For over a century, the era of Reconstruction was the unwanted child of American history. By contrast with the drama and nobility of the Civil War, the dozen years between Appomattox and the final decision to withdraw federal occupation troops from the former Confederacy in 1877 looked like a confused tale of disillusion, corruption, blasted hopes, and a resigned descent into failure, populated with some of the least-appealing neanderthals in American political history. The first great academic survey of the Civil War era, James Ford Rhodes' History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, pictured Reconstruction as a political moonscape where "the ignorant negroes, the knavish white natives and the vulturous adventurers who flocked from the North" disported themselves, and the college textbook that ruled the middle of the 20th century—James Garfield Randall's Civil War and Reconstruction—instructed its legions of undergraduate readers to regard Reconstruction as a Radical Republican "racket." Lincoln hoped at Gettysburg that the dead of the war had not died in vain. Reconstruction seemed to suggest that this was precisely what they had done.

But the notion that Reconstruction was a terrible mistake, a rape of the South by the unscrupulous and the vengeful that could only be redressed by letting Southerners have control of their own lives again, met with serious questioning of its own in the 1950s. The Montgomery bus boycott, the overturning of Jim Crow public education by Brown v. Board of Education, and the civil rights movement which sprang from both, squeezed from the white South the same complaints about Northern agitators, the incapacities of blacks for full civil equality, and the need to let the South take its own slow and gradual path that had been heard in Reconstruction. Only now, the complaints were coming from the likes of Bull Connor and George Wallace, and the agitation was coming from Martin Luther King, and suddenly the juxtaposition of the words and the characters changed the whole way Reconstruction looked to a generation of Americans.

The rethinking of Reconstruction which emerged out of the civil rights movement found its first voice in Kenneth Stampp's passionate and headlong The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877, published three days after the centennial of Appomattox, and fearless to a fault in its one-man assault on Rhodes, Randall, and the entire historiography of Reconstruction. Sympathy for the civil rights movement of the 1950s translated, in Stampp's case, into sympathy for what now looked increasingly like its forerunner in the 1870s, while contempt for the redneck supremacists with their billyclubs and water cannons in Birmingham engendered a parallel contempt for the white Redeemers who had smothered black equality under the pillow of segregation.

"Were there mass arrests, indictments for treason or conspiracy, trials and convictions, executions and imprisonments" under the first Reconstruction, Stampp indignantly asked. "Nothing of the sort… . After four years of bitter struggle costing hundreds of thousands of lives, the generosity of the federal government's terms was quite remarkable." And were the rights that blacks demanded, and the Reconstruction regimes that tried to grant them, really so absurd or so tainted with corruption, that the Ku Klux Klan was the only legitimate solution? "In no southern state did any responsible Negro leader, or any substantial Negro group, attempt to get complete political control into the hands of the freedmen," Stampp countered, nor did they "attempt radical experiments in the field of social or economic policy."

An end came to Reconstruction in 1877, not because the Reconstruction governments were too incompetent to be tolerated by virtuous Southerners, but because unreconciled whites "resorted to race demagoguery," made "incendiary appeals to race bigotry," and adopted terror tactics to vault themselves back into power. Reconstruction was a missed opportunity, not a mistake. It had been dedicated to making "southern society more democratic" and "emancipation … something more than an empty gesture," and its failures should not obscure the "radical idealism" that motivated it.1

Stampp's was not actually the first trumpet raised against the conventional view of Reconstruction. As early as 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois' Black Reconstruction in America attacked the notion of a virginal South being ravished by a vicious Reconstruction, and key components of Stampp's argument were foreshadowed in Eric McKitrick's Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (1960) and James McPherson's The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (1964). Nor was Stampp's the last—in fact, if anything, the argument now swung so violently in the opposite direction that sympathetic historians began to argue that Reconstruction failed because it had been too mild, too timid, and too feeble to work real change. Very little in the Reconstruction South actually changed under Union Army occupation, argued Leon Litwack in Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979). Union officers pressed the freed slaves back into agricultural work for their former masters, and the typical Freedmen's Bureau agent "looked upon their positions as sinecures rather than opportunities to protect the ex-slaves in their newly acquired rights." Far from being too radical, Reconstruction had not been nearly radical enough. Congress imposed Reconstruction only out of "political necessity, not … the spirit of the Declaration of Independence," and even then, "within a year of the war's end," Litwack insisted, "the planter class had virtually completed the recovery of its property."2

