A Short History of Reconstruction [Updated Edition]

by Eric Foner

The scholarly study of Reconstruction began early in this century with the work of William A. Dunning, John W. Burgess, and their students. The interpretation elaborated by the Dunning school may be briefly summarized as follows:

Lincoln good, Johnson Bad, Radical Republicans bad, Norther Carpetbaggers, Negro Incapacity, Start of Southern "Home Rule" myth.

From the first appearance of the Dunning School, dissenting voices had been raised, initially by a handful of survivors of the Reconstruction era and the small fraternity of black historians. In 1935, the black activist and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois published Black Reconstruction in America, a monumental study that portrayed Reconstruction as an idealistic effort to construct a democratic, interracial political order from the ashes of slavery, as well as a phase in a prolonged struggle between capital and labor for control of the South’s economic resources.

“One fact and one alone,” Du Bois wrote, “explains the attitude of most recent writers toward Reconstruction; they cannot conceive of Negroes as men.”

According to DuBois: The earlier "dunning School" of Reconstruction history neglected the viewpoint and contributions of the freed Negro.

It required, however, not simply the evolution of scholarship but a profound change in the nation’s politics and racial attitudes to deal the final blow to the Dunning School. If the traditional interpretation reflected, and helped to legitimize, the racial order of a society in which blacks were disenfranchised and subjected to discrimination in every aspect of their lives, Reconstruction revisionism bore the mark of the modern civil rights movement. In the 1960s, the revisionist wave broke over the field, destroying, in rapid succession, every assumption of the traditional viewpoint. First, scholars presented a drastically revised account of national politics. New works portrayed Andrew Johnson as a stubborn, racist politician incapable of responding to the unprecedented situation that confronted him as President, and acquitted the Radicals—reborn as idealistic reformers genuinely committed to black rights—of vindictive motives and the charge of being the stalking-horses of Northern capitalism.

1960s revisionism of the Reconstruction period appears to be an inverse of the Dunning School: Lincoln good, Johnson bad, Radical Republicans good, Negro involvement and contributions.

The establishment of public school systems, the granting of equal citizenship to blacks, and the effort to revitalize the devastated Southern economy refuted the traditional description of the period as a “tragic era” of rampant misgovernment. Revisionists pointed out as well that corruption in the Reconstruction South paled before that of the Tweed Ring, Crédit Mobilier scandal, and Whiskey Rings in the post-Civil War North. By the end of the 1960s, Reconstruction was seen as a time of extraordinary social and political progress for blacks. If the era was “tragic,” it was because change did not go far enough, especially in the area of Southern land reform.

1960s Revision: Reconstruction mismanagement/ scandalous was present but surely nothing of the scale plaguing post-civil war North (Tweed ring in NY, etc.), which were endured for similar time lengths, if not more. The effort, if it had a fault, was that it wasn't as wide in scope (Southern land reform) as it should have been.

Even when revisionism was at its height, however, its more optimistic findings were challenged, as influential historians portrayed change in the post-Civil War years as fundamentally “superficial.” Persistent racism, these postrevisionist scholars argued, had negated efforts to extend justice to blacks, and the failure to distribute land prevented the freedmen from achieving true autonomy and made their civil and political rights all but meaningless. In the 1970s and 1980s, a new generation of scholars, black and white, extended this skeptical view to virtually every aspect of the period. Recent studies of Reconstruction politics and ideology have stressed the “conservatism” of Republican policymakers, even at the height of Radical influence, and the continued hold of racism and federalism despite the extension of citizenship rights to blacks and the enhanced scope of national authority. Studies of federal policy in the South portrayed the army and the Freedmen’s Bureau as working hand in glove with former slaveholders to thwart the freedmen’s aspirations and force them to return to plantation labor. At the same time, investigations of Southern social history emphasized the survival of the old planter class and the continuities between the Old South and the New. The postrevisionist interpretation represented a striking departure from nearly all previous accounts of the period, for whatever their differences, traditional and revisionist historians at least agreed that Reco...

Post-1960s Revisionism: Challenged the 'good' that came from Reconstruction as told by the revisionists. They are referred to by Foner as "Post-Revisionists". Instead of the revolutionary effort that the Dunning school and Revisionists tagged on the Reconstruction, the Post-Revisionists interpret the period as a "Conservative" effort with relative minor changes. Negro treatment, citizenship rights, and economic opportunity were little changed.

The first is the centrality of the black experience. Rather than passive victims of the actions of others or simply a “problem” confronting white society, blacks were active agents in the making of Reconstruction whose quest for individual and community autonomy did much to establish the era’s political and economic agenda.

Foner's position.

Black participation in Southern public life after 1867 was the most radical development of the Reconstruction years.

Foner's position.

A second purpose of this study is to trace the ways Southern society as a whole was remodeled,

By the end of Reconstruction, a new Southern class structure and several new systems of organizing labor were well on their way to being consolidated. The ongoing process of social and economic change, moreover, was intimately related to the politics of Reconstruction, for various groups of blacks and whites sought to use state and local government to promote their own interests and define their place in the region’s new social order.

