The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era by Douglas R. Egerton published by Bloomsbury Press (2014) 448 pages. $30.00 Hardcover, $22.00 Paperback, $9.99 Kindle.
This recent history of Reconstruction keeps its lens firmly focused on African Americans from start to finish. Less a history of the Reconstruction Era, and more the story of the conflict through which African Americans achieved revolutionary change in states where they had been enslaved only to be beaten back, sometimes literally, by the savage forces of reaction.
The book’s Reconstruction is the reconstruction of race relationships from the moments the first blacks freed themselves by coming into Union lines in 1861 until Democratic terror crushed the biracial government of Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898. Along the way, author Douglas Egerton engages with both modern scholarship and popular understanding of Reconstruction.
The bottom line of Reconstruction was blood. Amidst his descriptions of the gains made by black men and women, Egerton gives the cost in lives lost and bodies mangled. He writes that:
As black activists paid for their convictions with their lives, terrified terrified carpetbaggers—northern politicians, missionaries, and teachers—fled the South. Reformers who might have taken their places often opted instead for survival, unhappily aware that the price of abandoning the work of Reconstruction meant that a future generation of activists would have to risk their lives in the cause of voting rights and integration. As these men and women well knew, Reconstruction did not fail; in regions where it collapsed it was violently overthrown by men who had fought for slavery during the Civil War and continued that battle as guerrilla partisans over the next decade. Democratic movements can be halted through violence. (Kindle Locations 340-345)
Egerton recalls a tour of Charleston on a horse drawn wagon that passed the old jail where slaves were once held and the place where Denmark Vesey was executed. The white tour guide who led tourists through a city built on slavery told his charges that “radical Reconstruction was the most undemocratic period in South Carolina history.” (Kindle Location 371). Egerton’s book is a demurrer. According to the author:
To the contrary, Reconstruction, which was in fact far from radical, constituted the most democratic decades of the nineteenth century, South or North, so much so that it amounted to the first progressive era in the nation’s history. Just ten years after Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney endorsed the expansion of slavery into the western territories and announced that black Americans, even if free born, could not be citizens of the republic, blacks were fighting for the franchise in northern states; battling to integrate integrate streetcars in Charleston, New Orleans, and San Francisco; funding integrated public schools; and voting and standing for office in the erstwhile Confederacy. How black veterans, activists, ministers, assemblymen, registrars, poll workers, editors, and a handful of dedicated white allies risked their lives in this cause, nearly brought down a racist president, but ultimately lost their fight because of
white violence is the subject of this book. (Kindle Location 378)
The violence against Blacks began almost as soon as the Confederate armies surrendered. If the cause of the Civil War had been the right of Southern whites to control the bodies of African Americans, that cause was not lost just because Jefferson Davis was locked in Fortress Monroe. Slavery could not be restored, but the violence that had once perpetuated slavery could still be used to control the labor of Blacks.
The Federal government’s counter to white violence was a small and declining number of United States troops, some Federal Marshall’s, the Federal Courts, and the Freedmen’s Bureau.
The Bureau became the principal target of conservative disdain.
The Bureau was a thin network of Federal offices set up throughout the South. In many places it was the first Federal installation other than the Post Office that had operated in that locale. Its immediate goal in 1865 was to stop people from dying from starvation and disease in war ravaged parts of the dead Confederacy. In its first year it distributed 13 million food rations, four million of which went to impoverished whites. It established orphanages for Black children whose parents had died, but also for children who had been separated from their parents by sale as slaves. It helped families busted up by sales find one another and reunite.
In many communities, the Bureau supported the first schools in cities and towns that ever allowed Black children to enroll. They also set up adult literacy programs in the belief that newly freed workers could only protect their rights if they could read their own labor contracts. When whites tried to exploit Black illiteracy by crafting contracts that returned former slaves to unpaid virtual slavery, the Bureau began to require that contracts be approved by Bureau sub-agents in order to be enforceable.
