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.

Blood-stained Phantoms: What Ambrose Bierce Saw at Shiloh

de Thulstrup, Thure. Battle of Shiloh. (1888).

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1281915

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his past April 7th marked the 154th anniversary of the Battle of Shiloh, fought during the American Civil War. The spring of 1862 found Union General Ulysses S. Grant and 45,000 troops of the Army of the Tennessee making their way down the Tennessee River following successful victories over Confederate forces at Forts Henry and Donelson earlier in the year. They arrived at Pittsburgh Landing and made their encampment a few miles inland, near Shiloh, named after a church of the same name in the vicinity. Grant’s eventual objective was Corinth, Mississippi, a strategically important railroad junction. It was from Shiloh that they were preparing for their march south to Corinth. Little did they know that 40,000 Confederate troops led by General Albert Sidney Johnston were creeping their way towards the unsuspecting Union troops. The battle began in earnest on Sunday morning as the Union army was caught off guard and the Confederates surged forward, forcing the federal army from their camps in a chaotic retreat toward Pittsburgh Landing.

Battle of Shiloh, April 6, 1862 

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shiloh_Battle_Apr6am-2.png

Despite their hard-won advances into Union territory—where hungry Confederate soldiers dined on federal foodstuffs after looting their tents—the day-long battle had taken its toll on the soldiers, and they were forced to halt their momentum and recuperate. The Confederate Army also suffered an especially damaging blow as its beloved overall battle-field commander, Albert Sidney Johnston, died of a gunshot wound suffered earlier in the day. General P.G.T. Beauregard took over command of southern forces. Meanwhile, the Union forces licked its own wounds and awaited Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio to provide reinforcements. It was the next day where a 20-year-old Union lieutenant Ambrose Bierce, a member of Buell’s Army of the Ohio, arrived on the scene to find the Union army reeling.

Ambrose Bierce, circa 1866(?) 

Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Abierce.jpg

In 1881, nineteen years after the battle, Bierce published “What I Saw at Shiloh,” in the San Francisco newspaper, The Wasp. Its first lines declare both his object and limitations, as well as those of the audience: “This is a simple story of a battle; such a tale as may be told by a soldier who is no writer to a reader who is no soldier.”[1]  Despite this caveat, Bierce was by then a well-regarded writer as well as an accomplished soldier. He was especially renowned as a topographer, and his memoirs on Shiloh reflect his careful analysis of the terrain of the battle. But unlike many of his fellow author-veterans, who by the 1870s were publishing their purportedly heroic exploits from the war, Bierce repeatedly sought to puncture the myth of war as noble, gallant, or heroic. Many of his short stories were set against the backdrop of the Civil War, where he frequently explored the disconnect, madness, and horror experienced by individual soldiers. In the case of “What I Saw at Shiloh,” we have a rare example of a non-fictional treatment of his war experience, very likely published as a corrective to his more glory-seeking contemporaries.

Shiloh National Military Park 

Source: https://www.tnvacation.com/sites/default/files/styles/slider_image_large/public/vendor/images/shiloh-national-military-park_media_1769_3.jpg

Bierce describes looking upon the scene at Shiloh early on the morning of April 7th: “Presently the flag hanging limp and lifeless at headquarters was seen to lift itself spiritedly from the staff. At the same instant was heard a dull, distant sound like the heavy breathing of some great animal below the horizon. The flag had lifted its head to listen.” However, there is no alluring metaphor or sentiment to cloak what Bierce and his regiment witnessed as it passed through where the Union army had retreated. Bierce recalled that:  

[Grant’s men] were mostly unarmed; many were wounded; some dead…Not one of them knew where his regiment was, nor if he had a regiment. Many had not. These men were defeated, beaten, cowed. They were deaf to duty and dead to shame. A more demented crew never drifted to the rear of broken battalions. They would have stood in their tracks and been shot down to a man by a provost-marshal's guard, but they could not have been urged up that bank. An army's bravest men are its cowards. The death which they would not meet at the hands of the enemy they will meet at the hands of their officers, with never a flinching. 

