Historian James Oakes writes about recent books, and a PBS documentry from Henry Louis Gates and Eric Foner in this week’s New York Review of Books. The review covers Reconstruction: America After the Civil War a PBS documentary series produced by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow
by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution by Eric Foner. From the review:
When Henry Louis Gates Jr. set out to produce a documentary series on Reconstruction for PBS, he wisely invited Foner to serve as his senior scholarly adviser. Together they assembled many of the very best historians working in the field to guide viewers through four superb hours on the history and significance of Reconstruction. With Gates narrating, the documentary takes us from the origins of Reconstruction as slavery was destroyed during the Civil War all the way to the early twentieth century, with the repudiation—both popular and scholarly—of Reconstruction. The two episodes that constitute Part 1 cover Reconstruction itself, describing it as a revolutionary moment in American history, full of hopeful possibilities. But it provoked a fearsome backlash, what Du Bois called a “counter-revolution of property.” This is the focus of Part 2, which covers the era of Jim Crow segregation, lynching, and disenfranchisement. It would take thousands of pages and dozens of books to tell this story fully. All the more remarkable, then, that the four episodes succeed so well in introducing the broad outlines of what Gates calls “the chaotic, exhilarating, and ultimately devastating period known as Reconstruction.”1
The ideological struggle to control how the story of Reconstruction would be told began with the surrender of Confederate forces at Appomattox. As Edward Ayers points out, Ulysses S. Grant believed it was the moment when Northern principles had triumphed, but Robert E. Lee acknowledged nothing more than that the South had succumbed to overwhelming force. Lee thereby introduced the premise of the pro-Confederate myth of the “Lost Cause”: the South had fought courageously for noble ends but was simply dominated by superior Northern numbers. The ideological seeds Lee planted came to flower in the 1890s with the so-called era of sectional reconciliation. Through the first half of the twentieth century and beyond, schoolchildren across America were taught that both sides in the Civil War had fought bravely for their own good reasons, only to have their nobility besmirched by the “tragic era” of Reconstruction.
Early in the first episode, Foner defines Reconstruction as the process by which American society tried to come to terms with the results of the Civil War, in particular the liberation of four million enslaved African-Americans. Slavery’s destruction meant that the social structure of the South had to be rebuilt on an entirely different basis. What sort of labor system would replace it? Were the freed people to be treated as full citizens, entitled to all the rights and privileges guaranteed by the Constitution? Would black men vote as white men did? In short, what did freedom mean? Some of these questions would be answered in Washington and others in the state legislatures of the former Confederacy. But many of them would be addressed in local communities across the South where freed people and their former masters negotiated their new relationship. For recently emancipated slaves, the first priority was to reunite families that had been broken by slavery. They moved about in search of lost relatives or placed ads in newspapers asking for information about parents, children, and spouses. In addition, freed people wanted education, physical security, legal rights, and, above all, land…
…Congress was out of session when Johnson was inaugurated in April 1865 and as usual did not return until December, leaving the president more than half a year to reconstruct the South on his own lenient terms. An unapologetic racist, Johnson issued blanket pardons to thousands of ex-Confederates; he required them to abolish slavery, but otherwise left them free to establish social and political relations between themselves and the former slaves. The restored Southern legislatures proceeded to pass a series of “black codes” that explicitly denied civil and political rights to the freed people and used vagrancy laws to prevent blacks from moving about in search of better jobs, in effect forcing freed people back to work on the plantations, often for their old masters. When Congress returned from its long recess, Johnson announced that Reconstruction had been completed.
But Republicans considered the new state governments illegitimate. They refused to seat the Southerners elected to Congress and proceeded to wrest control of Reconstruction policy from the president. In an attempt to protect former slaves, Congress renewed the Freedmen’s Bureau, and it passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which established race-blind citizenship for all those born in the United States, including former slaves, and empowered the federal government to enforce the rights of citizens in the Southern states. Johnson vetoed both, but Congress quickly overrode the vetoes. It also proposed the Fourteenth Amendment to confirm birthright citizenship along with a federal guarantee of “equal protection” of the law to all citizens. But Johnson did not give in easily. After blacks were openly massacred in the streets of Memphis and New Orleans, he blamed the violence on Republican radicals and did all he could to thwart congressional Reconstruction. He fired Freedmen’s Bureau agents and replaced Union officers who displeased white elites. During the elections of 1866, Johnson embarked on a disgraceful campaign of invective urging the Southern states not to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment.
Disgusted by a president who seemed out of control, voters gave Republicans a huge electoral victory in November 1866, and in early 1867 Congress effectively started the Reconstruction process over again. A series of Reconstruction Acts required Southern states to write new constitutions that stripped former Confederates of the vote while enfranchising black men. States were required to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment before being readmitted to the Union. The results were astonishing. In the spring of 1867 less than one percent of black men could vote; by December, over 80 percent could. The Fourteenth Amendment became part of the Constitution in July 1868. As John Stauffer notes, nothing like this had happened in the global history of emancipation. Robert Brown Elliott, a black legislator in South Carolina, was optimistic: “Behind us lie 243 years of suffering, anguish, and degradation. Before us lies our mighty future.” For the former slaves it was, Foner says, “a remarkable moment of hope and of militancy.” But militancy could be reactionary as well as revolutionary. In many parts of the South, the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations functioned as the paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party.
The elections of 1868 were among the most racially charged in American history, but the threat of violence did not prevent half a million blacks from casting their ballots for Ulysses S. Grant. The man who had crushed the Confederacy became president of the United States, while in the South, between 1868 and the late 1870s, 1,500 black men were elected to Congress, state legislatures, or as sheriffs and justices of the peace. Reconstruction legislatures built public schools, hospitals, and welfare systems, and black colleges and universities were established across much of the South, in large part to meet the new demand for black teachers. Blacks developed their own fraternal organizations and built churches that would become the centers of African-American community life. Freed people were buying land and setting up businesses, and many were becoming economically independent. By 1900, a quarter of all black farmers in the South owned their own land. They could do this in large part because black judges and sheriffs, or whites beholden to black votes, could enforce contracts and protect black economic interests.
But as Gates points out, “the more African-Americans achieved, the more they put their lives at risk.” It was black political success that most often provoked racist violence. As the historian Kate Masur points out in the documentary, “organized white supremacist groups were trying to make the cost of federal intervention higher than the federal government was willing to bear.” Republicans responded with the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, creating a right to vote and banning discrimination in voting on the basis of race. The following year, Republican congressmen held hearings that produced some eight thousand pages of dramatic testimony by African-Americans as well as ordinary whites detailing the brutal tactics of the Klan. In response, Congress passed a series of laws to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and to combat white supremacist groups, including the KKK. President Grant instructed his attorney general to vigorously prosecute offenders, and for a time, the Klan was effectively suppressed.
This is a much longer essay, which you can, briefly, access for free at the link in my first paragraph.