The lack of any medical care for the freedpeople led the Bureau to establish infirmaries and hospitals. Abandoned plantations were turned over to former slaves to work, often without rent.
Bureau personnel also intervened when night riders terrorized Black communities.
These Bureau roles made its men among the most hated by whites in the South.
Yet, from a 21st Century perch, the “failed” Freedmen’s Bureau effort, which lasted, in the main, from March 1865 to December 1868, had some important successes. Egerton writes:
Less than two years after Appomattox, [O.O.]Howard reported that the Bureau was running 1,207 southern schools that employed 1,430 teachers, instructing 77,998 pupils. By 1869, that number had doubled to 3,000 schools and 150,000 students. In Texas alone, one agent observed, “many small schools in obscure places are scattered throughout the State, taught mostly by colored people.” That number, impressive though it was, did not include those adults who attended informal night schools in nearby churches, or acquired basic literacy from their children each evening. “It is supposed that at least ten thousand colored persons, old and young, have learned to spell and read in Texas within the year,” the agent testified. (Kindle Locations 2412-2414)
Mass black literacy in the South began with the Freedmen’s Bureau. This was an achievement which would never be relinquished, even during Jim Crow.
Most of the teachers in the Freedmen’s schools were Black, but a significant number of white women from the North were among the first educators of African American children in the South. The Northern school teachers numbered around 1,300 most years, and they became models for African Americans learning to teach. They, like the Freedmen’s Bureau agents and sub-agents, were objects of hatred and intimidation by many white Southerners. Embracing, and transforming, the epithet hurled at her by the haters, one Northern woman bragged to her brother that she was an accomplished “nigg@r teacher” in Charleston.
The Northern teachers did not endure the dangers of working in hostile communities for the pay. The Freedmen’s schools paid 15 dollars per month. Had they stayed in the North, Egerton writes, the women would have earned fifty dollars and the men sixty dollars monthly.
These women and the Black women who worked with them, in spite of their gender, became the targets of nightriders. Egerton writes that by 1867:
what had begun as social ostracism of Yankee women and the isolated beatings of white schoolmasters escalated into a vigorous campaign of arson and murder. The violence was increased for a variety of reasons. Two years after Appomattox, the reactionary white minority had learned that almost nothing they might do could arouse the wrath of President Johnson. At the same time, black teachers began to replace replace those white teachers who found the work too exhausting or who, like Cynthia Everett and Helen Pitts, eventually fell victim to low-country diseases. Despite the fact that African Americans comprised only two percent of the northern population, by the end of 1867 they filled thirty-three percent of the Bureau’s teaching positions, a figure that was to increase to fifty-three percent within two years.
…Tensions also escalated over the issue of integrated schools, which were rare in any corner of the
republic. The Freedmen’s Bureau itself was maddeningly evasive on the matter. Howard believed that southern children should learn together, but the old soldier was pragmatic enough not to demand integrated academies. Most benevolent associations advocated schools that were blind to class or color, but as many teachers discovered, white parents adamantly refused to send their children to Bureau schools. Those few who did risked the same level of ostracism from their wealthier neighbors as did impoverished landlords who rented rooms to schoolmarms. When asked why she had withdrawn her daughter from a South Carolina Bureau school, despite not having any state-supported alternative, one farmer’s wife confessed: “I would not care myself, but the young men laugh at my husband. They tell him he must be pretty far gone and low down when he sends his children to a ‘****** school.’ ” Not for the first time in the region’s history, a small but powerful cadre of landholders employed race as a weapon to divide laboring people who shared similar interests and needs. (Kindle Location 2804)
Working-class whites who refused to send their children to free schools with Blacks, resented the Freedmen’s Bureau as they saw children born in slavery achieve literacy while their own progeny languished.
