REDRAWING THE BOUNDARIES ★^669a way for white southerners to come to terms with defeat in the Civil War
without abandoning white supremacy. The death of the Confederacy, in many
sermons, was equated with the death of Christ, who gave his life for the sins
of mankind.
Even as white northern Protestants abandoned concern for racial justice
and embraced the idea of sectional reconciliation, southern churches played a
key role in keeping the values of the Old South alive by refusing to reunite with
northern counterparts. In the 1840s, the Methodist and Baptist churches had
divided into northern and southern branches. Methodists would not reunite
until well into the twentieth century; Baptists have yet to do so. In both North
and South, school history textbooks emphasized happy slaves and the evils of
Reconstruction, and the role of black soldiers in winning the war was all but
forgotten. When a group of black veterans attempted to participate in a Florida
ceremony commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil
War in 1911, a white mob tore the military insignias off their jackets and drove
them away.
REDRAWING THE BOUNDARIES
The effective nullification of the laws and amendments of Reconstruction and
the reduction of blacks to the position of second- class citizens reflected nation-
wide patterns of thought and policy. As the nineteenth century drew to a close,
American society seemed to be fracturing along lines of both class and race. The
result, commented economist Simon Patten, was a widespread obsession with
redrawing the boundary of freedom by identifying and excluding those unwor-
thy of the blessings of liberty. “The South,” he wrote, “has its negro, the city has
its slums.... The friends of American institutions fear the ignorant immigrant,
and the workingman dislikes the Chinese.” As Patten suggested, many Ameri-
cans embraced a more and more restricted definition of nationhood.
The New Immigration and the New Nativism
The 1890s witnessed a major shift in the sources of immigration to the United
States. Despite the prolonged depression, 3.5 million newcomers entered the
United States during the decade, seeking jobs in the industrial centers of the
North and Midwest. Over half arrived not from Ireland, England, Germany,
and Scandinavia, the traditional sources of immigration, but from southern
and eastern Europe, especially Italy and the Russian and Austro- Hungarian
empires. The new immigrants were widely described by native- born Ameri-
cans as members of distinct “races,” whose lower level of civilization explained
In what ways did the boundaries of American freedom grow narrower in this period?