In defense of Radical Reconstruction: Part I

With those five words, I have likely lost half my friends in the Virginia blogosphere.  Still, after reading Jim Bowden and Doug Mataconis’ posts on the subject, I knew I would be responding.  Bowden and Mataconis are thoughtful bloggers, and their posts reflect that, but they are still mistaken on the events that occurred between 1865 and 1877.

For starters, the historiography of Reconstruction is nothing like Bowden wrote:

First, the cartoonishdepiction of the time is that Reconstruction was about the racist Southern whites coming back to power with the Ku Klux Klan and instituting almost a century of de jure racism. The rise of Jim Crow and segregation is the whole story to some. As always, history is a bit more complicated.

And how.  For starters, the portrayal of Reconstruction from about 1880 until the rise of the civil rights movement was nothing like this.  For at least 80 years, the prevailing view of the Radicals was much akin to Bowden’s – withthe exception that prevailing wisdom at the time held that blacks should be happy with their second-class status (to be clear, Bowden does not say that last part).  The only issue was whether the Radicals were completely to blame, or shared it with President Andrew Johnson, whose initial intransigence goaded the Radicals into much of their actions (or so the argument went).

It took the civil-rights movement itself to challenge that theory – which dominated in North and South.  Only then did it become clearer that in much of the South, opposition to Reconstruction, from President Johnson on down, was due to one prominent feature – racial political equality.

This is also where Doug misses the larger point.  Contrary to what is now the conventional wisdom, the Radicals were initially far happier withJohnson than they had been with Lincoln.  Yes, Johnson was a Southerner and a Democrat, but he was already famous in Washington as the only Senator from a seceding state (Tennessee) who refused to resign his seat.  His virulent hatred for the rebels new no bounds, and in fact he was initially far harsher in his treatment of them than Lincoln would have ever been.

What separated Johnson from the Radicals was the fate of African-Americans.  Johnson was more than happy to allow the ex-Confederate states to re-enter the union with “black codes,” which effectively denied the rights granted in Amendments I through VIII to blacks – especially Amendment II.  In fact, one of the biggest drivers behind the Radicals’ push to get the 14th Amendment ratified (and insist that ex-rebel state ratify it before readmission) was to ensure that all African-Americans had the right to keep and bear arms (Stephen Halbrook).

Another issue that divided Congress from Johnson was black suffrage, and it is here where the notion that Lincoln’s Reconstruction might have been easier falls flat.  In Lincoln’s final speech before he died, he suggested, for the first time, that he supported limited suffrage for blacks (Abraham Lincoln Online):

It is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man (RWL Note: Lincoln is referring to the Constitution of the would-be readmitted state of Louisiana). I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.

It is reported that John Wilkes Booth, upon hearing the speeach railed, “That means n****r citizenship.  That is the last speech he’ll ever make” (National Review Online).  Booth made good on his vow three days later.  The question of black political rights dominated the South – and through it, America – for the next dozen years.

It was an ugly dozen years in many respects.  Bowden himself mentions the role of the Klan as the shock-troops for southern whites and their political instrument (the Democratic Party), but leaves out their attempt to overthrow the elected government of North Carolina in the Kirk-Holden War.  The fact was, the Democrats, who were now outnumbered thanks to black voters, relied on violence and fear to suppress both the black vote and that of white Republicans.  More often than not, federal troops ended up protecting southern citizens far more than occupying anything or anyone.

However, the notion of Radical “corruption” turns out to be far less than meets the eye.  While some Radicals were certainly venal in their administration (Louisiana), others were far more upright and clean.  Moreover, The focus on the South during this period as a corruption hotbed is to be either intellectually dishonest or ignorant of northern history during this period, what with “Boss Tweed,” Roscoe Conkling, and a whole slew of politicians and fixers who gave the larger post-Civil War era its other, more infamous name: The Gilded Age.

I will not say Radical Reconstruction was perfect, but I will say – because I believe it to be true – that the motives of those who began it were far more honorable than had been presumed for so long.  Contrary to Bowden’s asertions, the Republicans took great pains to ensure they had Constitutional authority to conduct what all admitted was unprecedented (they finally settled upon the mandate that “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government”).   The Radicals’ insistence on political equality in the South also guilted several northern states to move in that direction (thus leading to the 15th Amendment, which banned the denial of the vote based on race – although southern states found creative ways to get around that).

In the end, though, the political will in the Republican Party was not there.  As the Civil War receededinto memory, an elitism took over the northern GOP, one with which activists in our local parties (read: Augusta County) would be quite familiar.  By 1877, desperate to preserve a hotly disputed victory in the presidenital election a year before, the Republicans madea deal with Southern Democrats – let us keep the White House, and we’ll pull the troops out of the last three states that had them (Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina – yes, only three states still had federal troops; each state’s history is somewhat different, and one was very different, more on that later).  The deal was done, and Reconstruction ended.

However, African-Americans remembered their time as political equals, and much like Jim’s ancestors passed on the tales of Civil War battles from generation to generation, thus did American blacks pass down the stories of when they, too, could vote and hold public office, when they had the same rights, however briefly, as whites.

That was the true history of Reconstruction.  Truth be told, I’m not altogether suprised that Jim and Doug missed it (especially Jim), because in fact, each state had slight variations of the overarching theme – except one: Virginia.  Unlike any of the other 10 ex-rebel states, Virginia’s Reconstruction was unique in many ways, ways which reflect well on it and, I think, explain why Jim’s theory (that Radical Reconstruction made racial reconciliation and equality harder to achieve) is incorrect.  I’ll have more on that in the next post (this one’s getting to be too long as it is).