Article 36

The New View of Reconstruction

Whatever you were taught or thought you knew about the post–Civil War era is probably wrong in the light of recent study

Eric Foner

In the past twenty years, no period ofAmerican history has been the subject of amore thoroughgoing reevaluation than Re-construction—the violent, dramatic, andstill controversial era following the CivilWar. Race relations, politics, social life,and economic change during Reconstruc-tion have all been reinterpreted in the lightof changed attitudes toward the place ofblacks within American society. If histori-ans have not yet forged a fully satisfyingportrait of Reconstruction as a whole, thetraditional interpretation that dominatedhistorical writing for much of this centuryhas irrevocably been laid to rest.

Anyone who attended high school be-fore 1960 learned that Reconstruction wasa era of unrelieved sordidness in Americanpolitical and social life. The martyred Lin-coln, according to this view, had planned aquick and painless readmission of theSouthern states as equal members of thenational family. President Andrew Johnson,his successor, attempted to carry out Lin-coln’s policies but was foiled by the RadicalRepublicans (also known as Vindictives orJacobins). Motivated by an irrational ha-tred of Rebels or by ties with Northern cap-italists out to plunder the South, theRadicals swept aside Johnson’s lenientprogram and fastened black supremacyupon the defeated Confederacy. An orgyof corruption followed, presided over byunscrupulous carpetbaggers (Northernerswho ventured south to reap the spoils ofoffice), traitorous scalawags (Southernwhites who cooperated with the new gov-

ernments for personal gain), and the igno-rant and childlike freedmen, who wereincapable of properly exercising the politi-cal power that had been thrust upon them.After much needless suffering, the whitecommunity of the South banded togetherto overthrow these “black” governmentsand restore home rule (their euphemismfor white supremacy). All told, Recon-struction was just about the darkest page inthe American saga.

Originating in anti-Reconstruction pro-paganda of Southern Democrats duringthe 1870s, this traditional interpretationachieved scholarly legitimacy around theturn of the century through the work ofWilliam Dunning and his students at Co-lumbia University. It reached the largerpublic through films like Birth of a Nationand Gone With the Wind and that best-sell-ing work of myth-making masquerading ashistory, The Tragic Era by Claude G.Bowers. In language as exaggerated as itwas colorful, Bowers told how AndrewJohnson “fought the bravest battle for con-stitutional liberty and for the preservationof our institutions ever waged by an Exec-utive” but was overwhelmed by the “poi-sonous propaganda” of the Radicals.Southern whites, as a result, “literally wereput to the torture” by “emissaries of hate”who manipulated the “simple-minded”freedmen, inflaming the negroes’ “ego-tism” and even inspiring “lustful assaults”by blacks upon white womanhood.

In a discipline that sometimes seems topride itself on the rapid rise and fall of his-

torical interpretations, this traditional por-trait of Reconstruction enjoyed remarkablestaying power. The long reign of the old in-terpretation is not difficult to explain. Itpresented a set of easily identifiable heroesand villains. It enjoyed the imprimatur ofthe nation’s leading scholars. And it ac-corded with the political and social reali-ties of the first half of this century. Thisimage of Reconstruction helped freeze themind of the white South in unalterable op-position to any movement for breachingthe ascendancy of the Democratic party,eliminating segregation, or readmittingdisfranchised blacks to the vote.

Nevertheless, the demise of the tradi-tional interpretation was inevitable, for itignored the testimony of the central partic-ipant in the drama of Reconstruction—theblack freedman. Furthermore, it wasgrounded in the conviction that blackswere unfit to share in political power. AsDunning’s Columbia colleague John W.Burgess put it, “A black skin means mem-bership in a race of men which has never ofitself succeeded in subjecting passion toreason, has never, therefore, created anycivilization of any kind.” Once objectivescholarship and modern experience ren-dered that assumption untenable, the entireedifice was bound to fall.

