Reconstruction: the historian Eric Foner pointedly describes it as America’s unfinished revolution, as it may well be. The period after Lincoln’s death and Union victory over the South saw an effort to remodel Southern society following an egalitarian principle. This effort was bound up at first in the practical necessity of finding land and subsistence occupation for freed black people, but under the guidance of radical abolitionists, there was a real movement to create societies of citizens, black and white, equal, at least before the law.
Northern Republican and abolitionist dislike of Southern slavery was partly rooted in the North’s different aesthetics and ethical sensibilities, and Reconstruction must be viewed partially in that light: as an attempt to paint the South with Northern colours. Northern abolitionists had in the antebellum period withdrew (in perhaps too-studied pantomime disgust) from visions of decadent plantation living, of unneeded Southern luxuries; this was contrasted with the rightness – the thrift and self-reliance – of pioneer life. A popular contemporary theory (now of course discredited) held that the North-South division was rooted in an atavistic English faultline: Southerners were held to be the descendants of aristocratic, lazy Normans, while Northerners descended from hardy Anglo-Saxons. Many objections to slavery – including that of Lincoln’s own father – were, so far from any concern with black suffering, in fact mostly based on frustration at the inability of smallholders in the border states to compete with slavers, the entrenched commercial power of the latter stemming from a free and naturally self-sustaining labour force. Reconstruction might be viewed as the Northern attempt to replace the Southern sense of human virtue with their own. Could black people be imagined, be figured, as the humble, moral, little people in whom Northern Republicans saw so much virtue? Radical abolitionists coupled the North’s more diffuse support for the little people of the world with their – much less popular and harder to sell – belief in equality. And with this combination the more radical among them spun thoughts of a society of black judges, black senators and black governors. For a decade this vision became real, imposed through the force of Northern arms.
And then it failed, but failed in a curious kind of way. It failed in that black people were subject to violent and sustained suppression, and lost voting rights for nearly a hundred years; and it failed inasmuch as radical abolitionists did not succeed in passing down any of the impetus for reconstruction to future generations, neither to their own children nor seemingly anyone else. It finally can be said to have failed such that the historiography of the period, beginning with the Dunning school of the early twentieth century, was allowed to so successfully construct a negative portrayal of Reconstruction such that its end became seen as a great moment of American reconciliation, the ‘birth of a nation’ – the new reunified white American nation. This portrayal seems to have significantly shaped (or distorted) collective memory. The Dunning school, which saw Reconstruction as alternately fanatical and self-interested, and as both chaotic and immoral, was hegemonic in academic history far into the twentieth century, and its views can be seen reflected in any number of films and tv shows. A fairer, potentially more positive, view of the motives of Reconstruction (as distinct from those of the abolitionist movement during the Civil War itself, which is better known) has never really been unearthed in popular history.
The energy and outrage over slavery displayed by white abolitionists became a movement for equality, but within a generation it had become much diminished, then forgotten. Why? How is it that by the 1900s ex-secessionist states were sending statues of confederate generals to the Capitol – with only muted protest from the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War? Why did the zeal for equal rights of the abolitionist movement, at one time so clear, disappear? From what I know, I’m not sure historians have come up with convincing answers to these questions.
The first statue – of Robert E. Lee – was sent by the state of Virginia in 1909. It was controversial. The Washington Post quotes a Kansas congressman of the day as saying, “I think it is a disgrace. He was a traitor to his country, and I will not sanction an official honor for a traitor.” Apparently one Idaho senator fulminated against what he called the “desecration” of the Capitol. Well, this is the kind of reaction you would expect (sadly one that would quickly fade faced with the strength of the ‘lost cause’ narrative. Would many Kansas congressmen, even today, call such a statue a disgrace? Or would most call it ‘history’ that should be left alone?). Despite such initial disquiet, as the Washington Post puts it, ‘a dam had broken in the Lost Cause’: the next twenty years saw Southern states send battalions of Confederate icons to the Capitol. The protest became muted fairly quickly. Hero-worship of Confederate generals became normalised in the South and happily tolerated by the rest of America.