Egerton devotes a considerable effort to describing the development of the institutions of African American leadership and agenda setting. During the 1850s, the Black Convention movement had enjoyed a heyday. These conventions brought together Black Northern activists, ministers, and intellectuals to craft a common abolitionist credo. The conventions were dispensed with during the first three years of the war, but as Union victory became likely, they were revived first in New York’s Hudson Valley at Poughkeepsie and then in Syracuse in 1864.
The Syracuse Convention was the first national African American convention, including as it did delegates from the South. It included some of the African American luminaries of Reconstruction like Frederick Douglass, Daddy Cain, Octavius Catto, and William Wells Brown. Some were tested in the Abolitionist movement, but others were from the new generation.
The delegates created the National Equal Rights League, announcing that ending slavery was only the beginning.
Blacks hoping to convene risked paying a price, and not only in the Deep South. One of the Syracuse conventioneers was assaulted by several Irish Democrats, for example. Egerton tells this story of an incident in 1866:
That August, Maryland whites—many of them self-proclaimed Confederate veterans—broke up a Methodist camp meeting in Anne Arundel County. Here too the violence was not random, and whites rarely assaulted African Americans simply on account of their color. The attacks were targeted at black men in uniform, who symbolized the revolutionary changes sweeping the country.
The African Americans who risked their lives for equality never worked only for change in the South. In Iowa, veterans of the 60th (Iowa) USCT convened to call for the repeal of that state’s laws discriminating against African Americans. Octavius Catto rose to prominence with his campaign to desegregate Philadelphia streetcars. The push for equal rights was national, and not regional. Black leaders demanded that their Northern white allies address the inequities in their own backyards as well as those in the former Confederacy.
White terrorism grew through 1871. By then, many areas of the South witnessed regular atrocities. But there was a price to be paid for the gruesome work of racial counter-revolution. A Northern public that had hoped to put Reconstruction behind it was stirred to support renewed Federal intervention. Egerton writes that this resulted in a reexamination of strategy by conservative leaders.
White vigilantism did not end in 1871, but it changed. Democratic mobs were less likely to
assault blacks at the polls, where marshals were inclined to station themselves. Groups of night riders near urban areas also attracted the attention of army patrols. But small groups and even single assassins continued to prey on Republican leaders, and on occasion, white gangs rioted against black neighborhoods in ill-defended upcountry towns. Intimidation continued as well, and both carpetbaggers and scalawags awoke to find empty coffins with their names inscribed on them dumped near their doors. In Alabama, a lone gunman lay in wait for a U.S. marshal as he returned from a political rally and “shot at him as he passed,” reported a black journalist, “but owing to the darkness missed his aim.” As ever, vigilantes sought to eliminate ministers, understanding how the murder of one influential community leader might terrify an entire congregation. (Kindle Location 5308-5312)
Although there were moments when the plight of white Unionists and African Americans in the South intruded on the attention of the nation, by the mid-1870s white voters had turned their attention to other matters. Egerton writes that in 1866:
roughly twelve thousand soldiers had guarded rural voters and patrolled southern streets. By the summer of 1876, only twenty-eight hundred federal troops provided a largely symbolic occupation of what had been eleven Confederate states. Despite the rise of the Klan and other vigilante groups, the ratio of one soldier to every 708 southern civilians had been gradually reduced to one for every 3,160 people. (Kindle Location 5519-5521)
While historians traditionally marked the end of Reconstruction as 1877, Egerton observes that African Americans retained some power until the 1890s. In fact, some rights, like the right to an education, continue up through the present day. In Florida, Blacks won local elections throughout the 1880s, and they served on city councils in many urban areas elsewhere in the South. In 1891, there were 2,393 African Americans in the employment of the Federal government. None of this compensated for the losses suffered in the same period, but the gains of Reconstruction were not wiped out with the results of one presidential election. It was not until 1901 that the last of the Reconstruction Black Congressman left office. There was not to be another African American in the House of Representatives until 1928.