The work of “revising” the history ofReconstruction began with the writings ofa handful of survivors of the era, such asJohn R. Lynch, who had served as a black

1

ANNUAL EDITIONS

congressman from Mississippi after theCivil War. In the 1930s white scholars likeFrancis Simkins and Robert Woody car-ried the task forward. Then, in 1935, theblack historian and activist W. E. B. DuBois produced Black Reconstruction inAmerica, a monumental revaluation thatclosed with an irrefutable indictment of ahistorical profession that had sacrificedscholarly objectivity on the altar of racialbias. “One fact and one alone,” he wrote,“explains the attitude of most recentwriters toward Reconstruction; they can-not conceive of Negroes as men.” DuBois’s work, however, was ignored bymost historians.

Black initiative established as many schools

as did Northern religious societies and the Freedmen’s

Bureau. The right to vote was not simply thrust upon them by meddling outsiders,

since blacks began agitating for the suffrage

as soon as they were freed.

It was not until the 1960s that the fullforce of the revisionist wave broke over thefield. Then, in rapid succession, virtuallyevery assumption of the traditional view-point was systematically dismantled. Adrastically different portrait emerged totake its place. President Lincoln did nothave a coherent “plan” for Reconstruction,but at the time of his assassination he hadbeen cautiously contemplating black suf-frage. Andrew Johnson was a stubborn,racist politician who lacked the ability tocompromise. By isolating himself from thebroad currents of public opinion that hadnourished Lincoln’s career, Johnson cre-ated an impasse with Congress that Lin-coln would certainly have avoided, thusthrowing away his political power and de-stroying his own plans for reconstructingthe South.

The Radicals in Congress were acquit-ted of both vindictive motives and thecharge of serving as the stalking-horses ofNorthern capitalism. They emerged in-stead as idealists in the best nineteenth-century reform tradition. Radical leaderslike Charles Sumner and ThaddeusStevens had worked for the rights of blackslong before any conceivable political ad-

vantage flowed from such a commitment.Stevens refused to sign the PennsylvaniaConstitution of 1838 because it disfran-chised the state’s black citizens; Sumnerled a fight in the 1850s to integrate Bos-ton’s public schools. Their Reconstructionpolicies were based on principle, not petty

political advantage, for the central issue di-viding Johnson and these Radical Republi-cans was the civil rights of freedmen.Studies of congressional policy-making,such as Eric L. McKitrick’s AndrewJohnson and Reconstruction, also revealedthat Reconstruction legislation, rangingfrom the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to theFourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments,enjoyed broad support from moderate andconservative Republicans. It was not sim-ply the work of a narrow radical faction.

Even more startling was the revised por-trait of Reconstruction in the South itself.Imbued with the spirit of the civil rightsmovement and rejecting entirely the racialassumptions that had underpinned the tra-ditional interpretation, these historiansevaluated Reconstruction from the blackpoint of view. Works like Joel William-son’s After Slavery portrayed the period asa time of extraordinary political, social,and economic progress for blacks. The es-tablishment of public school systems, thegranting of equal citizenship to blacks, theeffort to restore the devastated Southerneconomy, the attempt to construct an inter-racial political democracy from the ashesof slavery, all these were commendableachievements, not the elements of Bow-ers’s “tragic era.”

Unlike earlier writers, the revisionistsstressed the active role of the freedmen inshaping Reconstruction. Black initiativeestablished as many schools as did North-ern religious societies and the Freedmen’sBureau. The right to vote was not simplythrust upon them by meddling outsiders,since blacks began agitating for the suf-frage as soon as they were freed. In 1865black conventions throughout the South is-sued eloquent, though unheeded, appealsfor equal civil and political rights.

With the advent of Radical Reconstruc-tion in 1867, the freedmen did enjoy a realmeasure of political power. But black su-premacy never existed. In most statesblacks held only a small fraction of politi-cal offices, and even in South Carolina,where they comprised a majority of thestate legislature’s lower house, effectivepower remained in white hands. As forcorruption, moral standards in both gov-ernment and private enterprise were at lowebb throughout the nation in the postwaryears—the era of Boss Tweed, the CreditMobilier scandal, and the Whiskey Ring.Southern corruption could hardly beblamed on former slaves.

NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, PRINT ROOM

Until recently, Thaddeus Stevens had been viewed as motivated by irrational hatred of the Rebels (above). Now he has emerged as an idealist in the best reform tradition.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

2

Article 36. The New View of Reconstruction

Other actors in the Reconstructiondrama also came in for reevaluation. Mostcarpetbaggers were former Union soldiersseeking economic opportunity in the post-war South, not unscrupulous adventurers.Their motives, a typically American amal-gam of humanitarianism and the pursuit ofprofit, were no more insidious than thoseof Western pioneers. Scalawags, previ-ously seen as traitors to the white race, nowemerged as “Old Line” Whig Unionistswho had opposed secession in the firstplace or as poor whites who had long re-sented planters’ domination of Southernlife and who saw in Reconstruction achance to recast Southern society alongmore democratic lines. Strongholds ofSouthern white Republicanism like eastTennessee and western North Carolina hadbeen the scene of resistance to Confederaterule throughout the Civil War; now, as onescalawag newspaper put it, the choice was“between salvation at the hand of the Ne-gro or destruction at the hand of therebels.”

At the same time, the Ku Klux Klan andkindred groups, whose campaign of vio-lence against black and white Republicanshad been minimized or excused in olderwritings, were portrayed as they reallywere. Earlier scholars had conveyed theimpression that the Klan intimidatedblacks mainly by dressing as ghosts andplaying on the freedmen’s superstitions. Infact, black fears were all too real: the Klanwas a terrorist organization that beat andkilled its political opponents to deprive

blacks of their newly won rights. The com-plicity of the Democratic party and the si-lence of prominent whites in the face ofsuch outrages stood as an indictment of themoral code the South had inherited fromthe days of slavery.

Under slavery most blacks had lived in nuclear family units, although they faced

the constant threat of separation from loved ones

by sale. Reconstruction provided the opportunity for

blacks to solidify their preexisting family ties.

By the end of the 1960s, then, the oldinterpretation had been completely re-versed. Southern freedmen were the he-roes, the “Redeemers” who overthrewReconstruction were the villains, and if theera was “tragic,” it was because change didnot go far enough. Reconstruction hadbeen a time of real progress and its failurea lost opportunity for the South and the na-tion. But the legacy of Reconstruction—the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amend-ments—endured to inspire future effortsfor civil rights. As Kenneth Stampp wrotein The Era of Reconstruction, a superbsummary of revisionist findings published

in 1965, “if it was worth four years of civilwar to save the Union, it was worth a fewyears of radical reconstruction to give theAmerican Negro the ultimate promise ofequal civil and political rights.”

As Stampp’s statement suggests, the re-evaluation of the first Reconstruction wasinspired in large measure by the impactof the second—the modern civil rightsmovement. And with the waning of thatmovement in recent years, writing on Re-construction has undergone still anothertransformation. Instead of seeing the CivilWar and its aftermath as a second Ameri-can Revolution (as Charles Beard had), aregression into barbarism (as Bowers ar-gued), or a golden opportunity squandered(as the revisionists saw it), recent writersargue that Radical Reconstruction was notreally very radical. Since land was not dis-tributed to the former slaves, the remainedeconomically dependent upon their formerowners. The planter class survived both thewar and Reconstruction with its property(apart from slaves) and prestige more orless intact.

Not only changing times but also thechanging concerns of historians have con-tributed to this latest reassessment of Re-construction. The hallmark of the pastdecade’s historical writing has been anemphasis upon “social history”—the evo-cation of the past lives of ordinary Ameri-cans—and the downplaying of strictlypolitical events. When applied to Recon-struction, this concern with the “social”suggested that black suffrage and office-

EDWARD S. ELLIS. The History of Our Country. VOL. 5, 1900 SCHOMBERG CENTER, NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

Reconstruction governments were portrayed as disastrous failures because elected blacks were ignorant or corrupt. In fact, postwar corruption cannot be blamed on former slaves.

