The New View Of Reconstruction - Social Studies
Article 36The New View ofReconstructionWhatever you were taught or thought you knew about the post–Civil Warera is probably wrong in the light of recent studyEric FonerIn the past twenty years, no period ofAmerican history has been the subject of amore thoroughgoing reevaluation than Reconstruction—the violent, dramatic, andstill controversial era following the CivilWar. Race relations, politics, social life,and economic change during Reconstruction have all been reinterpreted in the lightof changed attitudes toward the place ofblacks within American society. If historians have not yet forged a fully satisfyingportrait of Reconstruction as a whole, thetraditional interpretation that dominatedhistorical writing for much of this centuryhas irrevocably been laid to rest.Anyone who attended high school before 1960 learned that Reconstruction wasa era of unrelieved sordidness in Americanpolitical and social life. The martyred Lincoln, according to this view, had planned aquick and painless readmission of theSouthern states as equal members of thenational family. President Andrew Johnson,his successor, attempted to carry out Lincoln’s policies but was foiled by the RadicalRepublicans (also known as Vindictives orJacobins). Motivated by an irrational hatred of Rebels or by ties with Northern capitalists out to plunder the South, theRadicals swept aside Johnson’s lenientprogram and fastened black supremacyupon the defeated Confederacy. An orgyof corruption followed, presided over byunscrupulous carpetbaggers (Northernerswho ventured south to reap the spoils ofoffice), traitorous scalawags (Southernwhites who cooperated with the new gov-ernments for personal gain), and the ignorant and childlike freedmen, who wereincapable of properly exercising the political power that had been thrust upon them.After much needless suffering, the whitecommunity of the South banded togetherto overthrow these “black” governmentsand restore home rule (their euphemismfor white supremacy). All told, Reconstruction was just about the darkest page inthe American saga.Originating in anti-Reconstruction propaganda of Southern Democrats duringthe 1870s, this traditional interpretationachieved scholarly legitimacy around theturn of the century through the work ofWilliam Dunning and his students at Columbia University. It reached the largerpublic through films like Birth of a Nationand Gone With the Wind and that best-selling work of myth-making masquerading ashistory, The Tragic Era by Claude G.Bowers. In language as exaggerated as itwas colorful, Bowers told how AndrewJohnson “fought the bravest battle for constitutional liberty and for the preservationof our institutions ever waged by an Executive” but was overwhelmed by the “poisonous propaganda” of the Radicals.Southern whites, as a result, “literally wereput to the torture” by “emissaries of hate”who manipulated the “simple-minded”freedmen, inflaming the negroes’ “egotism” and even inspiring “lustful assaults”by blacks upon white womanhood.In a discipline that sometimes seems topride itself on the rapid rise and fall of his-1torical interpretations, this traditional portrait of Reconstruction enjoyed remarkablestaying power. The long reign of the old interpretation is not difficult to explain. Itpresented a set of easily identifiable heroesand villains. It enjoyed the imprimatur ofthe nation’s leading scholars. And it accorded with the political and social realities of the first half of this century. Thisimage of Reconstruction helped freeze themind of the white South in unalterable opposition to any movement for breachingthe ascendancy of the Democratic party,eliminating segregation, or readmittingdisfranchised blacks to the vote.Nevertheless, the demise of the traditional interpretation was inevitable, for itignored the testimony of the central participant in the drama of Reconstruction—theblack freedman. Furthermore, it wasgrounded in the conviction that blackswere unfit to share in political power. AsDunning’s Columbia colleague John W.Burgess put it, “A black skin means membership in a race of men which has never ofitself succeeded in subjecting passion toreason, has never, therefore, created anycivilization of any kind.” Once objectivescholarship and modern experience rendered that assumption untenable, the entireedifice was bound to fall.The work of “revising” the history ofReconstruction began with the writings ofa handful of survivors of the era, such asJohn R. Lynch, who had served as a black
