Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869-1879 Book

RECONSTRUCTION: THE REALLY SHORT 2,000 WORD VERSION

How to do justice to this extraordinary scholarly work? The erudition, the level of detailed evidence that Eric Foner marshals, the clear, inescapable logic of his narrative left me in awe. With nearly every page I felt another layer of preconception peeling away. And with nearly every page I found myself understanding more about the society that the war and its aftermath shaped. I’m now convinced that when people talk of the legacy of slavery in the U.S., they are really talking (without realizing it) of the emotional legacy of the ill-named era of ‘Reconstruction’ because there are few things more painful than having hopes raised and then destroyed seemingly forever. But the era of Reconstruction should also be recalled as a time of major progress and overall societal change that shaped America's collective and individual choices and beliefs for decades to come.

Reconstruction was a time in American history that was so formative, so complex--and yet so understudied--that it fully deserves the level of detail that Foner brings to the story. Still, for those daunted by Foner’s 600-plus pages of dense history, I’m hereby humbly attempting a summary of some of his key points.

The Reconstruction was not a single period, but rather occurred in fairly distinct phases—each in part a reaction to what had gone before, but also to external developments such as industrialization and the railroad boom.

Phase I: Lincoln and the World the War Made (Chapters 1-3)

At the Civil War’s start, Lincoln made the defense of the Union the stated goal of the war, but others in the South saw things differently. As the Civil War started, sharp divisions began to arise between plantation owners, who could dodge the draft by sending slaves, and up-country subsistence farmers who were forced to go to war themselves and leave the farming to their women and children. One Alabama small farmer had no illusions about the planter-dominated Confederacy: “All tha want is to git you to…fight for their infurnal negroes and after you do their fightin’ you may kiss their hine part for o tha care.”

For the slaves themselves, hope was an irrepressible urge: well before the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, thousands of slaves had deserted plantations and headed for the safety of Northern lines and by the end of the war over 200,000 African Americans would serve as Union soldiers. Nor were fight and flight the only responses: throughout the South blacks began actively organizing classes, teaching each other how to read and figure; others took to the roads in the thousands trying to reunite with relatives sold away to other masters; still more sought land that they could farm on their own behalf.

The Quest for Land and Learning

With Emancipation came an extraordinary collective drive for self-improvement on the part of freedmen, most notable perhaps was their seemingly unquenchable thirst for education. For many adults, "a craving to read the word of God" provided the immediate spur to learning, but so too was a longing for a more secular freedom. One member of a North Carolina education society said in 1866 "a school-house would be the first proof of independence." In many communities, collective funds to pay teachers and build schoolrooms and churches helped make these dreams a reality, at least for a while.

The freedmen also longed for their own land. Wrote one Northerner: "The sole ambition of the freedman at the present time appears to become the owner of a little piece of land, there to erect a humble home, and to dwell in peace and security at his own free will...without anyone to dictate to him hours or system of labor."

In 1861 when the US Navy occupied the rice growing Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia, white plantation owners fled and 10,000 slaves took control hoping to gain land to start their own independent subsistence farms. The host of Northern whites arriving over the next years had other (and varied) ideas altogether and most hoped to see blacks working the plantations for wages.

The story of Davis Bend, an island plantation in the Mississippi south of Vicksburg, is one of the few bright spots: Initially known as “General Grant’s Negro paradise,” after the Union general, the fertile fields of Davis Bend were, for a time, set aside and successfully farmed by slave refugees.

Phase II: Reversals during the Johnson Era (Chapter 4-5)

Resistance to Land Re-Distribution

As the war drew to a close, what was left of the planter class faced massive challenges trying to rebuild—and without low-cost labor the task was nearly impossible. Viewed through the lens of plantation agriculture, other cases of emancipation, for example in the West Indies, taught an unmistakable lesson. Freedom had come to Haiti in the 1790s and to the British Caribbean in 1830s and in both settings former slaves had abandoned the sugar plantations in large numbers to establish themselves as subsistence-oriented small farmers. After emancipation sugar production plummeted in Haiti and only survived in the British Caribbean through the massive importation of indentured 'coolies' from India and China. Only on smaller islands like Barbados where whites owned all of the land had plantation agriculture continued to thrive.

Indeed, the early changes in black social structure underscored plantation owners’ fears: "The freedmen," a Georgia newspaper reported in 1869, "have almost universally withdrawn their women and children from the fields, putting the first at housework and the latter at school." In particular, blacks resented the sexual exploitation that had been a regular feature of slave life and shared the determination that women no longer labor under the direct supervision of white men.

In 1865 the Freedmen's Bureau controlled 850,000 acres of abandoned land, not enough to accommodate all of the freed slaves but enough make a start towards creating a black yeomanry. Commissioner Howard, following General Sherman's example, began granting 40 acre tracts to freed slaves. Then in July, President Johnson rescinded these orders returning most of the land to pardoned Confederates owners.

Historical experience and modern scholarship suggest that small landholdings would not have solved the plight of black families, but the reversal of Civil War-era promises left a devastating sense of betrayal and distrust.

Johnson’s Role

To win election Johnson had to craft a Southern coalition. But with whom? One interview cites Johnson's view that enfranchised blacks would vote with their late masters for Democrats, rather than with the reform-minded Republicans, who at least in theory were Lincoln's political heirs. Frederick Douglas proposed to Johnson a different political scenario uniting non-slaveholding poor upland white yeomen and black freedmen in a grand new Republican coalition, but the President was uninterested.

