Interpreting American History: Reconstruction

John David Smith

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781631012303
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de la Guerra de Secesión

Writing in 1935 in his brilliant and brooding Black Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois lamented America's post–Civil War era as a missed opportunity to reconstruct the war-torn nation in deed as well as in word. "If the Reconstruction of the Southern states, from slavery to free labor, and from aristocracy to industrial democracy, had been conceived as a major national program of America, whose accomplishment at any price was well worth the effort, " wrote Du Bois, "we should be living today in a different world."

Interpreting American History: Reconstruction provides a primer on the often-contentious historical literature on Reconstruction, the period in American history from 1865 to 1877. As Du Bois noted, this critical period in U.S. history held much promise for African Americans transitioning from slavery to freedom and in redefining American nationality for all citizens.

In topically arranged historiographical essays, eight historians focus on the changing interpretations of Reconstruction from the so-called Dunning School of the early twentieth century to the "revisionists" of the World War II era, the "postrevisionists" of the Vietnam era, and the most current "post-postrevisionists" writing on Reconstruction today. The essays treat the two main chronological periods of Reconstruction history, Presidential and Radical Reconstruction, and provide coverage of emancipation and race, national politics, intellectual life and historical memory, gender and labor, and Reconstruction's transnational history.

Interpreting American History: Reconstruction is an essential guidebook for students and scholars traversing the formidable terrain of Reconstruction historiography.

CHAPTER ONE

Reconstruction Historiography

An Overview

JOHN DAVID SMITH

In 1901 Woodrow Wilson, then teaching political science at Princeton University, commented that after thirty years, the time was ripe to study the period of Reconstruction following the Civil War, “not as partisans, but as historians.” Although Reconstruction still remained an incendiary subject for many Americans, “like a banked fire, still hot and fiery within,” historians nonetheless were up to the task. Reconstruction was “a period too little studied as yet,” Wilson noted, but one that could “be judged fairly enough, with but a little tolerance, breadth, and moderation added to the just modicum of knowledge.” The topic was essential, he insisted, for understanding constitutional change between 1860 and 1876 but, more importantly, for grasping the implications for American life in the twentieth century. “The national government which came out of Reconstruction was not the national government which went into it.”¹

The following year David Yancey Thomas, a Kentuckian then working on his doctorate at Columbia University, surveyed what he termed “The South and Her History.” Paraphrasing one of his professors, John W. Burgess, the Tennessee-born, German-educated founder and dean of Columbia’s School of Political Science, Thomas wrote that because the North won the Civil War, northerners were entitled to write the history of the antebellum period. Burgess reasoned that generally, “the victor can and will be more literal, generous, and sympathetic than the vanquished.” Conversely, Thomas explained, “the history of reconstruction must be written by Southerners, who were the ultimate victors in that life-and-death struggle.” Thomas went on to explain that Reconstruction constituted one of the most attractive areas of research for his generation of graduate students. “The scientific spirit of the universities,” he wrote, “has largely divested them of inherited passions and prejudices, and they are going at the task of writing history with a simple desire to discover and tell the truth.” He cited as an example James W. Garner’s revised Columbia doctoral dissertation, published as The Reconstruction of Mississippi (1901), which was welcomed by reviewers North and South. “Doctors’ theses dealing with such subjects are appearing every year,” Thomas explained.²

In 1908, Thomas praised Peter Joseph Hamilton’s The Reconstruction Period: The History of North America, stating that “it is refreshing to find at last a southern historian who has the courage to say that slavery was the cause of the war. It is still more refreshing to find one who does not burden his pages with recriminations, hurling back at those who love to dwell on the enormities of slavery and the heinousness of secession a double return for the immorality and criminality of reconstruction. However, this is already growing rare.”³ Eighteen years later, however, Thomas set forth his own view of Reconstruction in chauvinistic terms. After recounting Reconstruction’s overthrow in Arkansas, he wrote that “the nightmare of carpet-bag rule was over and Arkansas breathed the air of freedom once more.”⁴ Thomas’s point underscores the correctness of Wilson’s observation: post–Civil War writings on Reconstruction smacked of intense partisanship.

