THE
surrender of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House,
150 years ago next month, effectively ended the Civil War. Preoccupied
with the challenges of our own time, Americans will probably devote
little attention to the sesquicentennial of Reconstruction, the
turbulent era that followed the conflict. This is unfortunate, for if
any historical period deserves the label “relevant,” it is
Reconstruction.
Issues
that agitate American politics today — access to citizenship and voting
rights, the relative powers of the national and state governments, the
relationship between political and economic democracy, the proper
response to terrorism — all of these are Reconstruction questions. But
that era has long been misunderstood.
Reconstruction
refers to the period, generally dated from 1865 to 1877, during which
the nation’s laws and Constitution were rewritten to guarantee the basic
rights of the former slaves, and biracial governments came to power
throughout the defeated Confederacy. For decades, these years were
widely seen as the nadir in the saga of American democracy. According to
this view, Radical Republicans in Congress, bent on punishing defeated
Confederates, established corrupt Southern governments presided over by
carpetbaggers (unscrupulous Northerners who ventured south to reap the
spoils of office), scalawags (Southern whites who supported the new
regimes) and freed African-Americans, unfit to exercise democratic
rights. The heroes of the story were the self-styled Redeemers, who
restored white supremacy to the South.
This
portrait, which received scholarly expression in the early-20th-century
works of William A. Dunning and his students at Columbia University,
was popularized by the 1915 film “Birth of A Nation” and by Claude
Bowers’s 1929 best-selling history, “The Tragic Era.” It provided an
intellectual foundation for the system of segregation and black
disenfranchisement that followed Reconstruction. Any effort to restore
the rights of Southern blacks, it implied, would lead to a repeat of the
alleged horrors of Reconstruction.
HISTORIANS
have long since rejected this lurid account, although it retains a
stubborn hold on the popular imagination. Today, scholars believe that
if the era was “tragic,” it was not because Reconstruction was attempted
but because it failed.
Reconstruction
actually began in December 1863, when Abraham Lincoln announced a plan
to establish governments in the South loyal to the Union. Lincoln
granted amnesty to most Confederates so long as they accepted the
abolition of slavery, but said nothing about rights for freed blacks.
Rather than a blueprint for the postwar South, this was a war measure,
an effort to detach whites from the Confederacy. On Reconstruction, as
on other questions, Lincoln’s ideas evolved. At the end of his life, he
called for limited black suffrage in the postwar South, singling out the
“very intelligent” (prewar free blacks) and “those who serve our cause
as soldiers” as most worthy.
Lincoln
did not live to preside over Reconstruction. That task fell to his
successor, Andrew Johnson. Once lionized as a heroic defender of the
Constitution against Radical Republicans, Johnson today is viewed by
historians as one of the worst presidents to occupy the White House. He
was incorrigibly racist, unwilling to listen to criticism and unable to
work with Congress. Johnson set up new Southern governments controlled
by ex-Confederates. They quickly enacted the Black Codes, laws that
severely limited the freed people’s rights and sought, through vagrancy
regulations, to force them back to work on the plantations. But these
measures aroused bitter protests among blacks, and convinced Northerners
that the white South was trying to restore slavery in all but name.
There
followed a momentous political clash, the struggle between Johnson and
the Republican majority (not just the Radicals) in Congress. Over
Johnson’s veto, Congress enacted one of the most important laws in
American history, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, still on the books
today. It affirmed the citizenship of everyone born in the United
States, regardless of race (except Indians, still considered members of
tribal sovereignties). This principle, birthright citizenship, is
increasingly rare in today’s world and deeply contested in our own
contemporary politics, because it applies to the American-born children
of undocumented immigrants.
The
act went on to mandate that all citizens enjoy basic civil rights in
the same manner “enjoyed by white persons.” Johnson’s veto message
denounced the law for what today is called reverse discrimination: “The
distinction of race and color is by the bill made to operate in favor of
the colored and against the white race.” Indeed, in the idea that
expanding the rights of nonwhites somehow punishes the white majority,
the ghost of Andrew Johnson still haunts our discussions of race.