It’s surprising that by the early twentieth century, the egalitarian ambitions of the abolitionists were seen as an embarrassment. White reconciliation, represented iconically by Woodrow Wilson’s appreciation for ‘Birth of a Nation’ (“It’s like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true“) took over. Municipal statues and monuments in the Southern United States still overwhelmingly venerate slavers, confederates and segregationists, with almost nothing given over to abolitionists or civil rights activists (black or white). That is well-known. Perhaps less well-known is that the north still does not honour its abolitionists. Thaddeus Stevens, someone you might know from the movie ‘Lincoln’, has few monuments to his name, despite being one of the architects of the constitutional amendment which ended slavery. Can we chart the cultural articulation from the abolitionist generation to their gilded age children of the 1880s and 90s, uninterested as they were in securing even the most basic aims of Reconstruction? Something like ‘The Betrayal of the Negro’, written in 1954, is said to do something like this. I should pick it up.
Radical abolitionists have been forgotten; they have also been slandered. Take Virgilia Hazard, 1980s TV’s version of the mad bad abolitionist; played by Kirstie Alley, Virgilia featured heavily in the classic tv miniseries ‘North and South’, based on the wildly popular novels of the same name. Some background: the show is about two friends, George (Virgilia’s brother) and Orry. George’s family is a pioneer of the new industrialism, from Pennsylvania; Orry is a scion of a well-to-do South Carolinan plantation. The film shows us the Civil War (including the build up and aftermath) through their friendship. We see them bond when they first meet as cadets at West Point; we see them become closer through the decades; and finally we see their friendship tested when they fight on opposite sides of the Civil War. While the film looks admiringly upon George’s anti-slavery views, it also approves of his lack of energy to do anything about it, and his mannered disdain for what we would now call ‘direct action’.
The show wants to document the divisions – cultural and material – in American society that led to the civil war; but at the same time it wants to valorise friendship and solidarity between all (white) Americans, and at the end of the war, wants the audience to applaud as George and Orry reconcile. Much time is spent showing them fighting together, on the same side in the Mexican-American war of the early 1850s.
The cost of this is Virgilia, George’s sister. Unlike him, she is portrayed as blunt and lacking decorum. Early in life, she becomes obsessed with the wrongness of slavery, delivering a barnstorming speech against what she calls its true product, the harvest of human beings (Matrix vibes?) and going so far as to help the famous (non-fictional) abolitionist John Brown commit acts of terrorism. So far, so good. But the show constantly punishes Virgilia, and strongly suggests that she goes too far. At every turn, she falls further down in society from what the show implies to be her overzealous sense of justice: as a nurse, she is rude to Confederate wounded, and is duly punished; through a series of obstinate actions, she becomes practically homeless and dependent on prostituting herself to a powerful congressman to get by. And the show is not above intimating that her ‘pro-black’ feelings are driven by powerful and unseeming lusts: the man she later marries, the slave Grady, she meets in Orry’s barn and promptly seduces and has sex with in the hay. Lust and political zeal mixed up; each driving the other.
After the end of the war, Orry has seen to it that the ‘bad’ overseers are driven off, and that his ex-slaves, now workers, are ‘happy’ – but then, suddenly, their plantation gets attacked by a mob of angry freedmen desperate for revenge.
The show’s perspective is clear: these ‘savages’ are going to destroy the civilized life that Orry and his family have, and the cosy cohabitation that Orry, the ‘good slavemaster’ has created with his new workers. The obvious and offensive fantasy of black people choosing to till the fields, loyal to Orry and to his mother and sister, is one that ‘North and South’ is content to retread for the viewers of the 1980s. It represents the Dunning School’s perspective quite well, though with some concession to post civil rights era attitudes. So slavery is bad, yes, but the bloodshed to get rid of it is seen as a regrettable division between the brotherhood of white America, one to be resolved as soon as possible. Slavery is bad, yeah, but any attempt from former slaves to overwrite the plantation system, that Grand Guignol, is to be deprecated. ‘North and South’ (at least parts 1 and 2) doesn’t go far into the reconstruction period. But the attack on the plantation and Virgilia’s descent into poverty, confusion and grief at the death of her black husband indicates what we are supposed to think.