Maine’s James G. Blaine, one of the leading Republican politicians of the period, best exemplifies the northern perspective. In Twenty Years of Congress (1893), Blaine unabashedly blamed white southerners during Reconstruction for failing to show good faith toward the freedman, refusing to guarantee him “the inherent rights of human nature,” and thereby alienating northerners. Blaine took pains to condemn the Black Codes of the various former Confederate states, laws that he believed whites passed in order to restore slavery “in a modified form.” This “objectionable and cruel legislation” signified a slap in the face to the “liberal and magnanimous tenders of sympathy from the National Administration.” Blaine also criticized Andrew Johnson’s lenient policies toward the former Confederate states. The president, Blaine asserted, “quietly ignored the facts of secession, the crime of rebellion, the ruthless sundering of Constitutional bonds which these States had attempted.” Blaine charged Johnson with ignoring “the immense losses both of life and property which they had inflicted upon the Nation, and gave no consideration to the suffering which they had causelessly brought upon the people.” “History and just judgment of mankind will vindicate the wisdom and the righteousness of the Republican policy,” he stated, “and that vindication will always carry the condemnation of Andrew Johnson.”⁵

Blaine praised the Republicans for restoring the Union on a firm foundation and for recognizing the humanity of the freedpeople. It took bravery, commitment, and focus to overcome slavery’s shadow. The Republicans “gave hope to the hopeless, help to the helpless, liberty to the downtrodden,” and all the while they raised “the character and enlightened the conscience of the oppressing race.” “In every step taken after the simple article of emancipation was decreed,” he explained, “the Republicans who controlled the Government met with obstacles from without and within. There were thousands in their own ranks who did not wish the negro advanced to citizenship; there were tens of thousands who were unwilling to see him advanced to the elective franchise. But happily there were hundreds of thousands who plainly saw that only in name, and that without the elective franchise his citizenship would have no legitimate and … no automatic protection.”⁶

Blaine defended military occupation of the southern states and praised President Ulysses S. Grant’s stewardship. Without U.S. troops, the freedmen would have lost the vote. Former Rebels, Blaine wrote, worked to concentrate power in their hands and to prevent blacks from voting. They allowed such “vicious organizations” as the Ku Klux Klan to form “for the express purpose of depriving the negro of the political rights conferred upon him by law.” Klansmen, supported by whites who feared reprisals against them if they served as witnesses as to Klan treachery, “whipped, maimed, or murdered the victims of their wrath.” Southern Democrats fashioned a united region of sixteen states predicated on “a tyranny of opinion which threatens timid dissentients with social ostracism and suppresses the bolder form of opposition by force.” But, Blaine maintained, southern whites were shortsighted. Blacks were rapidly gaining in population. “Ceasing to be a slave the colored man must be a citizen. He cannot be permanently held in a condition between the two. He cannot be remanded to slavery. His numbers will ultimately command what should now be yielded on the ground of simple justice and wise policy.” In the end, Blaine praised his Republican colleagues for ending slavery, restoring the Union, bringing prosperity to the nation, and asserting national authority.⁷

Perhaps not surprisingly, white southerners who wrote during the Jim Crow era interpreted Reconstruction differently. In 1900, for example, the Reverend John W. Stagg of Charlotte, North Carolina, an ardent segregationist who favored abrogating the Fifteenth Amendment, wrote that for white southerners, Reconstruction “was Hell come upon the earth. No people, since the day that man was created upon the earth, ever endured such outrages and indignities.” He added, “Had they not been starved out during four years of fighting, they would have taken up arms after ’65, in an attempt to throw off the yoke of the conqueror.”⁸

That year, Columbia University’s William P. Trent, a native Virginian, similarly proclaimed Reconstruction a disastrous tragedy both for the South and the nation. The Radical Republicans, he charged, “by opposing [President Andrew] Johnson, by advocating negro suffrage, by talking about conquered provinces, by insisting upon the presence of troops in the South, by affiliating with the carpetbaggers and the scalawags, filled the Southern whites with a rage which the victories of Grant and Sherman had not caused and which the vindictive eloquence of [Robert] Toombs and other irreconcilables would have been powerless to inspire.” Trent further accused congressional Republicans of drawing upon “the docility of the freedmen” and initiating “a saturnalia of misrule” that established “the greatest tyranny this country has ever known.” “Is it any wonder,” he asked, “that the memory of such outrages has been slow to fade in the South, that old men and women look upon the hardships suffered during the war as almost trivial in comparison with the degradation and oppression they underwent at the hands not of soldiers but of rascals and renegades and misguided negroes?” Confronted by what Trent described as a “drastic reconstruction,” southerners not surprisingly responded by erecting undemocratic governments and maintaining white supremacy at any cost, including the brutal murder of blacks. “As Anglo-Saxons,” he explained, “they were determined to escape from both military rule and negro domination … hence, wisely or not, they threw themselves into the arms of the Democratic party and began to intimidate and cheat the negro.”⁹

