Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. Eric Foner
What remains certain is that Reconstruction failed, and that for blacks its failure was a disaster whose magnitude cannot be obscured by the genuine accomplishments that did endure. For the nation as a whole, the collapse of Reconstruction was a tragedy that deeply affected the course of its future development. If racism contributed to the undoing of Reconstruction, by the same token Reconstruction’s demise and the emergence of blacks as a disenfranchised class of dependent laborers greatly facilitated racism’s further spread, until by the early twentieth century it had become more deeply embedded in the nation’s culture and politics than at any time since the beginning of the antislavery crusade and perhaps in our entire history. The removal of a significant portion of the nation’s laboring population from public life shifted the center of gravity of American politics to the right, complicating the tasks of reformers for generations to come. Long into the twentieth century, the South remained a one-party region under the control off a reactionary ruling elite who used the same violence and fraud that had helped defeat Reconstruction to stifle internal dissent.
When it was published in 1988, this volume was a stunning revision of the period immediately after the Civil War; by the time it was revised and reissued in 2014, it had become the standard account of that period. It is deeply researched, strategically organized and dispassionately written in order to establish both the importance of the period and the tragedy of the events that unfold in these 600 pages. It is possible that readers younger than myself may not find its conclusions so remarkable: at the end of the 600 pages Foner recounts some of the myths that had grown up around Reconstruction, and it is these myths that, to historians “everlasting shame,” I learned in what were considered excellent high school history classes. I suspect that younger readers of history were never burdened with these misconceptions and that Foner’s work would represent something less revolutionary to them.
In this volume he narrates the nations attempts to confront several essential questions in the aftermath of the bloodiest war in its history:
· How could the rebellious Confederate States, and their citizens, be reunited into the political and social life of the nation?
· Who should decide the answer to that question – the President or the Congress? Behind this question lay a deeper one: to what extent would the question be answered by the evolution of social and political practices that the President and Congress were nearly powerless to influence?
· What system of labor should replace plantation slavery?
· What should be the place of blacks in the economic, political and social life of the nation?
It would be foolish to try to summarize Foner’s account of how the nation addressed these questions in any detail. He moves at a pace of about a page a week, looking at key dates and periods through multiple lenses and offering voluminous supporting details for each and every pattern that he outlines. However, it is possible for me to outline his major accomplishments by simply discussing the aspects of what I learned that surprised me – knowing that the surprise may tell you more about me than about Foner’s work.
To begin with, I was surprised that Foner begins his work in 1863. He does this in order to outline the ways that the Civil War changed America generally, to capture the context that Reconstruction needed to take place within. But he also makes clear that the nation began the process of Reconstruction in ad hoc and evolving ways throughout the war. Lincoln and Johnson both outlined Reconstruction ideas before the war ended, but more importantly, wherever the Union Army took control of a region, the general in charge of local forces had control over the liberation and livelihood of the formerly enslaved peoples. Tennessee and Louisiana were occupied by the Union Army in 1863, so these were not small tracts of land in question.
Many of the questions and controversies that will focus the nation’s attention for the dozen years after the war’s end are present in these early experiments – which vary tremendously with the ideas and energy of the generals involved. In some cases, enslaved peoples were encouraged to continue living and working on plantations (to the benefit of Northern industries) with the Union army doing little more than insisting upon and enforcing work contracts. Often the enforcement was to the benefit of the plantation rather than the worker – as when rules were established requiring workers get a plantation owner’s permission to change jobs. However, in Louisiana, the earliest attempts to reconstitute a government included an established minimum wage, a nine-hour work day for non-agricultural employees, a progressive income tax to replace the corrupt antebellum property tax system and free public education – with some schools and other public accommodations being desegregated. This central division – whether to support the return to something closest to the old system or to forge an entirely new role for government – would reverberate through all the debates of the period.
Foner is deeply critical of Johnson’s Reconstruction plans – citing the ease with which he allowed former Confederates to retake control of their states and communities. What was most surprising about this phase of Presidential reconstruction was the revolution in thinking about voting rights that took place during this phase despite the President’s desire to prevent it. At the war’s end, there is near total agreement that black suffrage was anathema to all powerful parties. Blacks could generally not vote in Northern states, and there was little power behind any idea to change that. But the Fifteenth Amendment passed just a few years later. Foner makes clear that some of the change comes from political calculation as Republicans realized that blacks would overwhelmingly vote for them. But a much larger factor is that Radical Republicans win the battle for the hearts and minds of the country, at least temporarily. Foner points out several times that granting former slaves citizenship and voting rights was beyond what any other nation dealing with emancipation accomplished.
