Reviewed: Eric Foner’s A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1877

Foner, Eric. A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1877. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990. Pp. 297.

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he story of the Civil War has captivated Americans for generations. It is perhaps the one historical event, along with the American Revolution, that remains foregrounded in collective memory. Most Americans tend to celebrate the grand personalities of the era and the valor displayed on memorialized battlegrounds more than the war’s causes and legacies. If the story of the Civil War has remained alive through public memory, then the consequences of the war, the era of Reconstruction, have largely been forgotten. Without the obvious framing of pitched battles and heroic sacrifice, the sometimes noble, sometimes violent, but always complicated story of the readmittance for Confederate states into the Union has gotten short shrift.

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, is arguably the preeminent Reconstruction historian  today. His 1990 publication, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1877, is among the landmark examinations of the post-Civil War era. The first systematic study of Reconstruction, by William Dunning (also of Columbia University) in the early twentieth century, condemned Reconstruction policy as a failure because of the twin problems of the corruption of Republican rule and black political incompetence and malfeasance. This failure was corrected, the story went, when the South was “redeemed” by the Democratic Party (with help from the Ku Klux Klan) and blacks were relegated to second-class citizenship. Modern scholarship has repudiated this theory as racist and incomplete. Unlike the Dunning School, modern scholars, especially since the 1960s, have tended "to view emancipation itself as among the most revolutionary aspects of the period” (xiv). To that end, The Short History of Reconstruction presents four unifying themes: 1) the centrality of the black experience, 2) the ways Southern society as a whole was remodeled, 3) the evolution of racial attitudes and patterns of race relations and the complex interconnection of race and class in the post war South, and 4) the emergence of the modern nation-state. 

Professor Eric Foner
Source: https://www.college.columbia.edu

The South, Foner indicates, was “…never a single white [community]; in the nineteenth century, the region as a whole, and each state within it, was divided into areas with sharply differing political economies” (5). While most states were led by a conservative planter elite, some non-slave owning white yeoman farmers welcomed political reform, but nearly all whites were united in their repugnance of black suffrage. This indicates why northern Republicans initial, if limited, success in integrating blacks into the political community was eventually repulsed by an overwhelming wave of white supremacy and growing northern disinterest in combating political violence.

Blacks, as Foner argues, were not invisible or passive observers of Reconstruction. Emancipation was only the first step in building an independent black community through the reuniting of family members previously separated by slavery. Black men then looked to reclaim authority in family affairs long dominated by slave-owners. Outside the family, black-led churches became the central institution of the freed community. There blacks could discuss issues like education and land reform that predicated their collective vision of freedom. Lastly, political mobilization into the Republican Party was of paramount significance. The Republican Party, Foner argues, “…became an institution as central to the black community as the church and the school. Long after (blacks) had been stripped of the franchise, blacks would recall the act of voting as a defiance of white superiority and regard ‘the loss of suffrage…as the loss of freedom’” (128).

There were two reasons why the North could intervene so comprehensively in the political and social life in the South: the South was in shambles after the Confederacy’s collapse in 1865; and there had been an unprecedented expansion of federal authority wrought by the exigencies of the Civil War. “The federal budget,” Foner argues, “amounting to $63 million in 1860, rose to well over $1 billion by 1865. At war’s end the federal government…was the largest employer of the nation” (10). Armed with these enhanced human and fiscal resources, the federal government worked to rebuild the South’s economy and society through the policies of the Radical Republicans in Congress. 