In 1902, another southerner compared the Civil War to the Spanish American War. Both conflicts, the writer explained in the Southern History Association Publications, had unintended, even undesired results. “The logic of events drove the conquerors into what was not foreseen, but from which it was apparently impossible to recede. The absurdity or arrogance is in claiming wisdom, foresight, virtue, for what was not contemplated, and in being seers and prophets after the achievements of evolution, which was hardly dependent on human sagacity, and certainly was not provided for the initial stages.” According to the anonymous writer, the Civil War unleashed the “Pandora’s box of reconstruction,” most egregiously Radical Reconstruction, “a period unsurpassed in passion, hate, cruelty, rapine, fraud, by anything that ever occurred on this continent.” President Abraham Lincoln never intended black suffrage, the disfranchisement of former Rebels, and the substitution of white supremacy by Negro rule. “That fearful Saturnalia of wrong and political corruption … unparalleled by any other treatment of the subjugated by civilized nations … was continued in its savagery until relief came to the Southern States largely through the firm and patriotic intervention of President Hayes.”¹⁰ Reconstruction’s demise, like the war with Spain, thus served to reunite the nation.

Mainstream historians also shared such reconciliationist views. For example, in 1920 William E. Dodd, the distinguished University of Chicago historian and later U.S. ambassador to Germany, remarked that once “set free,” southern blacks “were almost as much of a social menace as they had been in bondage. If they did not have the vote, they would probably become the peons of the white people of the south. If they were given the right to vote, they would become at once the objects of the most corrupting of sectional competitions.”¹¹ That same year Ellis P. Oberholtzer, a leading historian and editor of the period, wrote unabashedly of “the havoc wrought in the mess by negro suffrage, Loyal Leagues, carpet-baggers, scalawags, and their props and stays, the radical hierarchy at Washington.” He referred to “that whole lurid panorama that we call Reconstruction. The more we know of this era in our history the gladder we can be that it is now far behind us.”¹² A reviewer agreed with Oberholtzer’s interpretation of Reconstruction, describing the period as one “unsavory mess.”¹³

Two historians, James Ford Rhodes, the talented industrialist-turned-historian, and William A. Dunning, Burgess’s former prize student at Columbia, dominated Reconstruction historiography between 1890 and 1920. They concurred in interpreting the postwar years as a “tragic era”—a national tragedy that challenged white civilization. By the turn of the century most historians, following Rhodes and Dunning, portrayed the Radical Republicans as vindictive villains, political opportunists who used the freedpeople “as an instrument of power over the white South.”¹⁴ Rhodes made his mark in his influential multivolume History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 (1892–1906), while Dunning wrote two seminal books, Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction (1898) and Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865–1877 (1907). More importantly, Dunning trained generations of doctoral students whose generally like-minded dissertations, consisting of detailed state studies on Reconstruction, shaped much later scholarship. Historians deem these students and their disciples to be members of the Dunning School. Their interpretations of Reconstruction in turn sparked revisionist cycles that vigorously challenged the findings of Rhodes, Dunning, and the Dunningites.

Rhodes, a self-taught historian from Ohio, generally identified with white southerners and defended the South during the postwar years, charging that Radical Reconstruction was a mistaken policy. He argued that the former Confederate states could have reentered the Union smoothly without federal interference. While Rhodes criticized slavery harshly (in doing so Burgess charged “the abolitionist assumes again the historian’s place”) and held the “peculiar institution” accountable for the Civil War, judging the northern cause one of morality and civilization, he nevertheless condemned Reconstruction as “a sickening tale of extravagance, waste, corruption, and fraud.” Rhodes judged the freedmen mentally and morally unqualified for citizenship and hence unprepared to vote. In his opinion, the blacks “almost always voted wrong.” Rhodes blamed scalawags (“knavish native white natives”), carpetbaggers (“the vulturous adventurers who flocked from the North”), and northern reformers who foisted black suffrage on the South, unmindful of what Rhodes termed “the great fact of race.” He condemned the Military Reconstruction Acts of 1867 as unjust, predicated on “misguided humanitarianism, a desire to punish the South, and a design to maintain Republican supremacy in government.” Rhodes charged Thaddeus Stevens with hating the South and manifesting that feeling...