Why did the Founding Fathers fail to include blacks and Indians in their
cherished proposition that all men are created equal? The usual answer
is racism, but the reality is more complex and unsettling. In Bind Us
Apart, historian Nicholas Guyatt argues that, from the Revolution
through the Civil War, most white liberals believed in the unity of all
human beings. But their philosophy faltered when it came to the
practical work of forging a color-blind society. Unable to convince
others-and themselves-that racial mixing was viable, white reformers
began instead to claim that people of color could only thrive in
separate republics: in Native states in the American West or in the West
African colony of Liberia.
Herein lie the origins of separate but equal. Decades before
Reconstruction, America's liberal elite was unable to imagine how people
of color could become citizens of the United States. Throughout the
nineteenth century, Native Americans were pushed farther and farther
westward, while four million slaves freed after the Civil War found
themselves among a white population that had spent decades imagining
that they would live somewhere else.
Essential reading for anyone disturbed by America's ongoing failure to
achieve true racial integration, Bind Us Apart shows conclusively that
separate but equal represented far more than a southern backlash against
emancipation-it was a founding principle of our nation.
