Reconstruction

This is another undergraduate paper I wrote that will bear on later posts about the South. At least as it relates to the socioeconomic elite in America. It was one of the first intellectual/historiographical analyses I wrote, before I even knew that was what I wanted to specialize in. This paper actually holds up pretty well all things considered.

The end of the Civil War in America left the victorious North with the daunting task of reconstructing the rebellious states and re-forging a new Republic from the ashes of the old. Very briefly the period of 1863-1877 consisted of the lenient Presidential reconstruction of Southern States, a stricter program from Congress and finally home rule or redemption of the former Confederacy. Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, wrote A Short History of Reconstruction in large part to dispel the popular version of events as written by William Dunning and John Burgess while not falling into the absolute reversal of the modern Civil Rights movement. The former cast the Southern Republican coalition as usurpers of power, exploiting black voters and lining their own pockets at the expense of powerless whites; while the latter placed idealistic halos over the heads of Radical Republicans.

            Professor Foner analyses the period from a social class perspective and finds an aggressive class war waged by the supposed losers of the war (Southern Democratic planters) against the alleged winners (The Freedmen). Large landowners generally refused to admit that their former slave property now had economic and political rights and the planters resisted changes that would reduce their power. While in the North, values associated with plantation “labor discipline” are internalized by the captains of industry and applied to workers in the nation’s corporations. (173)

            In the antebellum period, American society was characterized by a free-labor north and slave power south; with the latter modeled more on feudalism than enlightenment principles. The election of Abraham Lincoln from the new Republican party was such a threat to slaveholders that they seceded from the United States in order to maintain their peculiar institution. President Lincoln prosecuted the war in order to preserve the Union but it soon became evident that emancipating the slaves would shorten the conflict. His thoughts on the subject of the Freedmen matured to the point that he “publicly endorsed black suffrage” for the “very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers” right before his assassination. (33) Foner illustrates the depth of debate over what form freedom should take for the emancipated slaves because as it stood, any changes would need to be imposed from above by the federal government. Wartime expediency tied Lincoln’s hands in the short-term, but the president “did not turn to peacetime with a ‘fixed plan’ of Reconstruction” and may have been willing to press Radical change upon the defeated Confederacy. (33)

            For his successor, Andrew Johnson, who “shared neither the Radicals’ expansive conception of federal power nor their commitment to political equality for blacks” and “never wavered from the conviction that the federal government could not impose such a policy [of black equality] on the states.” (83-4) The new president issued proclamations of “amnesty and pardon” for “former Confederates who pledged loyalty to the Union” with less than $20,000 in taxable property while those with more could petition individually for a pardon. (85) In effect, this put the old (Democratic) power structure back in place by also denying blacks the vote, thus allowing a virtual re-imposition of slavery through “Black codes”, labor contracts, punishment for vagrancy; with the effect of controlling labor and “limit its economic options.” (93) These events showed that left to themselves, southern states (and their ruling class) would do everything possible to ignore the outcome of the war and reassert control over the workforce. Foner argues that “the planter class… had no intention of presiding over its own dissolution.” (99)

            Northern capitalists, bankers and merchants of the upper class supported Presidential Reconstruction in order to quickly resume production of cotton and other southern staple agricultural goods. Radical Republicans balked at the abandonment of the Freedmen and Northern public opinion turned on letting the Confederates right back in to office as though nothing happened. Radical Reconstruction then, in Foner’s view, was a reaction to letting what northerners saw as the war aims fall by the wayside and Congress did much to rectify this situation. Failure stemmed from not forcing the redistribution of land to give Freedmen an economic base for their self-improvement, lacking this basis “a powerful national state must guarantee blacks equal political standing in a free-labor economy”. (108)

            Despite a great deal of political organizing by African-Americans in the South, without land of their own they remained at the mercy of their white landlords. The United States had no tradition of strong federal government and a severe depression caused a retreat in Reconstruction to deal with the national crisis. Republicans at state and national levels had spent a great deal of public money on aid to railroads, which was used both for legitimate economic development and dangerous speculation. The latter caused the collapse of the Northern Pacific Railroad; and with it many financial institutions and supporting industries like coal and steel suffered. Layoffs and wage reductions led to strikes, which in turn led to strike-breaking and “brought European-style class conflict to America.” (217-18)

            Foner demonstrates the similarity in language by Northern and Southern ruling classes in dealing with the “labor question”. (217) “Tramps” were dealt with in a similar fashion in the North as “Vagrants” were in the South, “making unemployment a crime… bore more than a passing resemblance to the Southern Black Codes of 1865-66.” (220) The Northern press branded union leaders “enemies of society” but found no problem with “the proliferation of trade associations” for industrialists. High tariffs and subsidies to private industry are fine but “public assistance” and “private relief” were to blame for labor unrest. (219) Southern planters decried loss of coercion for control over their black labor force, just as Northern capitalists gained the services of the state militia for strike-breaking. (245)

            Economics, class distinctions and the rights of laborers in a market system are certainly not the only elements of Dr. Foner’s thesis; but these represent the basis for telling the story of Reconstruction without resorting to the racist assumptions of the Dunning/Burgess school or idealistic revisionism. It certainly cannot be said that capitalist/labor tension in the US only began after the Civil War, or that race relations in the South would have been better if Reconstruction had not been imposed by Northern Republicans. This analysis of economic causes for the failure of Reconstruction succeeds in demonstrating the difficulty in remaking a society in a radically different image. I agree especially with his conclusion that “[t]he tide of change rose and then receded, but it left behind an altered landscape.” (254) Recalcitrant Southern whites not only outlasted Northern occupation but poisoned the labor relations there by recasting free-labor ideology into little more than slaves for rent, workers with no rights. That said; Twentieth Century Civil Rights activists were able to use many precedents of Re-construction to challenge white supremacy after an enormous amount of political organizing by African-Americans. And a New South did emerge after the idea of a strong national state became more accepted post-New Deal, with the power to force equal rights on the region.

            After reading this book though, the question could be asked: “Was the Civil War really worth it?” Could history have taken a different course, if President Lincoln had merely let the southern states go, recognized their independence and blockaded their ports, clandestinely smuggled African-Americans out of the Confederacy to colonize the territories;  and in that way letting the South collapse under its own contradictions? Given the immense, and ultimately unsuccessful, effort to forge a New South in the Nineteenth Century, could economic warfare have unseated the planter aristocracy when force of arms could not? This counterfactual question can never be satisfactorily answered of course. But Foner’s analysis shows that “winning” does not necessarily give the victors the right (or ability) to impose any conditions they wish upon the vanquished as Julius Caesar once noted. For anyone wishing to understand the socioeconomic history of the United States, Professor Foner’s interpretation of Reconstruction is required reading.