Egerton asks the question about Reconstruction that is raised, in a different form, frequently on this forum:
why did this period of progressive reform end? Why did similar battles have to be waged anew by a later generation of activists one hundred years later? There is no simple answer, and the theories explaining the end of Reconstruction are as numerous as the politicians, writers, journalists, and historians who have advanced them. One school of thought holds that southern whites, even as they recognized the futility of fighting on, remained loyal to the Confederacy, hostile to the government in Washington, D.C., and united in the cause of white supremacy. Seen this way, whites of all classes and both genders waged a relentless guerrilla war on black republicans and their carpetbagger allies. Faithful to a lost cause, even those white southerners who stood to benefit from Republican economic programs ultimately decided that race trumped self-interest and resolutely worked to set back the political clock. Although true in part—and virtually every theory purporting to explain the demise of Reconstruction has some merit—this view underestimates the amount of middle- and working-class disaffection with the Confederacy during its final years and overplays the extent of white unity and resistance in the immediate aftermath of the war.
This is not the only theory trying to explain the end of Reconstruction:
Some historians note that a small number of mixed-race Carolinians assumed a large role in Reconstruction and observe that those liberated before the war—the so-called freemen (as opposed to the freedmen, those liberated during the war and at its end)—disproportionately held seats in the South Carolina assembly. These historians argue that these middling African American politicians failed to endorse the more sweeping program of land redistribution favored by the rural freedmen. By failing to advance a truly progressive platform, this theory suggests, light-skinned
urbanites played into the hands of white conservatives and moderate southern Republicans—often derided as scalawags—and so lost the support of their agrarian constituents. But only Charleston and New Orleans were home to large numbers of browns who had won their freedom by emphasizing their white patronage and then drawing linguistic distinctions between themselves and those black laborers liberated by the war. Critics of this theory add that even in South Carolina and Louisiana black freedmen—and particularly veterans, artisans, and ministers—promptly challenged the old colored elite, just as they questioned whether most Charleston browns could rightly be characterized as bourgeois, given their relative lack of wealth and economic autonomy.
A third theory is also discussed by Egerton:
An even more recent theory holds that the determination of millions of suddenly liberated people to achieve an independent cultural life played into the desire of racist whites to maintain a separate political identity even as they laid the basis for future civil rights struggles.
The fourth theory claims that the conservatism of Republican business elites undermined Northern support for Reconstruction:
In this interpretation, the growth of industrialization, already under way in pockets of the North, accelerated during the war and led to the first meaningful stirrings of working-class organization as early as 1866 with the National Labor Union. Faced with new labor militancy, Republican magnates were increasingly sensitive to desires
of southern Redeemers—the indigenous white business class—and what remained of the old planter class to control their laborers, and so influential northerners gradually turned a blind eye to all but the most egregious civil rights abuses. The victory of the same Republican free-labor ideology that proved so dangerous to proslavery beliefs, ironically, ultimately failed to serve the needs of southern
freedmen. Tragically, these early attempts by northern workingmen to unite against their industrial bosses hindered the ability of black southerners to do so as well.
Another theory implicates Northerners as well:
Rightly recognizing that northern racism varied from its southern variety only by degree, a number of writers emphasize white attitudes toward African Americans and find it unsurprising that northern voters, even Republicans, failed to stand by far-reaching racial policies. Critical of what they perceived to be special-interest legislation designed to assist southern freedmen, these middle-class voters believed they had fulfilled their obligation to former slaves by fighting for the Union. Flattering themselves that their economic success was based upon their private industry, rather than on the happy accident of race, gender, and region, they used their embrace of individualism to excuse their failure to maintain support of meaningful social change in the South…When southern whites continued to resist democratization into the 1870s, often through murder and mayhem, weary northern voters simply gave way in pressing for a progressive social agenda they rarely supported in their own communities.