Instead, Johnson reversed sensible decisions that would have allowed the freed slaves to find an autonomous place in a new economy; aiming to appease Southern Democrats he reversed punishments for the plantation-owner leaders of the rebellion and propped up the plantation system with a result that forced former slaves into working conditions that were even worse than the slavery that they thought they had escaped; and he left the white subsistence farmers in the South's upland regions just as destitute as they'd been before the war.

The chapter on the failure of presidential reconstruction is so rich in insights that I want to quote every other page. The way the state became co-opted to enforce labor laws, the restrictions on freedmen's mobility, the dubious viability of plantation agriculture, alternative economic visions of the new South—all led inexorably to the break between Johnson and his own party.

Johnson’s recalcitrance empowered Republican radical leaders to take the job of Reconstruction into Congressional hands and that in turn led to a substantial expansion of Federal powers, as well as a significant legislative and Constitutional legacy.

Phase III: Radical Republicanism, Black Suffrage and the Constitutional Legacy (Chapters 6-8)

Thanks in no small measure to black suffrage the Republicans gained ascendancy in the South and blacks threw themselves into politics with enthusiasm. Sixteen were seated in Congress; Louisiana elected a mixed race governor; free born blacks served as state Lt. governors, treasurers, superintendents of education; some 600 blacks, including some former slaves, served in Southern state legislatures.

The social and political revolution of black suffrage was short-lived, but one of the most lasting triumphs of Radical Reconstruction was to enshrine in the Constitution a legal framework for equality.

The slaves were—at least in theory—set free with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Then, as relations with the President moved toward a rupture, Republicans grappled with the task of fixing in the Constitution--beyond the reach of Presidential vetoes and shifting political majorities--their understanding of the fruits of the Civil War.

The 14th Amendment, passed in 1866 and ratified in 1869, took a great deal of political wrangling to reach approval, but in the end it endowed "with constitutional authority the principle for which Radicals had fought a long and lonely battle: equality before the law, overseen by the national government." The amendment declared all persons born or naturalized in the U.S to be citizens and prohibited states from abridging the privileges and immunities of citizens, depriving them of life, liberty or property without due process of law, while assuring them of ‘equal protection of the laws'.

February 3, 1870 marked the day the Fifteen Amendment was ratified promising that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The compromises needed to pass these amendments made for some ugly political bargains and less than clear legislative language.

For decades these ideals would seem to have died an early death, but the seed was there, waiting for the right moment in time to sprout and take root. And as Foner notes, even the attempt was revolutionary: “Alone among the nations that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century, the United States, within a few years of emancipation, clothed its former slaves with citizenship rights equal to those of whites."

Phase IV: Industrialism in the North and Southern White Resistance (Chapters 9-10)

The staggering social and labor changes ushered in under Radical Reconstruction threatened what was left of plantation agriculture. The program of state-sponsored economic development that had promised to bring railroads, factories and prosperity to the devastated South fell well short of its potential for a host of reasons including widespread but hardly unusual corruption, but also because more attractive opportunities beckoned capital and immigrants to the North and to the newly opened Western regions.

The kind of distortions typical of planned economies devastated upcountry small farmers who turned from growing food crops to cotton for shipment on the new rail lines at the expense of their long-cherished economic independence.

Radical Reconstruction did manage to enhance black’s bargaining power on the plantation and create alternative systems such as share-cropping—and more importantly, the freedman’s conception of himself was altered irrevocably.

But between 1868 and 1871, a wave of counterrevolutionary terror began to sweep the South. Despite sporadic Federal efforts at suppression, the Ku Klux Klan and kindred organizations like the Knights of the White Camellia and the White Brotherhood became entrenched in many parts of the South and were ultimately successful in restricting local black enfranchisement and upward economic mobility.

Phase V: The Depression, Labor Unrest and the End of Reconstruction (Chapters 11-12)

The North, for its part, was increasingly distracted by its own concerns: rising labor unrest as well as the ascendance of an elite class of industrialists undermined the free labor ideology that inspired early Radical Reconstructionists and led to new alliances between plantation and factory owners.

I really struggled with these last few chapters. Endless discussions of shifting electoral trends, party infighting, Congressional committees creating sausage legislation made for very dull reading. I found myself longing for a CNN-style map showing electoral district returns and lo and behold I found this brilliant presentation showing election results from 1868-1900 that clearly demonstrates both the effect of the powerful surge of black enfranchisement and its ultimate suppression.

By 1877 concerns over the economy, which had barely weathered a major depression, labor strife especially rail shut-downs, and troubles with Indians and imported Chinese labor in the West had completely shifted the focus of national attention away from the South and the issues that animated the Civil War and Reconstruction. The South was largely left to its own devices to resurrect a new version of its old feudal class and racial system.

But the lockdown was never again as total as it had been under slavery; thousands of blacks would head west for new opportunities and later migrate en masse to the North to find new jobs in the industrial heartland. Black churches, in particular the Southern Baptist and AME Zion Protestant denominations, would provide both solace and political leadership. Black colleges and collective organizations such as the United Negro College Fund would educate a new elite. And in many black families the memories would be preserved of a time when grandfathers and uncles fought in the Union Army or served in high government office.

As Peter Randolph, a former slave and Baptist minister would write in a sentence that Foner uses at the close of his book: “The river has its bend, and the longest road must terminate.” For all its flaws and failures, the years of Reconstruction made the first bend in a great, broad river of change.

I read a lot of history and non-fiction, but there were times when I struggled under the sheer weight of information. I would encourage non-historians to check the abridged version, A Short History of Reconstruction