Bierce also takes a moment to observe the juxtaposition of Shiloh Church: “The fact of a Christian church…giving name to a wholesale cutting of Christian throats by Christian hands need not be dwelt on here; the frequency of its recurrence in the history of our species has somewhat abated the moral interest that would otherwise attach to it.” It was in this same spirit of cynicism that Bierce would relate the gore—rather than the glory—that the battlefield rendered. Upon viewing a wounded Union soldier, Bierce reported on the scene with a brutal honesty that was jarringly un-Victorian: “A bullet had clipped a groove in [the soldier’s] skull, above the temple; from this the brain protruded in bosses, dropping off in flakes and strings. I had not previously known one could get on, even in this unsatisfactory fashion, with so little brain.” Bierce’s black humor is what gave him notoriety and success as a journalist, but this was not the fashion in which most veterans chose to publicly recount the suffering of their fellow soldiers. 

Tennessee War Memorial at Shiloh National Park
Source: http://www.civilwar.org/photos/galleries/shiloh/tennessee-monument-at-jones.jpg

The Union Army by the end of the following day had taken back Grant’s original camp position, driving the Confederate Army from the field, where it retreated to Corinth. Much like the Confederates the day before, the Union army was unable to follow up on its victory due to the high cost paid on the field. In these two days of battle, there were an unheard of 24,000 casualties, at the time the most in American history, only to be eclipsed several times in other battles as the war dragged on. Despite these horrific numbers, the grim carnage of death was often subdued or omitted entirely in memoirs of the war, which instead tended to highlight the heroism and valor demonstrated by soldiers of both armies for the all-American goal of “freedom.” This played into a larger spirit of reconciliation between white Americans, especially after the end of Reconstruction in the South. Bierce had no qualms breaking from that convention in relating the gruesome nature of battle without the pretense of justification or rationalization. As he surveyed the aftermath of the crimson landscape of Shiloh, he depicted this grisly scene: “[The soldiers’] faces were bloated and black or yellow and shrunken. The contraction of muscles which had given them claws for hands had cursed each countenance with a hideous grin. Faugh! I cannot catalogue the charms of these gallant gentlemen who had got what they enlisted for.” The rage militaire of 1861-1862 found its punctuation at Shiloh. 

But topography, gore, and cynicism were not all that Bierce recalled of his complicated experiences at this battle. In the most tender reflection of “What I Saw at Shiloh,” Bierce laments what a cruel burden of war the survivors had to endure: the obliteration of youth and the gruesome legacy of war. The concluding passage features some of most elegiac prose written about the war: 

O days when all the world was beautiful and strange; when unfamiliar constellations burned in the Southern midnights, and the mocking-bird poured out his heart in the moon-gilded magnolia; when there was something new under a new sun; will your fine, far memories ever cease to lay contrasting pictures athwart the harsher features of this later world, accentuating the ugliness of the longer and tamer life? Is it not strange that the phantoms of a blood-stained period have so airy a grace and look with so tender eyes? - that I recall with difficulty the danger and death and horrors of the time, and without effort all that was gracious and picturesque? Ah, Youth, there is no such wizard as thou! Give me but one touch of thine artist hand upon the dull canvas of the Present; gild for but one moment the drear and somber scenes of to-day, and I will willingly surrender another life than the one that I should have thrown away at Shiloh. 

Without illusion to the war’s causes or consequences, and without deference to honor, valor, or freedom, lies a simple story of a battle told by a soldier. That soldier became a writer who helped contextualize for his readers what was won and lost by one man at Shiloh in the spring of 1862.

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[1] Bierce, Ambrose. “What I Saw at Shiloh.” The Wasp [San Francisco, CA] December 1881. Print. Retrieved from: http://www.classicreader.com/book/1165/1/ Web. 2 May 2016. 