ANNUAL EDITIONScongressman from Mississippi after theCivil War. In the 1930s white scholars likeFrancis Simkins and Robert Woody carried the task forward. Then, in 1935, theblack historian and activist W. E. B. DuBois produced Black Reconstruction inAmerica, a monumental revaluation thatclosed with an irrefutable indictment of ahistorical profession that had sacrificedscholarly objectivity on the altar of racialbias. “One fact and one alone,” he wrote,“explains the attitude of most recentwriters toward Reconstruction; they cannot conceive of Negroes as men.” DuBois’s work, however, was ignored bymost historians.Black initiativeestablished as many schoolsas did Northern religioussocieties and the Freedmen’sBureau. The right to votewas not simply thrust uponthem by meddling outsiders,since blacks beganagitating for the suffrageas soon as they were freed.It was not until the 1960s that the fullforce of the revisionist wave broke over thefield. Then, in rapid succession, virtuallyevery assumption of the traditional viewpoint was systematically dismantled. Adrastically different portrait emerged totake its place. President Lincoln did nothave a coherent “plan” for Reconstruction,but at the time of his assassination he hadbeen cautiously contemplating black suffrage. Andrew Johnson was a stubborn,racist politician who lacked the ability tocompromise. By isolating himself from thebroad currents of public opinion that hadnourished Lincoln’s career, Johnson created an impasse with Congress that Lincoln would certainly have avoided, thusthrowing away his political power and destroying his own plans for reconstructingthe South.The Radicals in Congress were acquitted of both vindictive motives and thecharge of serving as the stalking-horses ofNorthern capitalism. They emerged instead as idealists in the best nineteenthcentury reform tradition. Radical leaderslike Charles Sumner and ThaddeusStevens had worked for the rights of blackslong before any conceivable political ad-political advantage, for the central issue dividing Johnson and these Radical Republicans was the civil rights of freedmen.Studies of congressional policy-making,such as Eric L. McKitrick’s AndrewJohnson and Reconstruction, also revealedthat Reconstruction legislation, rangingfrom the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to theFourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments,enjoyed broad support from moderate andconservative Republicans. It was not simply the work of a narrow radical faction.ENEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, PRINT ROOMUntil recently, Thaddeus Stevens hadbeen viewed as motivated by irrationalhatred of the Rebels (above). Now he hasemerged as an idealist in the best reformtradition.ven more startling was the revised portrait of Reconstruction in the South itself.Imbued with the spirit of the civil rightsmovement and rejecting entirely the racialassumptions that had underpinned the traditional interpretation, these historiansevaluated Reconstruction from the blackpoint of view. Works like Joel Williamson’s After Slavery portrayed the period asa time of extraordinary political, social,and economic progress for blacks. The establishment of public school systems, thegranting of equal citizenship to blacks, theeffort to restore the devastated Southerneconomy, the attempt to construct an interracial political democracy from the ashesof slavery, all these were commendableachievements, not the elements of Bowers’s “tragic era.”Unlike earlier writers, the revisionistsstressed the active role of the freedmen inshaping Reconstruction. Black initiativeestablished as many schools as did Northern religious societies and the Freedmen’sBureau. The right to vote was not simplythrust upon them by meddling outsiders,since blacks began agitating for the suffrage as soon as they were freed. In 1865black conventions throughout the South issued eloquent, though unheeded, appealsfor equal civil and political rights.LIBRARY OF CONGRESSvantage flowed from such a commitment.Stevens refused to sign the PennsylvaniaConstitution of 1838 because it disfranchised the state’s black citizens; Sumnerled a fight in the 1850s to integrate Boston’s public schools. Their Reconstructionpolicies were based on principle, not petty2With the advent of Radical Reconstruction in 1867, the freedmen did enjoy a realmeasure of political power. But black supremacy never existed. In most statesblacks held only a small fraction of political offices, and even in South Carolina,where they comprised a majority of thestate legislature’s lower house, effectivepower remained in white hands. As forcorruption, moral standards in both government and private enterprise were at lowebb throughout the nation in the postwaryears—the era of Boss Tweed, the CreditMobilier scandal, and the Whiskey Ring.Southern corruption could hardly beblamed on former slaves.
