Calling
Reconstruction an “unfinished revolution” is a very observant thing that Foner
does in the title of this book. Reconstruction was truly the Second American
Revolution, though the “Redemption” counter-revolution would sweep away many of
its changes. This book details Reconstruction excellently and is an extremely
thorough and informative account of these important years. I’ve gotta say that
it’s one of the best books I’ve read because it is just packed with hard
information and knowledge, though at times that can make the book a little more
difficult to read. That said, if you are looking for answers to your questions
about the aftermath of emancipation, the beginning of free black life in
America and how the South changed in the middle to the end of the 19th
century, you will surely find the answers in this book.
The book
discusses in Chapter 2 various “Rehearsals for Reconstruction,” (also the name
of the chapter) which occurred when Union forces won certain areas of the South
and began to implement social and economic changes under military rule. For
example, the famous guarantee of “forty acres and a mule” originated in Special
Field Order No. 15, when General Sherman set aside land in the low country of South
Carolina, traditionally used for rice farming, for the exclusive settlement of
blacks. The land grants were intended to be temporary and, in the end, didn’t
come to much, but that order would be remembered by many former slaves as a
broken promise, one of many that came from the Civil War and its aftermath.
There were other “rehearsals” in coastal areas taken by Union troops, the
biggest of which was New Orleans, which was a city that had never followed the
same power structure as the rest of the South, being that in New Orleans there
weren’t just blacks and whites, but substantial numbers of French-descended whites
(I don’t know if they are Acadians or Cajuns or what) and Mulattoes (this is
the term that Foner uses for mixed-race people, I’m not sure if it’s acceptable
today or if it has some specific meaning, but I’m just going to use it since he
uses it).
Foner
then discusses the initial black response to emancipation. Above all, the end
of slavery was seen by freedmen as a miracle and a sort of millenarian event
that no one alive would forget. People started to dress differently, especially
women who wore more colorful and ostentatious clothing. People held large
meetings, formerly illegal under slavery, that often discussed politics and
issues of the day. People also started to buy guns and liquor, both previously
illegal. Freedmen also started to create schools, and although it was difficult
(sort of a blind leading the blind situation due to a shortage of qualified
teachers), people rushed to schoolhouses to get an education. Last, but not
least, freedmen were obsessed with travelling. All over the country, as travel
restrictions on slaves ended, freedmen up and left their plantations to go and
see their country. A Texas slave said of the end of the need of travel passes
that, “They seemed to want to get closer to freedom, so they’d know what it
was—like it was a place or a city.” There was also the creation of an
independent black church. Before the war, slaves could only go to white
churches (where they would be put in the back) or attend churches with white
ministers (who often focused on biblical passages that emphasized obeying
authority). After the war, the refusal of whites to give blacks an equal place
in their congregations and the black movement to be independent of white people
gave rise to separate black churches like the AME, a religious segregation that
exists to this day. Foner writes that “on the eve of the war, 42,000 black Methodists
worshipped in biracial South Carolina churches; by the end of the 1870s, only
600 remained.” One exception was the Catholic Church, which did not require
blacks to sit in separate pews (though parochial schools were segregated).
On the
economic and political side of things, not many blacks would hold land over the
long term, but most who could afford it tried to buy land as soon as possible.
There was clearly something not just economic, but also psychological going on
in the desire to be independent and have one’s own land. Those who did acquire
land were more likely to register, vote, and run for office later on and into
the 20th century. Foner points out that although immediate
landownership for blacks could have meant an economic independence and
segregation that would have been very bad for the southern economy, the
survival of the plantation system that came instead was no better, as the South
stagnated for the rest of the century economically. Politically speaking,
something interesting is that while in all Southern states, the first to step
forward to lead the black community politically were those who had already been
free before the war (therefore already having education, money, and social
standing), that only remained in Louisiana and South Carolina. In other
southern states, freedmen (those freed after the war), rose to power after a
few years. Despite the gains that were made by blacks, whites reacted
viciously. It reminds me of the Holocaust, when Jews returned to their homes in
Eastern Europe and found that the discrimination was just as bad as ever, with
whites attacking and murdering blacks all over the South. The main difference
is that when Jews continued to suffer pogroms even after World War Two, we were
able to flee to the United States and Israel while Blacks had fewer options and
generally chose to remain to claim the rights that were given to them on paper
in the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments.
