On a Nation Under Our Feet

If I had become an Americanist, I would be a historian of Reconstruction. As I’ve said in an earlier review, this period is—by far—the most fascinating era of American history, with all of its pitfalls and promises. I wonder how American history would have turned out differently had General Sherman’s field proclamation to give African Americans forty acres and a mule been taken seriously. I think that, for one, the United States of today would be a much better place.

Hahn’s book only adds to my fascination with Reconstruction. Although his text isn’t limited to Reconstruction, instead bounding his period with the last decade of slavery in the country and the Great Migration (which was effectively kicked off by World War I). Hahn here effectively argues that rural, Southern African Americans contributed to the construction of a new political country while simultaneously constructing themselves as a new “nation,” or a new people. In doing so, they shifted from a position of being slaves to citizens, then relegated to subjects after the coming of Jim Crow. Yet, even at the “nadir of Southern race relations” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Southern African Americans did not simply accept repression and oppression by former slaveowners and white Southerners—they maintained agency and set the stage for the emergence of black activists like W. E. B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, and even Marcus Garvey.

Reconstruction saw the height of African American political success in the United States, although they were politically active even as enslaved peoples and under Jim Crow. The first black United States Senator actually took Jefferson Davis’s Mississippi seat, which had lay vacant since the secession of the country—Southerners and Northern Democrats claimed that this senator, Hiram Rhodes Revels, was ineligible for his seat because, under the Dred Scott case, he was not a “citizen” for the nine years prior to his election (Dred Scott stripped citizenship from Black Americans in 1854). Radical Republicans rightly argued that Dred Scott was bullshit and seated him anyways. Even more successful were black Americans in state legislatures, where more than half of all seats in South Carolina’s House of Representatives went to Black Republicans, and more than a third of all Senate seats—rightly so, the population of SC was more than half black.

This is such interesting stuff, and I wish I had more time to spend on it. Hahn’s book is historical writing of the highest order, and it ought to be read by anyone interested in American racial history and the nineteenth century.