"We Will Be Satisfied with Nothing Less": The African American Struggle for Equal Rights in the North during Reconstruction

Abstract

"We Will Be Satisfied With Nothing Less": The African American Struggle for Equal Rights in the North during Reconstruction. By Hugh Davis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. 232 pages. $45 (cloth).The conventional Reconstruction historiography focuses on the struggles of African Americans to realize equal rights in the South in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. However, Hugh Davis-a Professor Emeritus of history at Southern Connecticut State University-sheds considerable light on the lesser known African American battle for male suffrage rights in northern and western states. In We Will Be Satisfied With Nothing Less, Davis provocatively claims that "Reconstruction began in the North" where the relatively small number of northern African Americans placed political pressure on reluctant white Republicans to live up to the ideals and rhetoric espoused by the party of Lincoln. Davis's work tracks the initial success of northern and western African Americans from the late-1860s to the mid1870s in their drive for political equality, accessibility to public schools and the beginning of their downward political and social trajectory from the mid-1870s onwards as the reactionary politics of Reconstruction began the reversal of many gains.We Will Be Satisfied With Nothing Less is organized thematically around two issues: black male suffrage and equal access to public schools within the context of political machinations of various African American groups as they navigated awkward partnerships with white Republicans, many of whom were reactionary and racist. The first chapter chronicles the struggle of northern African Americans before and during the Civil War with the introduction of organizations such as the National Equal Rights League and the Pennsylvania Equal rights League, both created in the 1850s. Davis also provides evidence that "race pride and consciousness" predated the Civil War, in part, by showing the nascent political activism of individuals such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany (7). Indeed, there was a vibrant and dynamic African American community that either proselytized emigration (a return to Africa) or those that had faith in the founding democratic principles of the United States. African American political organizations at the national level or in the form of state auxiliaries were primarily run by middle class African American men, though the author posits that the leadership did reach out "to the black Masses (28)." Interestingly, Davis asserts that African American women were more likely than African American men to legally challenge segregation and discrimination in public areas due to their greater interaction with whites in the workplace.In the aftermath of the Civil War the political focus on manhood suffrage shifted from the state level - because the political ethos was such that states had "sole authority" to determine political rights - to lobbying Washington (47). According to Davis, establishment African Americans also framed their push for manhood suffrage around service to the union during the Civil War and the fact that the struggle for political rights was not a demand for equal social rights, the latter an answer to racists' fear of miscegenation (42). The struggle for political equality in the 1860s was marked by the ambivalence of white Republicans - who believed there was little to gain politically by supporting the suffrage goals of two percent of the northern population - and Democrats who had much to gain from the political support of recent immigrants from Europe (53).A revealing sub-text in this volume was the dichotomy in the civil rights movement of the late 1860s and 1870s: black manhood suffrage versus women's (white) suffrage, and the social cleavages that these political battles exposed. Davis observes that white suffragists such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton believed that white women deserved the vote more than black men. …