On Reconstruction

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword His truth is marching on

Out of any period in American history, none elicits my imagination more than the era of Reconstruction. Far more than even the “original” American Revolution of 1776-1788, the “Second American Revolution” opened the doors to so much new opportunity, and, for awhile, it looked like the United States may achieve the promise that it set out in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence: that all men may have equal rights (although women would still have some ways to before they could seize their rights). Ulysses S. Grant seemingly wiped the Ku Klux Klan off the face of the map, fusionist governments emerged throughout the South, and Radical Republicans controlled 3/4 of all Congressional seats, permitting them to reshape the nation in a truly egalitarian and democratic manner. Then, it all came crashing down in the wake of the Compromise of 1877 (essentially, the Devil’s Bargain). If Southern Democrats would support Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the election of 1876, he would bring about a rapid end to Reconstruction. This is exactly what happened, but with the collapse of Reconstruction came the end of the Revolution. Southern legislatures established a series of Jim Crow laws and took the whole region in a much more reactionary direction. That isn’t to say that Radical Republicans were wholly successful with Reconstruction, not even close. But, the problem was not that they went too far, it’s that they didn’t go far enough.

Historians haven’t always viewed Reconstruction in this way—the first generations of historians to write about Reconstruction argued that corrupt Radicals inflicted the full power of the state among the (white) people of the South. In doing so, they looked the other way as Northern oligarchs drained the South of its wealth and back-stabbing southern scalawags accepted this turn of events. To make matters worse, black people were given rights. “How horrifying,” the earliest historians exclaimed, “this is surely the darkest period of American history.” Since the Civil Rights Movement, more recent historians have rightfully wiped the floor with traditionalist. To them, Reconstruction was not the darkest period of American history, but the brightest and the most vibrant. I agree with these historians, as does Foner.

Traditionalist historians made their cases through narrative history, while more recent historians have generally opted to do so through analytical history. As a result, before the publication of this book, more recent views of Reconstruction could only be understood through snapshots. Foner relies on both original research and synthesis of extant work to give us a narrative history of Reconstruction, and he does a damned good job of it. At times the text might be a bit dry or slow, but he points us to the progressive successes of Radical Republicans. Perhaps most central to Foner’s book is the centrality that he gives to recently freed African Americans. Traditionalist historians have viewed them as incapable of historical agency, while Foner follows in the footsteps of W. E. B. DuBois’s work on Black Reconstruction to establish the fundamental role of African Americans in the narrative. However, while DuBois was making a case about the conditions of African Americans and the world they produced during Reconstruction, Foner keeps a close eye on the pulse throughout the entirety of the South, especially regarding local conditions.

That’s not to say that Reconstruction before 1877 was a complete success. A wider view of America’s past also should give us a glimpse into its failings. The first failing is one that Foner recognizes well: the transition from slavery to free labor was not smooth, and it permitted the worst excesses of capitalism to take hold in the South while filling the coffers of Northern oligarchs. The other failure, Foner fails to spend much time on: the events in the West. As Union soldiers occupied the South, they also occupied the West, and initiated a series of wars against Native Americans that fully destroyed Native culture and society, relegating those who survived to reservations or boarding schools to “assimilate” them to white cultural norms. American treatment of Native Americans in this period was an unmitigated disaster, and it’s important that we don’t forget this.

Nevertheless, this book is an outstanding piece of scholarship, and it makes me think closely about what it means to be American, what it would mean to achieve the promise of the United States, and it offers questions about what might have been. The word that comes to mind is one coined by the late Mark Fisher: Hauntology. Although it has little relationship to Marxism, the legacy of Reconstruction’s collapse is one that haunts our present in the most extreme way possible. We still live with the legacy of 1877, and it’s our responsibility to maintain the vision of Radical Republicans.