scott vs. Sandford, March 6, 1857. Justice Roger Taney declared that Blacks were “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” (Dred Scott vs. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857).

At this nadir of race relations, Johnson suggests that St. Louis had another road it might have taken following the Civil War, but, of course, his book would be much different if the city had taken that road.

 

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Broken Heart Intro /Chap 1: Racial Capitalism

The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States, by Walter Johnson (New York: Basic Books), 2020.

Walter Johnson traces the racial history of  metropolitan St. Louis from the exploration of Lewis and Clark to the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014.  He is a native of Columbia, MO, personally identifying with the history he investigates. “I came to this book less as a professional historian than as a citizen taking the measure of a history that I had lived through, but not yet fully understood. This is a history that I have resisted, but also a history from which I have benefited, as a white man and a Missourian” (Prologue).

Having lived in St. Louis less than two years, I came to this book with a patchwork of history that needed some sewing together. I wanted to understand the racial tensions of this city through a historical lens. I was glad to read a historian with a stake in a good outcome for this city, because I also hoped for that outcome. Johnson expresses my wishes when he concludes: “I offer the result, not in the spirit of academics’ too-common conceit that injustice is everywhere but in their own biographical backyard, but rather in the hope that we may all seek to do better– to walk humbly, to act justly, to love mercy” (Prologue).

Chapter 1 – The dark side of capitalism in St. Louis is the history of eviction and extraction, as much as exploitation and production.  Johnson describes the eviction of the Osage and other tribes in the early 1800’s as a consequence of deliberate imbalances in the beaver trade. Subsequent evictions reflect the ideology of white supremacy driving the dispossession of races and ethnicities in St. Louis.  Borrowing from Cedric Robinson, Johnson calls this history “‘racial capitalism:” the intertwined history of white supremacist ideology and the practices of empire, extraction, and exploitation’ (6).

The earliest encounters of white people with natives in the northwest resulted in trading for wild animal pelts, especially beaver, coveted by the elite of Europe for soft and stylish hats. The Osage, Mandan and Blackfeet tribes became the exclusive suppliers for the traders, who offered guns and finely woven textiles in return. It  appeared to be a relationship for mutual profit.

But as early as 1803 President Thomas Jefferson had a strategy for dispossessing the native people of their land. In a letter to William Henry Harrison, he wrote: “We shall push our trading uses, and be glad to see the good and influential Indians . . . run into debt, because we observe when these debts get beyond what the individual can pay they become willing to lop them off by a cession of land.”

During the War of 1812 the Osage tribe fought alongside the Americans against the British and their allied tribes. In the summer of 1813 the word went out that a thousand hostile Indians were gathered in St. Charles County for an assault on St. Louis. Governor William Clark ,of Lewis and Clark fame, and French trader Pierre Chouteau arranged for a garrison of 260 Osage warriors to defend the city for the duration of the war.

The peace treaty ending the War of 1812 allocated territories to the British in the north and the Americans to the south, but nothing for the Indian tribes who did most of the fighting.  Meanwhile, the fur trade progressed as Thomas Jefferson foresaw; the Osage tribes were gradually divested of their land south of the Missouri and west of the Mississippi.

Empire: William Clark maintained the trade and social balance between the tribes and the white traders in the early 1800’s.  He settled disputes and negotiated the trades that brought large swathes of Indian land under federal control. Between 1808 and 1835 he obtained 419 million acres for the United States and removed 81,000 Indians from their homelands.

During the first third of the nineteenth century, the city that had once been the economic center of the fur trade was transformed into the administrative center of midwestern Indian removal — the largest forced relocation camp on the continent.(34)

Extraction: Predictably the European demand for hats began to outstrip the supply of beaver and the western Indians refused to trap at the pace expected by the fur companies.   When the white traders tried to establish their own trading posts upriver, the Blackfeet attacked and destroyed their fort. Later the U.S. Army was summoned to clear the passages to the hunting grounds, but the Blackfeet continued to command the upper reaches of the Missouri River. As the beaver supply declined, the demand for silk hats arose in Europe and importers turned their gaze toward Asia. By 1840 the western beaver was close to extinct.

Exploitation: The hunger for land and for profit among the white settlers was described by Alexis de Tocqueville as follows: “This world here belongs to us, they tell themselves every day: the Indian race is destined for final destruction which one cannot prevent and which it is not desirable to delay. Heaven has not made them to become civilized; it is necessary that they die.” Eventually white settlers moved into Osage territory without regard for the negotiated settlements of William Clark.

The relationship of William Clark to his life-long slave York is a sad postscript to exploitation. They were raised together on his father’s farm, and York accompanied Clark westward and on his entire northwest expedition. In Johnson’s words:

[York] had suffered the heat and mosquitoes of the Upper Midwest summer; the freezing hungry winter at Fort Mandan; and the torturous uncertain passage over the mountains. He had rowed a boat upstream against the current of the river and portaged the expedition’s goods around the Great Falls of the Missouri. He had cared for his owner when Clark was disabled for days on end with irritable bowel syndrome that left him not only physically incapacitated, but also unable to control the crew of mountain men allegedly under his command. York had seen his owner utterly dependent upon Indians for food and for the directions that guided him along the trail that today bears the white man’s name. York had been celebrated by the Indians who had never seen a man with skin so dark as his, who wondered at it, caressed it, and understood it as a sign of his vitality and potency. (38)

Two years following the expedition, York traveled to Virginia with Clark, who was  courting his future wife. On the return trip they stopped in Louisville, where the Clark family owned a farm and and where York’s wife remained enslaved. York told Clark he wished to stay in Louisville with his wife while Clark returned home with his bride. Clark refused and returned to St. Louis with York and nine other Clark family slaves, some also leaving family behind. Clark wrote back to this brother, ” I have been obliged [to] whip almost all my people, and they are now beginning to think that  it is best to do better and not Cry.” Clark was dissatisfied with York after this and apparently returned him to Kentucky, asking his brother to find the slave a “severe master” who would make him wish he were in Missouri again and to “give over that wife of his.”

In an interview with the famous author Washington Irving, Clark claimed he had emancipated York and provided him with a wagon and horses to run a transport between Nashville and Richmond. “He could not get up early enough in the morning,” reported Clark”–his horses were ill-kept–two died– the others grew poor. He sold them and was cheated.” “Damn this freedom,” said York, according to Clark. “I have never had a happy day since I got it.”

Indeed, Clark declared, he had emancipated several slaves, and always the story had the same moral: “They all repented and wanted to come back.” They could not live without him (39).

The racist convictions of William Clark were evidenced by his inability to see his dependency on human beings he considered his inferiors:

  • his dependence on the Osage warriors during the War of 1812 and his transfer of hundreds of thousands of acres of their land to Pierre Chouteau for their alleged debt in the fur trade
  • his dependence on his Indian guides, especially the Shoshone woman Sacajawea, to find the passages to the Pacific
  • his dependence on  his personal black slave throughout the expedition in the Northwest

But when it came to land settlement, William Clark was a humane presence compared to the angry white settlers who just wanted to occupy land without regard for purchase. By the time he was defeated as governor of Missouri, Clark was considered an Indian appeaser, because he had tried to negotiate land deals instead of letting white settlers invade the native people’s land.  Thus racial capitalism in mid-century descended to “white settler imperialism and ethnic cleansing” (39).