3

ANNUAL EDITIONS

holding, once seen as the most radical de-partures of the Reconstruction era, wererelatively insignificant.

The Civil War raised the decisive questions of American’s national

existence: the relations between local and national

authority, the definition of citizenship,

the balance between force and consent in

generating obedience to authority.

Recent historians have focused their in-vestigations not upon the politics of Re-construction but upon the social andeconomic aspects of the transition fromslavery to freedom. Herbert Gutman’s in-fluential study of the black family duringand after slavery found little change infamily structure or relations between menand women resulting from emancipation.Under slavery most blacks had lived in nu-clear family units, although they faced theconstant threat of separation from lovedones by sale. Reconstruction provided theopportunity for blacks to solidify theirpreexisting family ties. Conflicts overwhether black women should work in thecotton fields (planters said yes, many blackfamilies said no) and over white attemptsto “apprentice” black children revealedthat the autonomy of family life was a ma-jor preoccupation of the freedmen. Indeed,whether manifested in their withdrawalfrom churches controlled by whites, in theblossoming of black fraternal, benevolent,and self-improvement organizations, or inthe demise of the slave quarters and theirreplacement by small tenant farms occu-pied by individual families, the quest for in-dependence from white authority and controlover their own day-to-day lives shaped theblack response to emancipation.

In the post–Civil War South the surestguarantee of economic autonomy, blacksbelieved, was land. To the freedmen thejustice of a claim to land based on theiryears of unrequited labor appeared self-evident. As an Alabama black conventionput it, “The property which they [the plant-ers] hold was nearly all earned by the

sweat of our brows.” As Leon Litwackshowed in Been in the Storm So Long, aPultizer Prize–winning account of theblack response to emancipation, manyfreedmen in 1865 and 1866 refused to signlabor contracts, expecting the federal gov-ernment to give them land. In some locali-ties, as one Alabama overseer reported,they “set up claims to the plantation and allon it.”

In the end, of course, the vast majorityof Southern blacks remained propertylessand poor. But exactly why the South, andespecially its black population, sufferedfrom dire poverty and economic retarda-tion in the decades following the Civil Waris a matter of much dispute. In One Kind ofFreedom economists Roger Ransom andRichard Sutch indicted country merchantsfor monopolizing credit and charging usu-rious interest rates, forcing black tenantsinto debt and locking the South into a de-pendence on cotton production that impov-erished the entire region. But JonathanWiener, in his study of postwar Alabama,argued that planters used their politicalpower to compel blacks to remain on theplantations. Planters succeeded in stabiliz-ing the plantation system, but only byblocking the growth of alternative enter-prises, like factories, that might draw offblack laborers, thus locking the region intoa pattern of economic backwardness.

If the thrust of recent writing has empha-sized the social and economic aspects ofReconstruction, politics has not been en-tirely neglected. But political studies havealso reflected the postrevisionist moodsummarized by C. Vann Woodward whenhe observed “how essentially nonrevolu-tionary and conservative Reconstructionreally was.” Recent writers, unlike their re-visionist predecessors, have found little topraise in federal policy toward the emanci-pated blacks.

A new sensitivity to the strength ofprejudice and laissez-faire ideas in thenineteenth-century North has led manyhistorians to doubt whether the Republicanparty ever made a genuine commitment toracial justice in the South. The granting ofblack suffrage was an alternative to a long-term federal responsibility for protectingthe rights of the former slaves. Once en-franchised, blacks could be left to fend forthemselves. With the exception of a fewRadicals like Thaddeus Stevens, nearly allNorthern policy-makers and educators arecriticized today for assuming that, so longas the unfettered operations of the market-

place afforded blacks the opportunity toadvance through diligent labor, federal ef-forts to assist them in acquiring land wereunnecessary.

