Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

by David W. Blight

Politically, Whitman became a devotee of Johnson and his lenient, state-rights approach to Reconstruction policy.30 Whitman did not believe blacks capable of exercising the suffrage, and he viewed radical Reconstruction policies with the same contempt he had felt for abolitionists. “The republicans have exploited the Negro too intensely,” he wrote to his mother in 1868, “and there comes a reaction.” By 1875, Whitman had described Reconstruction racial affairs in words that would become with time the staple mythology of white Southern, and much Northern, comprehension of the aftermath of emancipation. “The black domination,” he wrote, “but little above the beasts—viewed as a temporary, deserv’d punishment for their [Southern whites’] Slavery and Secession sins, may perhaps be admissible; but as a permanency of course is not to be consider’d for a moment.”31 Here again, Whitman spoke for a growing consensus. The image of Reconstruction as black domination, radical ideology taken too far, would become one of the deepest strains of American historical consciousness in the next generation.