In the Dunning view, the black people of the 1870s South, the ones who ran for state senate and gubernatorial positions and won: they are wild and untutored; their northern allies who migrated to the South, the so-called carpetbaggers, are self-interested crooks posing as high-minded radicals; and the Southerners who worked with the northern Republican victors and accommodated themselves to the new order were yellow-bellied collaborators (‘scalawags’, as they became known).
While some or all carpetbaggers may have been partly motivated by personal gain of some kind, given that this is true of all political action in any context, it seems prima facie to be an unfair ding against them; and I don’t really like what I’ve seen of the rebuttals to this point, either. I am struck by the defensive shadow in which the new neo-abolitionist movement – those historians and writers who in the last few decades have taken a more positive view of Reconstruction – lives. Why even take the time to extensively refute this drummed up charge sheet?
There are several works which are dedicated to defending carpetbaggers from the charges of corruption to which they have been subject. These go into some detail. But doesn’t the act of refuting every charge concede too much of the framing to the Dunning school? The Southern ‘redeemer’ perspective should have been dismissed out of hand as that of revanchists sympathetic to slavery and secessionism, who balked at criticism of pre-war Southern society and celebrated a return to it. Why take the ‘Birth of a Nation’ depiction of generally shifty and degenerate northern opportunists so seriously, when it was in part or in whole a smokescreen set up to oppose the remaking of Southern society?
And I could say the same about the attitude to the Scalawags. Some scholarship has found contempt for Scalawags in the class divisions of the white South (for example, placing them as lower class whites cut out of the benefits of plantation society). But again, why take this contempt so seriously? Why spend time and energy on the refutation?
Those of us outside of the academic study of this subject don’t have any understanding of what the abolitionists felt about the failure of their project in the mid-1870s. The famous speeches of abolition happened a decade before, and little of the reconstructor’s view of their faltering project has filtered into popular culture or even the background knowledge of the educated public. Sometimes summations will talk about the abolitionists ‘losing interest’ in black people, without explaining that loss of interest. Was it mission accomplished? Since Stevens et al. had a clear vision for Reconstruction, beyond emancipation itself, I’m not sure that explains it. Of course, the fact of emancipation itself – something that even at the height of the civil war was still controversial amongst the Northern public – would have doubtless drained political capital for further energy spent on black welfare and rights. The 1880s were the gilded age, the age of the Vanderbilts and the railroad: the civil war was a fading memory. A few decades later, it was the something like that sweetness of forgetting that would be celebrated: relief at the reconciliation between white Americans.
Those who have read Ta-Nehisi Coates will know of his fatalistic attitude. In his view, there are some victories, but the structure of racism in America means that these will always be subject to reversals. This is how he explains Trump. Compare with Zion in the Matrix (not sure why the Matrix keeps coming up…). Even Obama’s pithy line, that the ‘arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice’ is based on a reading of American, and not say British or French, history. The plot on the graph gyrates up and down, but there’s a trend line. In English Whig history there has never been a need to talk about trend lines overcoming such gyrations, because Whig historians are not aware of tragic reversals of rights, material well-being, or cultural flourishing. In their view, which has until recently marked the English attitude to the ‘island story’, constitutionalism, liberalism and prosperity march together.
In many Southern states, amazingly, the 2010s have seen the first black Senators and Governors elected since Reconstruction. More than 130 years had to pass for the achievements of Reconstruction to come again. In this context, you have to think of an [progressive] ‘arc of history’ to explain the tragedy of this loss (Obama). Or you don’t think there is such an arc at all and fall into despair (Coates).
BAD ACCESS EXCEPTION 