Foner's position.

The evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations, and the complex interconnection of race and class in the postwar South, form a third theme of this book. Racism was pervasive in mid-nineteenth-century

Moreover, in the critical, interrelated issues of land and labor and the persistent conflict between planters’ desire to reexert control over their labor force and blacks quest for economic independence, race and class were inextricably linked.

The book’s fourth theme is the emergence during the Civil War and Reconstruction of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and a new set of purposes, including an unprecedented commitment to the ideal of a national citizenship

Supremacy of National citizenship over State's.

Reconstruction produced enduring changes in the laws and Constitution that fundamentally altered federal-state relations and redefined the meaning of American citizenship. Yet because it threatened traditions of local autonomy, produced political corruption, and was so closely associated with the new rights of blacks, the rise of the state inspired powerful opposition, which, in turn, weakened support for Reconstruction.

Reconstruction was not only a specific time period, but also the beginning of an extended historical process: the adjustment of American society to the end of slavery. The destruction of the central institution of antebellum Southern life permanently transformed the war’s character and produced far-reaching conflicts and debates over the role former slaves and their descendants would play in American life and the meaning of the freedom they had acquired.

Dunning and Burgess insisted that Reconstruction must be understood in a national context, as part of the nineteenth century’s nation-building process.

As does Foner, I believe.

Most of these scholars taught that blacks were “children” incapable of appreciating the freedom that had been thrust upon them, and that the North did a “monstrous thing” in granting them the right to vote.4 The views of the Dunning School helped to freeze the white South for generations in unalterable opposition to any change in race relations, and justified decades of Northern indifference to Southern nullification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

The persistence of racialized labor systems—peonage among Hispanics in the Southwest, long-term indentures of Chinese immigrants on the West Coast—as well as the dispossession of the lands of Native Americans raise important questions about the limits to the triumph of free labor during the Civil War.

In the absence of slavery, other means of peonage were devised to continue a similar labor system as slavery, but lacking the name.

Bryce’s book “proved” that blacks, coolies, aborigines, etc., were unfit to be citizens. It was frequently invoked by the founders of Australia’s federal nation in support of their vision of a White Australia, and by white South Africans. Around the world, the “key history lesson” (as Lake and Reynolds put it) of Reconstruction was taken to be the impossibility of multiracial democracy. Thus, as Du Bois pointed out long ago, consequences of the overthrow of Reconstruction in the United States reverberated across the globe.

Once again, an example of how treatment of one group can be justification for the treatment of another group.

Even if we remain unaware of it, Reconstruction is part of our lives even today. Issues that agitate American politics—who is an American citizen and what rights come along with citizenship, the relative powers of the national government and the states, affirmative action, the relationship between political and economic democracy, the proper response to terrorism—are Reconstruction questions. Reconstruction is embedded in our judicial processes. Every session of the Supreme Court adjudicates issues arising from the Fourteenth Amendment and the civil rights legislation of Reconstruction.

Issues of Reconstruction era remain sore today. The experiment in 'multi-racial' democracy continues. The players may be different, but the concerns and roadblocks remain the same.

Citizenship, rights, freedom, democracy—as long as these questions remain central to our society, so too will the necessity of an accurate understanding of Reconstruction. These are not only historical and political questions, but moral ones. Reconstruction history has always been morally inflected, because writing about the period forces the historian to think about where he or she stands in relation to key problems of our own time.

Nearly two and a half centuries had passed since twenty black men and women were landed in Virginia from a Dutch ship. From this tiny seed had grown the poisoned fruit of plantation slavery, which, in profound and contradictory ways, shaped the course of American development. Even as slavery mocked the ideals of a nation supposedly dedicated to liberty and equality, slave labor played an indispensable part in its rapid growth, expanding westward with the young republic, producing the cotton that fueled the early industrial revolution. The slavery question divided the nation’s churches, sundered political ties between the sections, and finally shattered the bonds of the Union.

For emancipation meant more than the end of a labor system, more even than the uncompensated liquidation of the nation’s largest concentration of private property.

Begun to preserve the Union, the Civil War now portended a far-reaching transformation in Southern life and a redefinition of the place of blacks in American society and of the very meaning of freedom in the American republic. In

Lincoln fully appreciated, as he would observe in his second inaugural address, that slavery was “somehow” the cause of the war. But he also understood the vital importance of keeping the border slave states in the Union, generating support among the broadest constituency in the North, and weakening the Confederacy by holding out to irresolute Southerners the possibility that they could return to the Union with their property, including slaves, intact.

In 1861, the restoration of the Union, not emancipation, was the cause that generated the widest support for the war effort.

presence of Union soldiers precipitateted large-scale desertion of the plantations,

Increasingly, military authorities adopted the plan, inaugurated in Virginia by Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, of designating fugitive slaves “contraband of war”

Northern abolitionists and Badical Republicans recognized that secession offered a golden opportunity to strike a fatal blow at slavery. Their agitation kept at the forefront of Northern polit...