The antebellum federal government rarely waded into political issues such as citizenship and equality as they were thought to belong to state jurisdiction. After Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson, a southern sympathizer and avowed racist, became president. He proposed to readmit the Confederate states as quickly as possible with little concern for the well-being of millions of former slaves freed by the Thirteenth Amendment. Eventually this drew the ire of northern Republicans who thought this would mean the war had been fought in vain. Overriding Johnson’s veto power, the Radical Republican faction of Congress worked to completely overhaul Southern society by making it an interracial democracy. By 1877, however, the waning power of the Radical Republicans, the resistance of Southern whites, and the eventual indifference of Northern whites to the plight of blacks, indicated declining support for Reconstruction. An “official” end to Reconstruction is typically associated with the contested presidential election of 1876 between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, the latter of whom won the popular vote but controversially lost the electoral vote. Eventually a deal was struck between Democrats and Republicans in Congress where Hayes would take the presidency in exchange (among other things) for the removal of all U.S. forces from the South, and with them the protection of Republican state governments and the return of the overtly racist Democratic Party to local and state power.

“Despite all its limitations,” Foner maintains, “Congressional Reconstruction was indeed a radical departure, a stunning and unprecedented experiment in interracial democracy” (122). Radical Reconstruction, that combined effort by white and black Americans in the South to give African-Americans political power and economic security, retreated in significance as most Americans became more concerned with economics than social equality. The end of slavery, it was argued, was all the federal government owed to blacks. Economic concerns, for all races, ought to be left to the market. To this end, the Democratic Party consolidated control by limiting access to political power on strict class-based criteria. “[The] return to [southern] rule by ‘intelligent property-holders’,” Foner writes, “meant the exclusion of many whites from government, while implicitly denying blacks any role in the South’s public affairs except to vote for their social betters” (182). Crippled by the rampant violence perpetrated by white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the once “noble” experiment of Reconstruction morphed into the rigid apartheid of Jim Crow inequality.

Foner argues this process played out against a backdrop of increasingly vocal classical liberals during the 1870s. Classical liberalism was predicated on limited state intervention, since the rampant corruption of the time, especially in the South, was presumed to be the result of excess governmental interference in the marketplace. Without land and labor reform, blacks would be left powerless and dependent, and most southern whites agreed this was “natural.” “Nearly all [these classical liberal] reformers,” Foner observes, “had been early advocates of emancipation and black suffrage…[yet] if all Radical [Republicans] agreed the state should embrace the principle of civil and political equality, liberals increasingly insisted it should do little else” (210).           

The realization of full citizenship and economic access and opportunity was denied to blacks at the close of Reconstruction, and in that respect, Foner concludes, the process can only be judged a failure. It was a failure not because Republicans erroneously or vindictively elevated blacks—and working class whites—in the South (as Dunning had argued), but rather because the counter-revolution of exclusionary “home-rule” by the Democratic Party set into motion decades of racial inequality. Nonetheless there were some aspects of accomplishment. “The tide of change” Foner notes, “rose and then receded, but it left behind an altered landscape. The freedman’s political and civil equality proved transitory, but the autonomous black family and a network of religious and social institutions survived the end of Reconstruction” (254). By giving agency to and centralizing the experiences of blacks alongside whites in the narrative of Reconstruction, Foner’s work yields a comprehensive history of the revolutionary and pivotal time following the Civil War. His work remains critically important because the legacy of Reconstruction, with its central challenge of interracial democracy, still resonates today.

Concerning the Longue Durée, universal history, and “big history”

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 central concern of historians is what the appropriate time-scale of history ought to be. David Armitage indicates that most historians find themselves working in an interval between five and fifty years. This was not always the case. Prior to the professionalization of the history field in the late nineteenth century, historians freely cast a long net in time to capture the so-called “grand historical narrative,” seeking out broad patterns of history in centuries or even millennia. As professional history became both more specialized and widespread, shrinking periodization became micro-history and case studies until the grand narratives of history—human or otherwise—were relegated to cosmology and anthropology. Armitage argues for a return to the longer view of history: the Longue Durée, or "long term."