Probably the most innovative recentwriting on Reconstruction politics has cen-tered on a broad reassessment of black Re-publicanism, largely undertaken by a newgeneration of black historians. Scholarslike Thomas Holt and Nell Painter insistthat Reconstruction was not simply a mat-ter of black and white. Conflicts within theblack community, no less than divisionsamong whites, shaped Reconstruction pol-itics. Where revisionist scholars, bothblack and white, had celebrated the accom-plishments of black political leaders, Holt,Painter, and others charge that they failedto address the economic plight of the blackmasses. Painter criticized “representativecolored men,” as national black leaderswere called, for failing to provide ordinaryfreedmen with effective political leader-ship. Holt found that black officeholders inSouth Carolina most emerged from the oldfree mulatto class of Charleston, whichshared many assumptions with prominentwhites. “Basically bourgeois in their ori-gins and orientation,” he wrote, they“failed to act in the interest of black peas-ants.”

In emphasizing the persistence fromslavery of divisions between free blacksand slaves, these writers reflect the in-creasing concern with continuity and con-servatism in Reconstruction. Their workreflects a startling extension of revisionistpremises. If, as has been argued for the pasttwenty years, blacks were active agentsrather than mere victims of manipulation,then they could not be absolved of blame forthe ultimate failure of Reconstruction.

Despite the excellence of recent writ-ings and the continual expansion of ourknowledge of the period, historians of Re-construction today face a unique dilemma.An old interpretation has been overthrown,but a coherent new synthesis has yet totake its place. The revisionists of the 1960seffectively established a series of negativepoints: the Reconstruction governmentswere not as bad as had been portrayed,black supremacy was a myth, the Radicalswere not cynical manipulators of the freed-men. Yet no convincing overall portrait ofthe quality of political and social lifeemerged from their writings. More recenthistorians have rightly pointed to elementsof continuity that spanned the nineteenth-century Southern experience, especiallythe survival, in modified form, of the plan-tation system. Nevertheless, by denying

4

Article 36. The New View of Reconstruction

the real changes that did occur, they havefailed to provide a convincing portrait ofan era characterized above all by drama,turmoil, and social change.

Building upon the findings of the pasttwenty years of scholarship, a new portraitof Reconstruction ought to begin by view-ing it not as a specific time period,bounded by the years 1865 and 1877, butas an episode in a prolonged historical pro-cess—American society’s adjustment tothe consequences of the Civil War andemancipation. The Civil War, of course,raised the decisive questions of America’snational existence: the relations betweenlocal and national authority, the definitionof citizenship, the balance between forceand consent in generating obedience to au-thority. The war and Reconstruction, asAllan Nevins observed over fifty yearsago, marked the “emergence of modernAmerica.” This was the era of the comple-tion of the national railroad network, thecreation of the modern steel industry, theconquest of the West and final subduing ofthe Indians, and the expansion of the min-ing frontier. Lincoln’s America—theworld of the small farm and artisan shop—gave way to a rapidly industrializing econ-omy. The issues that galvanized postwarNorthern politics—from the question ofthe greenback currency to the mode of pay-ing holders of the national debt—arosefrom the economic changes unleased bythe Civil War.

Above all, the war irrevocably abol-ished slavery. Since 1619, when “twentynegars” disembarked from a Dutch ship inVirginia, racial injustice had hauntedAmerican life, mocking its professed ide-als even as tobacco and cotton, the prod-ucts of slave labor, helped finance thenation’s economic development. Now theimplications of the black presence couldno longer be ignored. The Civil War re-solved the problem of slavery but, as thePhiladelphia diarist Sydney George Fisherobserved in June 1865, it opened an evenmore intractable problem: “What shall we dowith the Negro?” Indeed, he went on, thiswas a problem “incapable of any solutionthat will satisfy both North and South.”

As Fisher realized, the focal point ofReconstruction was the social revolutionknown as emancipation. Plantation slaverywas simultaneously a system of labor, aform of racial domination, and the founda-tion upon which arose a distinctive rulingclass within the South. Its demise threwopen the most fundamental questions ofeconomy, society, and politics. A new sys-tem of labor, social, racial, and political re-lations had to be created to replace slavery.

