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.

T

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.