Article 36. The New View of ReconstructionEDWARD S. ELLIS. The History of Our Country. VOL. 5, 1900SCHOMBERG CENTER, NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARYReconstruction governments were portrayed as disastrous failures because elected blacks were ignorant or corrupt.In fact, postwar corruption cannot be blamed on former slaves.Other actors in the Reconstructiondrama also came in for reevaluation. Mostcarpetbaggers were former Union soldiersseeking economic opportunity in the postwar South, not unscrupulous adventurers.Their motives, a typically American amalgam of humanitarianism and the pursuit ofprofit, were no more insidious than thoseof Western pioneers. Scalawags, previously seen as traitors to the white race, nowemerged as “Old Line” Whig Unionistswho had opposed secession in the firstplace or as poor whites who had long resented planters’ domination of Southernlife and who saw in Reconstruction achance to recast Southern society alongmore democratic lines. Strongholds ofSouthern white Republicanism like eastTennessee and western North Carolina hadbeen the scene of resistance to Confederaterule throughout the Civil War; now, as onescalawag newspaper put it, the choice was“between salvation at the hand of the Negro or destruction at the hand of therebels.”At the same time, the Ku Klux Klan andkindred groups, whose campaign of violence against black and white Republicanshad been minimized or excused in olderwritings, were portrayed as they reallywere. Earlier scholars had conveyed theimpression that the Klan intimidatedblacks mainly by dressing as ghosts andplaying on the freedmen’s superstitions. Infact, black fears were all too real: the Klanwas a terrorist organization that beat andkilled its political opponents to depriveblacks of their newly won rights. The complicity of the Democratic party and the silence of prominent whites in the face ofsuch outrages stood as an indictment of themoral code the South had inherited fromthe days of slavery.Under slavery most blackshad lived in nuclear familyunits, although they facedthe constant threat ofseparation from loved onesby sale. Reconstructionprovided the opportunity forblacks to solidify theirpreexisting family ties.By the end of the 1960s, then, the oldinterpretation had been completely reversed. Southern freedmen were the heroes, the “Redeemers” who overthrewReconstruction were the villains, and if theera was “tragic,” it was because change didnot go far enough. Reconstruction hadbeen a time of real progress and its failurea lost opportunity for the South and the nation. But the legacy of Reconstruction—the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments—endured to inspire future effortsfor civil rights. As Kenneth Stampp wrotein The Era of Reconstruction, a superbsummary of revisionist findings published3in 1965, “if it was worth four years of civilwar to save the Union, it was worth a fewyears of radical reconstruction to give theAmerican Negro the ultimate promise ofequal civil and political rights.”As Stampp’s statement suggests, the reevaluation of the first Reconstruction wasinspired in large measure by the impactof the second—the modern civil rightsmovement. And with the waning of thatmovement in recent years, writing on Reconstruction has undergone still anothertransformation. Instead of seeing the CivilWar and its aftermath as a second American Revolution (as Charles Beard had), aregression into barbarism (as Bowers argued), or a golden opportunity squandered(as the revisionists saw it), recent writersargue that Radical Reconstruction was notreally very radical. Since land was not distributed to the former slaves, the remainedeconomically dependent upon their formerowners. The planter class survived both thewar and Reconstruction with its property(apart from slaves) and prestige more orless intact.Not only changing times but also thechanging concerns of historians have contributed to this latest reassessment of Reconstruction. The hallmark of the pastdecade’s historical writing has been anemphasis upon “social history”—the evocation of the past lives of ordinary Americans—and the downplaying of strictlypolitical events. When applied to Reconstruction, this concern with the “social”suggested that black suffrage and office-
ANNUAL EDITIONSholding, once seen as the most radical departures of the Reconstruction era, wererelatively insignificant.The Civil War raised thedecisive questions ofAmerican’s nationalexistence: the relationsbetween local and nationalauthority, the definitionof citizenship,the balance betweenforce and consent ingenerating obedienceto authority.Recent historians have focused their investigations not upon the politics of Reconstruction but upon the social andeconomic aspects of the transition fromslavery to freedom. Herbert Gutman’s influential study of the black family duringand after slavery found little change infamily structure or relations between menand women resulting from emancipation.Under slavery most blacks had lived in nuclear family units, although they faced theconstant threat of separation from lovedones by sale. Reconstruction provided theopportunity for blacks to solidify theirpreexisting family ties. Conflicts overwhether black women should work in thecotton fields (planters said yes, many blackfamilies said no) and over white attemptsto “apprentice” black children revealedthat the autonomy of family life was a major preoccupation of the freedmen. Indeed,whether manifested in their withdrawalfrom churches controlled by