The United States was not the only na-tion to experience emancipation in thenineteenth century. Neither plantation sla-

very nor abolition were unique to theUnited States. But Reconstruction was.In a comparative perspective RadicalReconstruction stands as a remarkable ex-periment, the only effort of a society expe-riencing abolition to bring the formerslaves within the umbrella of equal citizen-ship. Because the Radicals did not achieveeverything they wanted, historians havelately tended to play down the stunning de-parture represented by black suffrage andofficeholding. Former slaves, most fewerthan two years removed from bondage,debated the fundamental questions of thepolity: what is a republican form of gov-ernment? Should the state provide equaleducation for all? How could politicalequality be reconciled with a society inwhich property was so unequally distrib-uted? There was something inspiring in theway such men met the challenge of Recon-struction. “I knew nothing more than toobey my master,” James K. Greene, anAlabama black politician later recalled.“But the tocsin of freedom sounded andknocked at the door and we walked outlike free men and we met the exigenciesas they grew up, and shouldered the re-sponsibilities.”

You never saw a people more excited onthe subject of politics than are the negroesof the south,” one planter observed in1867. And there were more than a fewSouthern whites as well who in these yearsshook off the prejudices of the past to em-brace the revision of a new South dedi-cated to the principles of equal citizenshipand social justice. One ordinary South Car-olinian expressed the new sense of possi-bility in 1868 to the Republican governorof the state: “I am sorry that I cannot writean elegant stiled letter to your excellency.But I rejoice to think that God almighty hasgiven to the poor of S.C. a Gov. to hear tofeel to protect the humble poor without dis-tinction to race or color.… I am a nativeborned S.C. a poor man never owned a Ne-gro in my life nor my father before me.…Remember the true and loyal are the poorof the whites and blacks, outside of theseyou can find none loyal.”

Few modern scholars believe the Re-construction governments established inthe South in 1867 and 1868 fulfilled the as-pirations of their humble constituents.While their achievements in such realms aseducation, civil rights, and the economicrebuilding of the South are now widely ap-preciated, historians today believe theyfailed to affect either the economic plight

COURTESY OF THE ATLANTA Constitution

Some scholars exalted the motives of theKu Klux Klan (above). Actually, its mem-bers were part of a terrorist organizationthat beat and killed its political opponentsto deprive blacks of their rights.

RUTHERFORD B. HAYES LIBRARY,FREMONT, OHIO

5

ANNUAL EDITIONS

of the emancipated slave or the ongoingtransformation of independent white farm-ers into cotton tenants. Yet their opponentsdid perceive the Reconstruction govern-ments in precisely this way—as represen-tatives of a revolution that had put thebottom rail, both racial and economic, ontop. This perception helps explain the fe-rocity of the attacks leveled against themand the pervasiveness of violence in thepost-emancipation South.

In the end neither the abolition of slavery nor Reconstruction

succeeded in resolving the debate over the

meaning of freedom in American life.

The spectacle of black men voting andholding office was anathema to large num-bers of Southern whites. Even more dis-turbing, at least in the view of those whostill controlled the plantation regions of theSouth, was the emergence of local offi-cials, black and white, who sympathizedwith the plight of the black laborer. Ala-bama’s vagrancy law was a “dead letter” in1870, “because those who are charged withits enforcement are indebted to the vagrantvote for their offices and emoluments.” Po-litical debates over the level and incidenceof taxation, the control of crops, and theresolution of contract disputes revealedthat a primary issue of Reconstruction wasthe role of government in a plantation soci-ety. During presidential Reconstruction,and after “Redemption,” with planters andtheir allies in control of politics, the lawemerged as a means of stabilizing and pro-moting the plantation system. If RadicalReconstruction failed to redistribute theland of the South, the ouster of the planterclass from control of politics at least en-sured that the sanctions of the criminal lawwould not be employed to discipline theblack labor force.