Perhaps the greatest change in my understanding of the period centers on that term Radical Republican. I had been under the impression that the term “Radical” in that title simply connoted a desire to black political rights too far and too fast, with the label being essentially a critique that argued that the pace of change was unreasonable. I was taught that this rush promoted changes that former slaves were not ready, that it put illiterate and ignorant blacks in power where they were easily manipulated by corrupt carpetbaggers. That gave a powerful argument to the white South as it tried to reclaim its right to good government. What Foner makes clear is that the Radical Republicans were advocating a complete rethinking of the role of government, beginning an argument that still rages in the 21st Century
Foner uses the term “activist government” to describe Southern constitutions written by Radical Republicans. Their view, which Foner presents as eminently logical, is that a society in which one of the main forms of economic relations has been abolished and which now has almost 4 million new citizens with whom a new social contract must be developed, requires a larger and more active role by government. That absorbing these changes and finding a peaceful and productive role for newly freed workers and their families will require planning and programmatic experimentation that is best handled by government. The Radical Republicans – pushed largely by newly enfranchised blacks not afraid in these early years to demand a government that met their needs, promoted a dramatic change in Southern Society. Among the measures enacted in this period, in addition to black enfranchisement and basic protections for labor, were government sponsored medical care for the poor, government supported legal counsel for the poor, liberalized divorce laws that protected the rights of women, legal requirements for child support that included children born of formerly enslaved mothers raped by their masters and free public education, with some areas experimenting with desegregation.
Foner makes clear that this thoroughly modern view of the state would not simply address needs of the South. There is an extensive chapter on economic and political issues faced by the North in this period, as class warfare begins between labor and capital. This new concept of government is as much a subject of debate in New York and Chicago as in the rural South.
Of course, this radicalism was by no means the sole point of view within the Republican party. An equally strong wing of the party – deemed “liberal” – was primarily interested in stabilizing the agricultural economy through enforceable labor contracts and expanding the opportunities for railroads and other public works. In other words, the Republican Party was the main voice for both workers and business. The two sides were united by their role in the war years and their fervor for black rights. However, as the Radicals pushed for a broader transformation and were less than enthusiastic about aid to railroads, many Liberal Republicans began to find common ground with Democrats. When Republican promises of a resurgent Southern economy failed to come true, these new alliances opened the way for a resurgence of Democratic political power in the elections of 1870 and 1872.
Though Grant was re-elected in 1872, he faced a hostile Congress and the economic collapse of 1873 (caused by a bursting bubble in railroad investments). This panic plunged the nation into its worst economic crisis since 1837. I had studied the 1873 Depression in both college and graduate school without ever linking it to the end or Reconstruction. The collapse of the economy also meant the collapse of Republican economic policy. Republicans took the brunt of the blame for the widespread poverty and Democrats won back what was to become the Solid South. It only remained for the election of 1876 to cause the Republicans to abandon Reconstruction and bargain away protecting African Americans for the White House. However, Foner is clear that the liberal wing of the Republican Party was already looking for a way to abandon what they saw as a failed policy. As a result, the kind of mob rule that would effectively eliminate black political participation for the next 90 years had already begun.
In discussing the end of Reconstruction, Foner puts two other ideas I had learned in context. The first was that the period was marked by unprecedented corruption in Southern government. Foner points out that corruption in the South was indeed endemic and unprecedented – except by the contemporaneous corruption in the North. His time period saw the rise of urban political machines like Tammany, with Boss Tweed the most glaring example of bosses who enriched themselves. Corruption was a national problem: it hurt Reconstruction, but was not caused by it.
The final revelation for me was the level of violence endured throughout the period. My history education left the impression that freedmen and their allies had been protected by Federal troops during Reconstruction and fell victim to the KKK after the troops were withdrawn. But there was never a period where blacks or their allies were secure and protected. The constant, daily threat of violence was punctuated by massacres like the murder of 2000 people in Shreveport Louisiana, and a later massacre in Colfax Louisiana. The level of violence varied tremendously from place to place, but there was never a time when Northern politicians could have fooled themselves into thinking the freed peoples were secure and safe. That is, until they needed to believe that for political purposes. As for the protection of the troops, it is true that the situation got worse after they were withdrawn in 1877, but in fact by that time there were only a few thousand troops left of the more than a million that had originally occupied the Confederacy. The final removal of troops (most of which travelled west to fight Native Americans) represented breaking the promise of protection, but that promise had never been fulfilled.
By the end of the century the combination of sharecropping, strict social segregation, voter suppression and state sponsored violence that has been called slavery by another name was firmly established. It provided the Northern industrialists with the labor stability they needed after the chaos of the war and would, therefore, go unchallenged until the second half of the next century.
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