It was the achievement of Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University, to haul the interpretation of Reconstruction back from the brink of irrelevancy to which Litwack had pushed it. In 1988, Foner published Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, simultaneously underscoring the real accomplishments of Reconstruction and delivering the first comprehensively detailed (and charmingly literate) history of Reconstruction since Du Bois. True, Foner acknowledged, "The freedmen's political and social equality proved transitory, but the autonomous black family and a network of religious and social institutions survived the end of Reconstruction," and even at its worst, the Jim Crow South was unable to deprive blacks of citizenship, or force blacks back into "complete dispossession and immobilization." Nor were Reconstruction's failures entirely due to a lack of resolve on the part of Northern Republicans. The rebound of Democratic political strength in Congress in 1868, the deaths or retirements of the major Radical Republican leaders between 1868 and 1873, and the national financial panic of 1873 all played an irresistible role in sapping Reconstruction's vitality, entirely apart from any residual racism or weakness in the political knees.3

Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction is at once a shorter, more popularized (and updated) version of Reconstruction, and also a more edgy and frustrated one. Partly, this is because Foner believes "our racial institutions and attitudes" have still not outgrown the "unresolved legacy" of emancipation and Reconstruction. "In contemporary debates over affirmative action, the rights of citizens, and the meaning of equality, Americans still confront issues bequeathed to our generation by the successes and failures of Reconstruction." But another cause of Foner's tetchiness is his disappointment that the embrace of Reconstruction begun by Stampp (and continued by Foner) still hasn't gained any meaningful purchase on the public's historical memory. "Long abandoned in the academic world, the traditional view of Reconstruction still survives in popular memory and everyday life," Foner complains, and largely because Americans seem to "prefer historical narratives with happy endings."

And yet, apart from those exasperated moments, Forever Free manages (like so much else in Foner's work) to ladle out judgment with an even hand and nudge a balky narrative into readable and convincing shape. While acknowledging that Abraham Lincoln "shared many of the era's racial prejudices," Foner refuses to join the Lincoln-was-a-racist chorus. The Emancipation Proclamation "is perhaps the most misunderstood important document in American history," and Foner decries the notion that "the proclamation freed no slave on the day it was issued." To the contrary, "the proclamation launched the historical process of Reconstruction." The villain in Foner's story is not Lincoln, but Andrew Johnson, who was only in office six weeks before he pulled the rug from under Reconstruction by issuing waves of pardons to former Confederates and restoring to their white owners plantation lands that the federal government had seized during the war (for non-payment of taxes) and sold to freed slaves. The loss of access to land meant the loss of any possibility of economic clout for the freed slaves. And while Foner finds blacks successfully building families, churches, and political mobilization after 1865, the failure to acquire control over the means of economic production through land ownership meant that "blacks must remain a dependent plantation labor force in a situation not very different from slavery."

Still, the political accomplishments of blacks in Reconstruction flew far higher than Rhodes or Randall ever dreamt. Based on the work he did in assembling Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction in 1993, Foner can point to over 2,000 black officeholders during Reconstruction, "from justice of the peace to governor and United States senator," the vast majority of whom confound the field-hand stereotype of blacks in Reconstruction offices. "By the early 1870s, biracial democratic government, something unknown in American history, was functioning effectively in many parts of the South."