An understanding of this fundamentalconflict over the relation between govern-ment and society helps explain the perva-

sive complaints concerning corruption and“extravagance” during Radical Recon-struction. Corruption there was aplenty;tax rates did rise sharply. More significantthan the rate of taxation, however, was thechange in its incidence. For the first time,planters and white farmers had to pay asignificant portion of their income to thegovernment, while propertyless blacks of-ten escaped scot-free. Several states, more-over, enacted heavy taxes on uncultivatedland to discourage land speculation andforce land onto the market, benefiting, itwas hoped, the freedmen.

As time passed, complaints about the“extravagance” and corruption of Southerngovernments found a sympathetic audi-ence among influential Northerners. TheDemocratic charge that universal suffragein the South was responsible for high taxesand governmental extravagance coincidedwith a rising conviction among the urbanmiddle classes of the North that city gov-ernment had to be taken out of the hands ofthe immigrant poor and returned to the“best men”—the educated, professional,financially independent citizens unable toexert much political influence at a time ofmass parties and machine politics. Increas-ingly the “respectable” middle classes be-gan to retreat from the very notion ofuniversal suffrage. The poor were notlonger perceived as honest producers, thebackbone of the social order; now they be-came the “dangerous classes,” the “mob.”As the historian Francis Parkman put it, toomuch power rested with “masses of im-ported ignorance and hereditary inepti-tude.” To Parkman the Irish of the Northerncities and the blacks of the South wereequally incapable of utilizing the ballot:“Witness the municipal corruptions of NewYork, and the monstrosities of negro rule inSouth Carolina.” Such attitudes helped tojustify Northern inaction as, one by one, theReconstruction regimes of the South wereoverthrown by political violence.

In the end, then, neither the abolition ofslavery nor Reconstruction succeeded inresolving the debate over the meaning offreedom in American life. Twenty yearsbefore the American Civil War, writingabout the prospect of abolition in France’scolonies, Alexis de Tocqueville had writ-ten, “If the Negroes have the right to be-come free, the [planters] have the

incontestable right not to be ruined by theNegroes’ freedom.” And in the UnitedStates, as in nearly every plantation societythat experienced the end of slavery, a rigidsocial and political dichotomy betweenformer master and former slave, an ideol-ogy of racism, and a dependent labor forcewith limited economic opportunities allsurvived abolition. Unless one means byfreedom the simple fact of not being aslave, emancipation thrust blacks into akind of no-man’s land, a partial freedomthat made a mockery of the American idealof equal citizenship.

Yet by the same token the ultimate out-come underscores the uniqueness ofReconstruction itself. Alone among the so-cieties that abolished slavery in the nine-teenth century, the United States, for amoment, offered the freedmen a measureof political control over their own desti-nies. However brief its sway, Reconstruc-tion allowed scope for a remarkablepolitical and social mobilization of theblack community. It opened doors of op-portunity that could never be completelyclosed. Reconstruction transformed thelives of Southern blacks in ways unmea-surable by statistics and unreachable bylaw. It raised their expectations and aspira-tions, redefined their status in relation tothe larger society, and allowed space forthe creation of institutions that enabledthem to survive the repression that fol-lowed. And it established constitutionalprinciples of civil and political equalitythat, while flagrantly violated after Re-demption, planted the seeds of futurestruggle.

Certainly, in terms of the sense of pos-sibility with which it opened, Reconstruc-tion failed. But as Du Bois observed, it wasa “splendid failure.” For its animating vi-sion—a society in which social advancementwould be open to all on the basis of individ-ual merit, not inherited caste distinctions—isas old as America itself and remains relevantto a nation still grappling with the unresolvedlegacy of emancipation.

Eric Foner is Professor of History atColumbia University and author ofNothing but Freedom: Emancipation andIts Legacy.

6

Article 36. The New View of Reconstruction

From American Heritage October/November 1983, pp. 10-15. © 1983 by Forbes, Inc. Reprinted by permission of American Heritage magazine, a divi-sion of Forbes, Inc.

7