Finally, in September, came the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, and on January 1, 1863, the final edict, a turning point in national policy as well as in the character of the war. In effect, it transformed a war of armies into a conflict of societies. In December 1861, Lincoln had admonished Congress that the Civil War must not degenerate into “a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle.” The Emancipation Proclamation announced that this was precisely what it must become. Of the Proclamation’s provisions, few were more essential to breathing life into the promise of emancipation than the massive enrollment of blacks into military service. By the war’s end, some 180,000 blacks had served in the Union Army.

The “logical result” of their military service, one Senator observed in 1864, was that “the black man is henceforth to assume a new status among us.”

Here was a crucial justification for blacks self-confident claim to equal citizenship during Reconstruction.

“I believed that these people were content, happy, and attached to their masters,” South Carolina rice planter A. L. Taveau confessed two months after the war’s close. But if this were the case, why did the slaves desert their masters “in [their] moment of need and flock to an enemy, whom they did not know?”

It was in the secession crisis and Civil War that large numbers of upcountry yeomen discovered themselves as a political class. The elections for delegates to secession conventions in the winter of 1860–61 produced massive repudiations of disunion in yeoman areas. Once the war had begun, most of the upcountry rallied to the Confederate cause. But from the outset, disloyalty was rife in the Southern mountains. Its western counties seceded from Virginia in 1861 and two years later reentered the Union as a separate state. From East Tennessee, long conscious of its remoteness from the rest of the state, thousands of men made their way through the mountains to enlist in the Union Army.

Discontent developed more slowly outside the mountains. It was not simply devotion to the Union but the impact of the war and the consequences of Confederate policies that awakened peace sentiment and social conflict. In any society, war demands sacrifice, and public support often rests on the conviction that sacrifice is equitably shared. But the Confederate government increasingly molded its policies in the interest of the planter class. Slavery’s disintegration compelled the Confederate government to take steps to preserve the institution, and these policies, in turn, sundered white society.

The impression that planters were not bearing their fair share of the war’s burdens spread quickly among Southern yeomen. The upcountry became convinced that it bore an unfair share of taxation; it particularly resented the tax-in-kind and the policy of impressment that authorized military officers to appropriate farm goods to feed the army.

Free State of Jones

But, above all, conscription convinced many yeomen that the struggle for Southern independence had become “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”

including provisions that a draftee could avoid service by producing a substitute, and that one able-bodied white male would be exempted for every twenty slaves.

By war’s end, more than 100,000 men had deserted, almost entirely, one officer observed, from among “the poorest class of non slaveholders whose labor is indispensable to the daily support of their families.”

Thus the war permanently redrew the economic and political map of the white South. Military devastation and the Confederacy’s economic policies plunged much of the upcountry into poverty, thereby threatening the yeomanry’s economic independence and opening the door to the postwar spread of cotton cultivation and tenancy. The war ended the upcountry’s isolation, weakened its localism, and awakened its political sell-consciousness.

Upcountry Unionism, Northern reporter Sidney Andrews explained in the fall of 1865, rested above all on “hatred of those who went into the Rebellion” and of “a certain ruling class” that had brought upon the region the devastating impact of the Civil War.

The North’s Transformation

The policies of a national government whose powers were magnified each year the war continued offered unparalleled economic opportunities to some Northerners while spurring determined opposition among others. As in the South, how Northerners reacted to the war and its consequences reflected prior divisions of class, race, and politics, even as these were themselves reshaped by the conflict.

If economic devastation stalked the South, for the North the Civil War was a time of unprecedented prosperity. Railroads

Agriculture also flourished, for even as farm boys by the thousands were drawn into the army, the frontier of cultivation pushed westward, with machinery and immigration replacing lost labor.

Deep structural changes accompanied the North’s wartime boom. Accelerating the emergence of an American industrial bourgeoisie, the war tied the fortunes of this class to the Republican party and the national state. More was involved than profits wrung from government contracts, for faced with the war’s unprecedented financial demands, Congress adopted economic policies that promoted further industrial expansion and permanently altered the conditions of capital accumulation.

To mobilize the financial resources of the Union, the government created a national paper currency, an enormous national debt, and a national banking system. To raise funds it increased the tariff and imposed new taxes on nearly every branch of production and consumption. To help compensate for the drain of men into the army, a federal bureau was established to encourage immigration under labor contracts. To promote agricultural development, the Homestead Act offered free land to settlers on the public domain, and the Land Grant College Act assisted the states in establishing “agricultural and mechanical colleges.” And to further consolidate the Union, Congress lavished grants of public land and government bonds upon internal improvements, most notably the transcontinental railroad, which, when completed in 1869, expanded the national mark...

these measures reflected the birth of the modern American state.

On the eve of the Civil War,

Most functions of government were handled at the stat...