Foner
then moves into talking about the economy in Chapter 4, and in short, the economy
was not good. There were just straight up bad seasons, not to mention the fact
that massive amounts of infrastructure was destroyed and so many died in the
war (260,000 men- one fifth of the South’s adult white male population). On top
of that, with slaves free and women and children working less, wages rose
drastically, making life tough for the formerly economically immune planter
class. Foner writes that, “measured in hours worked per capita, the supply of
black labor dropped by about one third after the Civil War.” In addition to
women and children working less, the men also wanted to work less, as after
being freed, no one wanted to work the same hours they did in slavery. The
Freedmen’s Bureau, created to assist in the adjustment of exslaves to normal
life, was not able to do its job well. Instead of having some blacks farm
independently and others work as hired laborers, the lack of land for freedmen
resulted in nearly everyone signing annual contracts to work on the
plantations, returning to the old way. And remember, the old slavers were not
used to labor negotiations and having employees who could leave at will. They
also were not ready to give up corporal punishment, so in many ways, these
contracts were like a return to slavery. Think about this: farm laborers would
only be paid at the end of the year based on the crop success, meaning that the
freedmen bore the risk of crop failure (which happened in 1866 and 1867 in
nearly all of the South). Essentially, the postponement of payment offered planters
and interest-free loan from their own employees. Forced to choose between these
contracts, gang labor (everyone together under an overseer on some project) and
sharecropping, which gave blacks tenancy on some planter’s land, freedmen
overwhelmingly chose sharecropping to avoid the overseer. This allowed freedmen to hunt, fish,
and grow crops on their own time. However, given just a couple of years, loans
from planters to sharecroppers would become a way of trapping them on the
plantation and forcing them into labor relations that were close to a return to
slavery.
Chapter
5 is called “The Failure of Presidential Reconstruction,” detailing the
differences between the actions of President Andrew Johnson, which essentially
allowed Confederates to return to power immediately, versus Congressional
Reconstruction, which came about in 1867 and actually attempted to enact social
change in the South. Johnson has gotta be one of the worst Presidents ever.
This passage from Foner sums it up: “Despite talk of punishing traitors, the
President embarked on a course of amazing leniency. No mass arrests followed
the collapse of the Confederacy; only Henry Wirz, commandant of Andersonville
prison camp, paid the ultimate penalty for treason. Jefferson Davis spent two
years in federal prison but was never put on trial and lived to his
eighty-second year; his Vice President, Alexander H. Stephens, served a brief
imprisonment, returned to Congress in 1873, and died ten years later as
governor of Georgia.” The President proved totally unwilling to punish traitors
or reward the loyal, which is a very bad strategy, even when you forget the
moral and legal issues present. Johnson, one of the few Democrats to remain
loyal during the war, quickly aligned himself with the old southern elites. It
shows you how important the assassination of Lincoln truly was, completely
changing the post-war situation. Southern elites who quickly came back into
power passed laws to make life harder for freedmen, like limiting hunting and
fishing plus requiring fenced land, making it difficult to eat and make money
for anyone without livestock or land. They also stripped public institutions of
funds. For example, North Carolina, which had begun public education shortly
before the war, abolished it, preferring to educate none at all than to educate
white and black children equally. One important political effect of
Presidential Reconstruction is that, because it made no distinction between
free mulattoes and blacks, those two groups would ally together during Radical
Reconstruction from 1867-77, with whites failing to split them, as occurred in
Jamaica.
In
Chapter 6, Foner transitions into Radical Reconstruction, the period when
Congress took over, mainly the “Radical Republican” wing of congress, led by
Thaddeus Stevenson. In 1866, they won huge at the polls, putting a 2/3 majority
of Republicans in both houses.They were going to go much harder on the old elites
and do much more to help freedmen. There were going to be challenges, however.
For example, the Southern Homestead Act failed to achieve its purpose of
transferring lands from the old Confederates to blacks and loyal whites because
blacks did not have the capital to buy lands and most whites who bought acted
as agents for lumber companies. However, they were more successful on other
issues, like a civil rights bill and the passage of the 14th and 15th
amendments, despite Johnson’s opposition. They were able to pass those constitutional
amendments thanks to the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which divided the
Confederacy into 11 military districts and only allowing the reinstitution of
states if they approved those amendments.