Soon
after, Congress incorporated birthright citizenship and legal equality
into the Constitution via the 14th Amendment. In recent decades, the
courts have used this amendment to expand the legal rights of numerous
groups — most recently, gay men and women. As the Republican editor
George William Curtis wrote, the 14th Amendment changed a Constitution
“for white men” to one “for mankind.” It also marked a significant
change in the federal balance of power, empowering the national
government to protect the rights of citizens against violations by the
states.
In
1867 Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts, again over Johnson’s
veto. These set in motion the establishment of new governments in the
South, empowered Southern black men to vote and temporarily barred
several thousand leading Confederates from the ballot. Soon after, the
15th Amendment extended black male suffrage to the entire nation.
Disunion: The Civil War
The
Reconstruction Acts inaugurated the period of Radical Reconstruction,
when a politically mobilized black community, with its white allies,
brought the Republican Party to power throughout the South. For the
first time, African-Americans voted in large numbers and held public
office at every level of government. It was a remarkable, unprecedented
effort to build an interracial democracy on the ashes of slavery.
Most
offices remained in the hands of white Republicans. But the advent of
African-Americans in positions of political power aroused bitter
hostility from Reconstruction’s opponents. They spread another myth —
that the new officials were propertyless, illiterate and incompetent. As
late as 1947, the Southern historian E. Merton Coulter wrote that of
the various aspects of Reconstruction, black officeholding was “longest
to be remembered, shuddered at, and execrated.”
There
was corruption in the postwar South, although given the scandals of New
York’s Tweed Ring and President Ulysses S. Grant’s administration,
black suffrage could hardly be blamed. In fact, the new governments had a
solid record of accomplishment. They established the South’s first
state-funded public school systems, sought to strengthen the bargaining
power of plantation laborers, made taxation more equitable and outlawed
racial discrimination in transportation and public accommodations. They
offered aid to railroads and other enterprises in the hope of creating a
New South whose economic expansion would benefit black and white alike.
Reconstruction
also made possible the consolidation of black families, so often
divided by sale during slavery, and the establishment of the independent
black church as the core institution of the emerging black community.
But the failure to respond to the former slaves’ desire for land left
most with no choice but to work for their former owners.
It
was not economic dependency, however, but widespread violence, coupled
with a Northern retreat from the ideal of equality, that doomed
Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups began a campaign of
murder, assault and arson that can only be described as homegrown
American terrorism. Meanwhile, as the Northern Republican Party became
more conservative, Reconstruction came to be seen as a misguided attempt
to uplift the lower classes of society.
One
by one, the Reconstruction governments fell. As a result of a bargain
after the disputed presidential election of 1876, the Republican
Rutherford B. Hayes assumed the Oval Office and disavowed further
national efforts to enforce the rights of black citizens, while white
Democrats controlled the South.
By
the turn of the century, with the acquiescence of the Supreme Court, a
comprehensive system of racial, political and economic inequality,
summarized in the phrase Jim Crow, had come into being across the South.
At the same time, the supposed horrors of Reconstruction were invoked
as far away as South Africa and Australia to demonstrate the necessity
of excluding nonwhite peoples from political rights. This is why W.E.B.
Du Bois, in his great 1935 work “Black Reconstruction in America,” saw
the end of Reconstruction as a tragedy for democracy, not just in the
United States but around the globe.
While
violated with impunity, however, the 14th and 15th Amendments remained
on the books. Decades later they would provide the legal basis for the
civil rights revolution, sometimes called the Second Reconstruction.
Citizenship,
rights, democracy — as long as these remain contested, so will the
necessity of an accurate understanding of Reconstruction. More than most
historical subjects, how we think about this era truly matters, for it
forces us to think about what kind of society we wish America to be.
Eric Foner is a professor
of history at Columbia University and the author of “Gateway to
Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad,”
“Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution” and “A Short History
of Reconstruction.”
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