Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meanings 150 Years Later edited by Adam Domby and Simon Lewis, Published by Fordham University Press (2022)
Freedoms Gained and Lost is a collection of essays that moves away from the contradictory notions that Reconstruction was a failure from the start or that African Americans followed a steady march from slavery to freedom (“From Civil War to Civil Rights”). According to the editors, the book’s “unifying theme is the expansion and contraction of the many and varied manifestations and meanings of freedom,” as well as the gaps between the legal gains of Black people and how their lives were actually lived.
Editors Domby and Lewis write that there is a “unique degree of historical misunderstanding of Reconstruction.” They say that “The persistence of the misunderstanding of Reconstruction matters a great deal more than as a historiographical debate, however. Its pertinence to understandings of race and citizenship in the contemporary United States has profound implications.” They note that prominent politicians, including Hillary Clinton, show a shocking misunderstanding of Reconstruction. The fundamental issue during Reconstruction was freedom, who had it, and how it could be taken away. Most Blacks began Reconstruction unfree. What freedom would come to mean to them is central to many of the essays in this book. So is how it was violently destroyed.
Hilary Green writes about the importance of education to African American communities’ understanding of what being free meant. For generations, Blacks had been barred from learning to read and write. During Reconstruction, they became the leading advocates for the establishment of universal public education. Green tells the story of Black education in Mobile, Alabama during this period. Schools were a primary target of White terror groups because they were such key bastions of Black freedom.
Another symbol of change was the Black cop. In Charleston and New Orleans, Black police officers meant that the armed might of the government was no longer solely on the side of the White man. Samuel Watts describes how officers of color altered the forces they joined and the relations of civilians to them. As the embodiment of government power, the Black officer “interpreted, performed, and enforced their own visions of radical equality and Reconstruction.” Many whites were outraged that the police no longer forced African Americans to show deference to whites. The participation of many white officers in anti-Reconstruction violence led military commanders like Phil Sheridan to demand that these allies of the Klan be removed. This in turn opened up more positions to Black men. By 1870, 28% of New Orleans’ police were Black. By the 1870s, African Americans had risen to positions of command in the two city departments.
Holly Pinheiro has a chapter on Black soldiers from the North. While most joined to free Blacks in the South, some found their own lot harmed while in the army because of discrimination or for legal action taken against them. And of course there was the unconscionable discrimination in soldiers’ pay between white and black in the Union Army. Pinheiro writes: “Realizing that race determined their rate of pay, USCT soldiers rapidly became aware of the bitter irony that their actions as emancipators actually jeopardized their own immediate families’ finances and undermined their claims to equality.”
Other chapters look at the veterans of the Confederate armies. While most former Confederates willing to take a loyalty oath lost few civil rights for their participation in a deadly insurgency, high-ranking Confederates often faced civic disabilities for which they applied for amnesty. The administration of these amnesties gets a chapter of its own, one which looks at General James Longstreet as an applicant for forgiveness. Many Black leaders supported the granting of amnesty to all Confederates who accepted the civic equality of Blacks. They would soon learn that some Confederate officers were willing to lie on the Bible that they would support Black suffrage while secretly plotting to take the civil rights of non-whites away.
Professor Don Doyle has one of several essays on the international dimensions of Reconstruction. These included the French imperial invasion of Mexico, where Grant, Sheridan, and Seward skillfully limited French success. The quick march from Black enslavement to citizenship and voting during Reconstruction, inspired Cuban Liberals who hoped to free a country that still had slavery. The breakdown of the British colonial structures in Canada accelerated in reaction to Reconstruction, helping to create the modern Canadian state. Doyle argues that Reconstruction left the United States stronger on the world stage as it led to the decline of European imperialists in the Western Hemisphere.
Adam Domby writes about the restoration of white rule and the erasure of the Black history of Reconstruction that followed. Ignoring the gains of Reconstruction and blaming all of its problems on Black voters allowed the Redeemers to anoint the White Race as the region’s natural ruler, with the Black as a permanent sub-class. According to Domby:
“…the version of the past enshrined by former Confederates justified disenfranchisement of African Americans as the solution to racial problems. The story went that there had not been racial strife during antebellum times (a false understanding of the past) and that “the natural order of things”—that is, whites on top—left everyone happy. Only during Reconstruction had race relations been harmed, Confederate veterans claimed, so a disenfranchisement of Black southerners was simply a return to the “natural order of things” and was best for all. This depiction of Reconstruction was a fundamental part of the Lost Cause narrative.” (p. 233)
I can’t recount all fourteen essays in this new book. Most of my readers will find this a challenging work based on the latest scholarship that helps break apart some misunderstandings of Reconstruction.
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