Remembering Appomattox on its 150th Anniversary: A Beginning and End

http://www.authentichistory.com/1860-1865/1-images/Lees_Surrender_at_Appomattox_1867_Painting.jpg

On the evening of April 7, 1865, Union General Ulysses S. Grant dispatched a letter to Confederate General Robert E. Lee asking for the unconditional surrender of his army.[1] Though Lee initially demurred, he recognized any further resistance was futile and accepted Grant’s proposal to meet. On April 9, 1865, and now surrounded by Union forces, Lee formally surrendered his beleaguered army to Grant at McLean House in Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Fellow Confederate General Joseph Johnston surrendered his Army of Tennessee to Union General William T. Sherman sixteen days later in North Carolina. These surrenders effectively ended the major military operations of the American Civil War, although scattered resistance remained, especially for those who had not yet heard news of Lee’s surrender.[2] The prostrate but defiantly honorable demeanor of Lee’s surrender indicated a practical ending to the war as well as a symbolic foundation of postwar memory, particularly in the South. Of course, it was also a moment of long awaited celebration in the North.

http://pixshark.com/robert-e-lee-surrender.htm

What was the transition from a wartime to peacetime national culture? No single date captures the genesis of postwar memory, but American culture “after” Appomattox is typically the conventional place to start by most (but certainly not all) historians as the end of the Civil War. After Appomattox, the Union Army and the federal government began the complicated deconstruction of the Confederate States of America and a reconstruction of the Union, which in turn created a "New South.” Paralleling these political maneuvers was the social and cultural phenomenon known as the “Lost Cause.” This was the central mythology for “un-reconstructed” Southerners following the war. The Lost Cause refers to a postwar historical, literary, and social movement in the South which argued that the cultural hierarchy in the antebellum South was noble and gallant, only the overwhelming resources of the North ended the war, and an implied conclusion that white supremacy ought to continue to dominate the South. In some ways, this Lost Cause mythology was actually being promulgated during the war.[3]

It was in this atmosphere that the fight for political equality escalated for African Americans across the South. Even if the short-lived Confederacy had been destroyed by the Union armies, southern politicians were not simply going to relinquish the system of white supremacy which had long been the foundation of life in the antebellum South. Federal reconstruction of the South coincided with the rise of terrorist white supremacists organizations aimed at neutering the political power of African Americans and their white Republican allies.

http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/sites/default/files/styles/article-top/public/m-1265.jpg?itok=b_gzpTll

And this is why the events of Appomattox, of which we remember on its 150th anniversary, presents us with a question: was Appomattox an end to the Civil War, or perhaps a beginning of the longer process of a integrating a multiracial polity in the South (and North)? And if that more difficult social process, which in many ways started during the war with the Emancipation Proclamation, signifies a beginning, then Appomattox would signify much more than General Robert E. Lee’s honorable surrender. It would act as a new political beginning, a second American Revolution, which in many ways is still being fought 150 years later.

[1] The letter read: “The result of last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia in this struggle. I feel that it is so, and regard it as my duty to shift from myself the responsibility of any further effusion of blood, by asking you the surrender of the portion of the Confederate army known as the Army of Northern Virginia.” Harry Hansen, The Civil War: A History (New York: Penguin Books USA, 1961), 628.

[2] John Wesley designates the last day of official Confederate resistance as June 23, 1865, when Cherokee leader and Confederate General, Stand Waite, surrendered his forces following the Battle of Doaksville in Indian Territory, Oklahoma. John Wesley, Ghost towns of Oklahoma (University of Oklahoma Press: 1977), 68-69.

[3] See William C. Davis’ The Lost Cause: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), Gaines M. Foster’s Ghosts of the Confederacy (Oxford University Press, 1988), and Edward Pollard’s contemporary account, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates (New York: E. B. Treat and Co., 1866).