The
South developed very differently during Radical Reconstruction than during
Presidential Reconstruction. The old elites who reasserted power in Presidential
Reconstruction were thrown out in 1867 and Republicans began to claim power in
the South. Blacks became extremely excited about the possibilities offered by
participation in politics and chose to stay in the South, trying to build a
more colorblind society, which would not end up happening. Despite huge wins
for Republicans in 1866, 1867 was a mixed year for them, with the Republicans
winning big in the South, thanks to restrictions on ex-confederates voting, but
losing in the North, as Democrats took power. While these were all off-year
elections, it foreboded problems. It meant the end of any land redistribution
in the south, and 1867 would be a high water mark, when congressmen enacted
major policy changes in the South, yet got a glimpse of their electoral future.
From then on, Reconstruction would decline, having barely begun.
Republicans
who had power in the South were completely disordered. Foner writes that, “walkouts
and fistfights disrupted party conventions, members of some factions connived
with Democrats to defeat their rivals, Republican legislatures impeached
Republican governors, and Florida’s lieutenant governor even seized the state
seal and claimed the right to rule. Such displays weakened the party’s
coherence and its image in the North, and undermined its claim of bringing to
the South a new era of responsible government.” Within the black community,
things slowly transitioned into a class hierarchy, as separate black
neighborhoods sprung up in cities, creating a black business class, while black
artisans in port cities like New Orleans and Charleston declined in prominence.
Economic changes for free blacks varied by region. For example, in the South
Carolina and Georgia lowcountry where rice was the most prominent crop, “initial
federal policy, the inability to attract outside investment, a prolonged period
of local black political power, and the cohesion and militancy of the black
community… promoted black landownership.” As a result, freedmen were most
successful there. On the other hand, in the tobacco and cotton-growing South, where
farming did not require as much capital or as much coordination in the labor
force, factors that would have forced more cooperation, the planter class was able
to control its land and resume production.
In
Chapter 9 “The Challenges of Enforcement,” Foner discusses the difficulties
faced by black reformers during Reconstruction, which came mainly as results of
virulent racism and hatred on the part of white Southerners and passive racism and
indifference on the part of white Northerners. Foner tells us that, “At least
one tenth of the black members of the 1867-68 constitutional conventions became
victims of violence during Reconstruction, including seven actually murdered.”
The Ku Klux Klan emerged as a force of anti-black terror, killing freedmen’s
livestock, whipping whites who bought cotton from independent blacks, and burning
down plantations for renting land to freedmen. They sought to regulate blacks
as a vigilante force and had the support of huge numbers of Southern whites,
becoming a horrible force of terror. Whites were far more likely to commit violent
acts against blacks than blacks against whites. Of the large numbers of blacks
put in prison, they were largely for property crimes, while whites had impunity
for violent crimes including the murders of many blacks. Eventually, thanks to
the election of Ulysses S. Grant as President, the Klan was crushed in 1872,
something that Johnson had had no interest in doing. It would reemerge again,
but that was the end of their Reconstruction chapter.
The
Panic of 1873 is a huge event that is detailed in Chapter 11 “The Politics of
Depression.” This thing blew my mind and I need to learn more about it because
it’s way more important than I realized. It was called “The Great Depression”
at the time and the economy contracted for FIVE STRAIGHT YEARS until 1878.
SIXTY-FIVE MONTHS! That is the longest period of economic contraction in United
States history. The Panic diminished Northern interest in Reconstruction and
coincided with a series of very conservative Supreme Court decisions that
emasculated postwar changes. Reconstruction had been in decline for some time
and by the time of the Panic it was barely even in force anymore. It would
officially last until 1877, but the end had already begun.
The book
ends with Chapter 12, “Redemption and After,” as “Redemption” refers to the
years after Reconstruction when the South “redeemed” its political institutions.
I am not sure if there is a clear end date on Redemption. In the judiciary, the
courts retained the extra power they gained, but used it not to forward social
equality among the races, but rather “to protect corporations from local
regulation.” Most Southern states started to drastically cut spending. For
example, the Florida legislature abolished the penitentiary and abandoned the
construction of an agricultural college. Alabama’s “Redeemers” closed public
hospitals. State services started to disappear. However, there were other “mini-reconstructions.”
