Reconstruction,Segregation, and Miscegenation: Interracial Marriage and the Law in the Lower South, 1865–1900

On the eve of Congressional Reconstruction, all seven states of the Lower South had laws against interracial marriage. During the Republican interlude that began in 1867–68, six of the seven states (all but Georgia) suspended those laws, whether through judicial invalidation or legislative repeal. Yet by 1894 all six had restored such bans. The trajectory of miscegenation laws in the Lower South between 1865 and 1900 permits a reconsideration of the range of possibilities the Reconstruction era brought to public policy. More than that, it forces a reconsideration of the origins of the Jim Crow South. Legally mandated segregation in public transit, as C. Vann Woodward observed in 1955, took hold late in the century. But such segregation in public education, as Howard R. Rabinowitz pointed out with his formula ‘from exclusion to segregation,’ originated during the first postwar years. Segregation on the marital front – universal at the start of the period and again at the end, but relaxed in most Lower South states for a time in between – combined the two patterns into yet a third. Adding another layer of complexity was the issue of where the color line was located, and thus which individuals were classified on each side of it.     

Republican citizenship in the post-Civil War South and French Algeria 1865–1900

This essay compares the American South and French Algeria from 1865 to roughly 1900. Their similarities and connections reveal the paradox of republicanism in an era of growing nation-state power. The Civil War’s outcome, particularly slavery’s abolition, inspired American and French liberals alike. But after bold initiatives to establish full citizenship for people of color in the 1860s, provincial, white rule was established in both territorial areas. Fears of socialism provoked by the Paris Commune figured in this pivot. The essay shows us transnational aspects of race-based, contingent citizenship in the post-slavery era of these two republican empires.     

Delineating the nation: South African censuses 1865–2007

The census plays a significant role in delineating the nation in statistical terms. The decisions as to whom to enumerate, what questions are to be asked and how the results are presented all modify the view of the population offered to contemporary observers and to posterity. Although census officials tend to be conservative in retaining a large body of questions in similar form from one enumeration to the next in order to promote inter-census comparisons, those concerned with identity have tended to shift with the political evolution of the state and nation. Nowhere has this been more in evidence than in South Africa where the state and nation have been redefined several times since the commencement of modern scientific censuses in 1865. Administrations run by the British Empire, Boer republics, Union of South Africa, apartheid republic, African ‘bantustans’ and now democratic republic have each brought their own concepts to national identification and the framing of the questions of national identity in the census. As a result the set of nearly forty censuses present an often contradictory and complex image of the South African population, ranging from comprehensive inclusive censuses to narrowly restrictive enumerations of a single ethnic group. There was thus little of the continuity in census taking between the colonial and post-colonial states noted elsewhere. South African censuses therefore offer an insight into how the nation was viewed at the time the census was undertaken.