According to Egerton, while there are elements of truth in all of the explanations offered, they all try to locate the end of Reconstruction in internal flaws that caused its “failure.” Egerton writes that:
Reconstruction did not fail; in regions where it collapsed it was violently overthrown by men who had fought for slavery during the Civil War and continued that battle as guerrilla partisans over the next decade. Democratic movements can be halted through violence.
The impact of the violent counterrevolution could be dramatic. Once you understand that Reconstruction did not magically end with the determination of the contested presidential election in 1877, you can see how. For example, in 1896, two decades after Reconstruction supposedly ended, 130,344 black Louisianans were still registered to vote. In 1900, only four years later, there were only 5,320 black voters still on the rolls.
In the final section of the book, Egerton explores how the Reconstruction Era has been remembered, and more often misremembered. The early Lost Cause former-Confederate writers were important for laying the groundwork, but they were not taken seriously outside the South. When the United Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy established book review committees to insure that the white Southern view of Reconstruction was presented in school texts, writers began confining their narratives to those themes acceptable to review committees hostile to African American equality and to the connection of the Confederacy to the defense of slavery. While James Longstreet might say; “Why not talk about witchcraft if slavery was not the cause of the war, I never heard of any other cause of the quarrel than slavery,” school children would learn differently.
The work of the Dunning School historians in the early 1900s would establish the academic paradigm for the university study of the subject, but Egerton points out that only a small number of Americans would read books written by these professors. More effective at popularizing the view of Reconstruction as an ignoble failure was the emergence of popular histories and novels like The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan that portrayed the white South as the victim of negro misrule and terror after the Civil War.
The movie version of Dixon’s novel, The Birth of a Nation, became the highest grossing film of the silent movie era. It also established for film makers and publishers the idea that there was a market for such racial morality plays. Sentimental Moonlight and Magnolia novels and films proliferated.
Trying to counter the historical revisionism of Dixon and Dunning were the aging veterans of the G.A.R., who insisted that slavery was the cause of the Civil War and that the establishment of African American citizenship was a defensible result of it. African Americans also worked to establish a counter-narrative, publishing memoirs of the period which focused on Black achievements and white violence. The formation of the Niagara movement at the turn of the century and the NAACP that it spawned led to the rise of the great African American historian W.E.B. DuBois. The Harvard-trained Ph.D would spend half a century researching and writing about Reconstruction. His master work on the subject would become a Book of the Month Club selection, introducing scholarship on the subject into the discussion of Reconstruction. But nothing DuBois could write would be enough to counter the reinforcement of the white Southern view of Reconstruction that the novel and film Gone With the Wind accomplished.
According to Egerton, Margaret Mitchell “insisted that her novel was based on years of research, and it drew heavily on the writings of Dunning…” and his disciple Ulrich B. Phillips. Mitchell’s novel sold one million copies when it was released. It sold thirteen times as many copies each day as DuBois’s history of Reconstruction had sold in an entire year. Mitchell was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
The release of the film adaptation of the novel broke all records for movie box office. The fact that one of its stars, Hattie McDaniel, could not attend the film’s opening in segregated Atlanta seems not have given the movie-going public much pause.
The film would influence popular American thinking on Reconstruction for the next two generations, even as academic historians were increasingly rejecting the Dunning School on which the film based its “history.”
The Wars of Reconstruction is the third of three surveys of Reconstruction that I have read in the last year. I have to admit that it is the most depressing. The violence directed at African Americans, stretching from 1862 to 1900 recorded in this volume is relentless. This is a chapter in American race relations that most Americans have only a dim awareness of, and it is one that needs exposure.
The book is focused on the Black experience from its opening sentences until its conclusion. It describes the challenges African Americans made to white supremacy and the beat-downs they suffered in response. One cannot read this work and participate in the national denial about the disadvantaging by race that went on long after the last slave had been freed.
Egerton has not written an overview of the years from 1865 to 1877 in America. There is nothing much here about issues beyond race relations. What is included helps to explain a lot about the nation we became in the first half of the 20th Century.
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