whites, in theblossoming of black fraternal, benevolent,and self-improvement organizations, or inthe demise of the slave quarters and theirreplacement by small tenant farms occupied by individual families, the quest for independence from white authority and controlover their own day-to-day lives shaped theblack response to emancipation.In the post–Civil War South the surestguarantee of economic autonomy, blacksbelieved, was land. To the freedmen thejustice of a claim to land based on theiryears of unrequited labor appeared selfevident. As an Alabama black conventionput it, “The property which they [the planters] hold was nearly all earned by thesweat of our brows.” As Leon Litwackshowed in Been in the Storm So Long, aPultizer Prize–winning account of theblack response to emancipation, manyfreedmen in 1865 and 1866 refused to signlabor contracts, expecting the federal government to give them land. In some localities, as one Alabama overseer reported,they “set up claims to the plantation and allon it.”In the end, of course, the vast majorityof Southern blacks remained propertylessand poor. But exactly why the South, andespecially its black population, sufferedfrom dire poverty and economic retardation in the decades following the Civil Waris a matter of much dispute. In One Kind ofFreedom economists Roger Ransom andRichard Sutch indicted country merchantsfor monopolizing credit and charging usurious interest rates, forcing black tenantsinto debt and locking the South into a dependence on cotton production that impoverished the entire region. But JonathanWiener, in his study of postwar Alabama,argued that planters used their politicalpower to compel blacks to remain on theplantations. Planters succeeded in stabilizing the plantation system, but only byblocking the growth of alternative enterprises, like factories, that might draw offblack laborers, thus locking the region intoa pattern of economic backwardness.If the thrust of recent writing has emphasized the social and economic aspects ofReconstruction, politics has not been entirely neglected. But political studies havealso reflected the postrevisionist moodsummarized by C. Vann Woodward whenhe observed “how essentially nonrevolutionary and conservative Reconstructionreally was.” Recent writers, unlike their revisionist predecessors, have found little topraise in federal policy toward the emancipated blacks.A new sensitivity to the strength ofprejudice and laissez-faire ideas in thenineteenth-century North has led manyhistorians to doubt whether the Republicanparty ever made a genuine commitment toracial justice in the South. The granting ofblack suffrage was an alternative to a longterm federal responsibility for protectingthe rights of the former slaves. Once enfranchised, blacks could be left to fend forthemselves. With the exception of a fewRadicals like Thaddeus Stevens, nearly allNorthern policy-makers and educators arecriticized today for assuming that, so longas the unfettered operations of the market-4place afforded blacks the opportunity toadvance through diligent labor, federal efforts to assist them in acquiring land wereunnecessary.Probably the most innovative recentwriting on Reconstruction politics has centered on a broad reassessment of black Republicanism, largely undertaken by a newgeneration of black historians. Scholarslike Thomas Holt and Nell Painter insistthat Reconstruction was not simply a matter of black and white. Conflicts within theblack community, no less than divisionsamong whites, shaped Reconstruction politics. Where revisionist scholars, bothblack and white, had celebrated the accomplishments of black political leaders, Holt,Painter, and others charge that they failedto address the economic plight of the blackmasses. Painter criticized “representativecolored men,” as national black leaderswere called, for failing to provide ordinaryfreedmen with effective political leadership. Holt found that black officeholders inSouth Carolina most emerged from the oldfree mulatto class of Charleston, whichshared many assumptions with prominentwhites. “Basically bourgeois in their origins and orientation,” he wrote, they“failed to act in the interest of black peasants.”In emphasizing the persistence fromslavery of divisions between free blacksand slaves, these writers reflect the increasing concern with continuity and conservatism in Reconstruction. Their workreflects a startling extension of revisionistpremises. If, as has been argued for the pasttwenty years, blacks were active agentsrather than mere victims of manipulation,then they could not be absolved of blame forthe ultimate failure of Reconstruction.Despite the excellence of recent writings and the continual expansion of ourknowledge of the period, historians of Reconstruction today face a unique dilemma.An old interpretation has been overthrown,but a coherent new synthesis has yet totake its place. The revisionists of the 1960seffectively established a series of negativepoints: the Reconstruction governmentswere not as bad as had been portrayed,black supremacy was a myth, the Radicalswere not cynical manipulators of the freedmen. Yet no
Eric Foner I n the past twenty years, no period of American history has been the subject of a more thoroughgoing reevaluation than Re-construction—the violent, dramatic, and still controversial era following the Civil War. Race relations, politics, social life, and economic change during Reconstruc-tion have all been reinterpreted in the light
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