What does “blood at the root” mean and how does one study it? Michael Javen Fortner brings up Edmund Morgan’s work regarding the intertwining of republican conceptions of freedom with slavery as a model to emulate. But slavery and the violence associated with it had constitutional backing in a way lynchings never did. Whereas Fortner rightfully points out the consistent failure to meet the “deep moral obligation to African-Americans,” the ways in which that failure is manifested has changed over time. Following the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments, a black man did have rights which a white man was at least supposed to obey but did not. Once slavery was abolished and blacks were considered citizens, a new form of racial subordination emerged that was informed by previous forms of subordination but was not necessarily a simple facsimile of them. My work tries to show how lynching was embedded within this newly reconfigured liberal conception of citizenship. There is a historical, institutional and juridical specificity to lynchings that belie any overgeneralization.

With that said however, it is also impossible to deny the influence of an overarching racial ordering that consistently confirmed that black lives do not matter, which is what Fortner alludes to in his review. When he suggests I need to more “thoroughly grapple” with racism, I take him to mean that I need to show the consistency across time. But I hasten to wonder if the consistent lack of fulfilling the “deep moral obligation to African-Americans” is partly due to the inconsistent ways in which that obligation has been nullified across time. In other words, even though the blood might be the same, the root might perhaps be changing.

I have chosen to focus on the specificity of lynchings, but there is definitely a need for more comprehensive accounts across different eras. The trick however is to do so in a manner that does not overly conflate the similarities but also is not too preoccupied with the differences either. Political scientists, including myself, have generally preferred to err on the side of specificity over that of generality, but I take to heart Fortner’s challenge. I thus take Fortner’s review as less of a criticism than a call to arms. Fortner’s review extends beyond particular criticisms of my book and hints at particular issues of methodology. In their book that outlines the basic thrust of American Political Development, Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek state that “scholars formulate historical propositions that are more subtle and exacting, but they have less to say than scholars in earlier generations about the development of the American polity overall” (The Search for American Political Development, 2004). Perhaps it is time, as Fortner suggests, to revisit the earlier scholarly approaches that focused on the polity overall, particularly as it pertains to race.