In “The Return of the Longue Durée: An Anglo-American Perspective (2015),” Armitage explores why the Longue Durée initially retreated in the historical professional, its current revival, and the questions about how the Longue Durée informs the questions historians ask. The Longue Durée, he argues, “allows [historians] to step outside the confines of national history to ask about the rise of long-term complexes, over many decades, centuries, or even millennia; only by scaling our inquiries over [such] duration can we explain and understand the genesis of contemporary global discontents.” The problem is that historical work has become too dependently tied to “events.” Unlike economists, historians must “untether” themselves from such limitations. Worse still, the professionalization and specialization of history has led to the diminished capacity of historians to have an audience with policy makers as their “grand narrative” ancestors had. The inquiries of micro-history are undoubtedly rich and complex, but without a larger context such questions became “irrelevant” to non-experts. Armitage calls for the return of the Longue Durée to act as an inspiration for historians “to return history to its mission as a social science.”

 

The Observable Universe
(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2MASS_LSS_chart-NEW_Nasa.jpg)

           

David Christian, in “The Return of Universal History (2010)” evokes a similar sentiment when he calls for a return to “universal history,” defined “as the attempt to understand the past at all possible scales, up to those of cosmology, and to do so in ways that do justice both to the contingency and specificity of the past and also to the large patterns that help make sense of the details.” He writes that in the nineteenth century, “[historians] lowered their sights, insisting that factual rigor must precede high theory.” The grand narratives of historical scholarship were thus marginalized and the contraction of scope was further encouraged by the development of the nation-state and nationalism, which offered “the discipline of history an artificial sense of wholeness.” The project of uncovering the overlooked, repressed and the many “others” of history is made possible, Christian argues, because of the data now available to draw upon. Lastly, he sees the expansion of universal history as a way to encourage collaboration between historians and scientists, collaborations which have been sorely lacking due to specialization and departmental professionalization. He sees universal history, in its “whole” sense as occupying three interrelated patters: 1) the increasing control of “biosphere” resources by humanity, 2) the slow but accelerating increase in the human population, and 3) after initial massive global migrations, the eventual settling of humans into dense communities. Much like the early universe, early human history started off rather simply and has since been increasingly complex, just as the patterns of stars and galaxies from the early matter of the universe. But humans are unlike every other species on earth for the simple reason that they do not solely adapt over generations, but within generations. It is this “[continuous] adaptation [that] provides the species as a whole with more resources than are needed simply to maintain a demographic steady state.”

Universal history for Christian also has a pedagogical component. He argues that it will impact education in three ways: 1) it will help students grasp the underlying unity of modern knowledge, 2) it should help people to better understand the complex relationship between humanity and the biosphere, and 3) when understood in the scope of universal history, the underlying unity of humanity as a whole can be understood. For both the professional historian and the consumer of history, the return of universal history, he argues, “is the possibility that it may provide the framework within which we can create histories that can generate a sense of human solidarity or global citizenship as powerfully as the great national histories once created multiple national solidarities.”

From the Big Bang to Humanity
From: https://www.commonsense.org/education/website/big-history-project

David Christian, in his 1991 paper, “The Case of “Big History,” argued for pursuing the scholarly inquiries of history to its absolute capacity. Moving past the Longue Durée and universal history, the logical ending point is “big history,” which is “the whole of time.” Historians, he argues, have “failed to find an adequate balance between the opposing demands of detail and generality.” This tension yields histories rich in detail but fragmented and parochial. Nothing short of an anthropological understanding of the human species is required to achieve a full understanding of “modern” humanity. “Big history” is just such an endeavor; the exploration of time-scales even up to and including the scale of the universe itself. The objection to such a pursuit, he notes, is that the scale of such time makes details irrelevant, to which Christian replies that the very notion of what comprises a “detail” is relative. “As one shifts from the smaller to larger scales,” he argues, “the loss of detail is, in any case, balanced by the fact that larger objects come into view, objects so large that they cannot be seen whole from close up.” Furthermore, “big history” by asking such far-ranging questions about the experience not just of humanity but all of existence, may actually even speak to the future, a taboo that Christian sees as limiting historical scholarship. The pursuit of “big history” is nothing short of reconciling the relationships between humanity and the biosphere and determining whether the historical evidence implies an option toward equilibrium or the succumbing to the forces of entropy.