For example, “Readjusters” came to power in Virginia in 1879, pouring funds
into public schools, abolishing the poll tax, raising taxes on corporations,
reducing taxes on small farmers, and reinforcing blacks’ political and civil
rights.” Foner also writes that, “A decade later a Populist-Republican alliance
won control of North Carolina,” which brought the state a “Second Reconstruction”
that increased education funding, returned control of county government to
local voters, and revived black officeholding. I think that it is interesting
to read this in light of the book American Nations, which does a very
good job illustrating the differences between the Deep South and Tidewater,
which would include Virginia and North Carolina, states that are fundamentally
different from the rest of the South.
The Redeemers did not fully
integrate segregation into Southern law until the 1890s, which could be either
early or late, depending on how you look at it. The Redeemers tended to create
laws that focused on the protection of white property. White lawmakers tried to
put any black they could get their hands on in prison and would then hire them
out as forced labor, recreating the same dynamic as slavery. South Carolina and
Florida achieved the hiring out of nearly every convict in the state,
especially necessary in Florida, which abolished the penitentiary, meaning that
if you went to jail in Florida, you basically went back to plantation slavery. Redeemers
also created “lien laws” that “gave a landlord’s claim to his share of the crop
precedence over a laborer’s for wages or a merchant’s for supplies, thus shifting
much of the risk of farming from employer to employee.” In 1877, North Carolina
passed a law that placed the entire crop in the planter’s hands until rent had
been paid and gave him full power to decide if the obligation had been
fulfilled with no one else a sharecropper could appeal to. Laws that worked to
hurt sharecroppers and help planters started out in the black belt but soon
spread to damage the interests of white yeomanry too, a pattern that is common in
the history of the South. Foner writes that, “Partly because of Redeemer rule,
the South emerged as a peculiar hybrid—an impoverished colonial economy
integrated into the national capitalist marketplace yet with its own
distinctive system of repressive labor relations. While the region’s new upper
class of planters, merchants, and industrialists prospered, the majority of
Southerners of both races sank deeper and deeper into poverty.” Outside
corporations then came in and carved up everything and exploiting the South
without contributing to it. Per capita income in the Deep South showed ZERO
GROWTH FROM 1880-1900, a pretty big indictment of the Redeemer policies in my
mind. For blacks specifically, it was even worse. In 1900, they owned an even
smaller percentage of the land than they had at the end of Reconstruction in 1877
and most worked by moving from plantation to plantation in search of paltry
sums of money and better conditions than the last plantation.
I want to conclude by
re-emphasizing that this is an absolutely spectacular book jam-packed with
facts and knowledge. I feel like I just took a whole college course with all I
learned and I absolutely loved it. Foner tells us that the end that, “What
remains certain is that Reconstruction failed, and that for blacks its failure
was a disaster whose magnitude cannot be obscured by the genuine accomplishments
that did endure.” The tragedy of the failure was extremely clear for almost
another hundred years, as the Jim Crow South oppressed blacks and forced them
into segregated schools. Today, there are still laws on the books that date
from the Redeemer period and amendments to the Constitution from the
Reconstruction period. We still fight the same political fights over who can
vote, which often is a racial fight. The prison system in the South and the use
of police all over the country is evolved from racist norms developed during
these times and the tensions that exist today can probably be traced back to them.
This book is essential reading if you want to understand America and the South.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- South Carolina’s School for the Deaf and Blind integrated and then, at the demand of staff, re-segregated, even though students who were blind would never have known the difference.
- Between 1860-70, five Northern states tripled their tax burden, Michigan quintupled, and New Jersey sextupled.
- From 1867-73, the bonded debts of Boston, New York, and Chicago tripled.
- I learned about the Exodusters, which was a number of blacks who left the South to head west, largely settling in the Great Plains region and living there until the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl era.
- This is not a fact, but just a quote from the author that has some relevance to today’s politics: “Democracy, it has been said, functions best when politics does not directly mirror deep social divisions, and each side can accept the victory of the other because both share many values and defeat does not imply ‘a fatal surrender of … vital interests.’ This was the situation in the North, where, an Alabama Republican observed, ‘it matters not who is elected.’
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