But blacks were never a majority either of officeholders or voters in any but a few pockets of the South. Even in majority-black states, "every Reconstruction governor was white." They depended instead on establishing alliances with white Unionists (the much-demeaned Scalawags) and émigré Northern Republicans (the even-more demeaned Carpetbaggers)—and that, to a large degree, was their undoing. Blacks never ceased to agitate for the restoration of the lands they had occupied during and after the war (and which they had farmed as slaves). But the political ideology of the Republican party was chilly to agrarianism in any form, and glorified the "free labor" of workers who entered the market for wages, accumulated capital through savings, and then turned business-owner and employer themselves.4

Asking for the confiscation of rebel land might have seemed obvious to Southern blacks, but it grated on the sensibilities of white Republicans, who saw confiscation as the substitution of government favors for individual enterprise and a threat to property rights. And given that the generation following the Civil War was rocked by waves of revolutionary labor violence (from the Paris Commune in 1871 to the Pullman Strike in 1894), the Southern black demand for land re-distribution gradually alienated even their most fervent Northern white supporters.5 That, in turn, encouraged unreconstructed Southern white Democrats to turn to violence, and then to national political blackmail in the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876, to bring Reconstruction down. It did not help, either, that the hallmark of post-Civil War government in the North was corruption; Northerners who were sickened by the graft and bribery of the Gilded Age and wanted the power of government restrained were not disposed to listen favorably to Southern black pleas for increased government intervention to protect them or advance their cause.

Much of Foner's book is straight-up political history, and Forever Free gives as good an account of the politics of Reconstruction, from the First Reconstruction Act to the Supreme Court decisions of the 1880s which overturned much of the Reconstruction legislation, as one could hope for. In the process of rendering this account concise, though, a good deal of the lower-level politics gets missed. There is nary a glimpse of how Reconstruction's "bi-racial democracy" actually worked bi-racially, despite substantial evidence of whites and blacks who did join forces to promote democracy; and there is only a passing acknowledgement of how persistently Gilded Age Republican administrations—Garfield, Harrison, McKinley, and Roosevelt—tried to shield Southern blacks from the full fury of Southern Democratic backlash after 1877 by distributing federal patronage to blacks, sponsoring federal anti-lynching legislation (which Southern bloc votes routinely defeated), and offering symbolic pokes to Southern white suprem-acist blather (Theodore Roosevelt's dinner invitation to Booker T. Washington being a case in point).

Nor does Foner give much attention to Southern blacks who did, in fact, use the free-labor ideology to win real political victories from their former plantation masters. In the southern Louisiana sugar parishes, free black wage laborers leveraged the complex skills and processes of sugar production as weapons to extort a substantial degree of economic and political independence from some of the most deeply-entrenched plantation elites of the Old South.6 It was not the blacks' appeal to government intervention, but the white planters' use of government-sponsored violence in the 1880s, that destroyed even these pockets of black resistance.

It is here that a cloud of ambiguity hangs suspended over Foner's narrative, since politics both made and unmade Reconstruction. As much as Foner deplores Booker T. Washington's 1895 injunction to blacks to "cast down your buckets where you are" and cultivate economic independence rather than political power, the single most dramatic difference between Reconstruction and the civil rights movement was the role played in the latter by a newly nascent black middle class, using its economic heft to force concessions from white supremacists and finally bringing the whole hideous political edifice of segregation crashing, Dagon-like, into the dust.

Ultimately, the question which Reconstruction holds for Americans today may be whether we see economic life as prior to political life, or vice versa. I suspect that, in a genuine democracy, the answer looks less like yes or no and more like a moving target, sometimes yes and sometimes no, responding to the demands made by each generation's circumstances and crises. This is less ideologically absolute, and maybe less emotionally satisfying to both the Left and the Right, but it is by no means as guilty of looking for the "happy endings" as Foner thinks.

Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and director of the Civil War Era Studies program at Gettysburg College. A two-time winner of the Lincoln Prize for Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (2000) and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (2004), he recently received the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution Medal of Honor.

1. Kenneth Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877 (Knopf, 1965), pp. 10, 168, 170, 214.

2. Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (Knopf, 1979), pp. 410, 488, 446, 588.

3. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (Harper & Row, 1988), p. 602.

4. And no one knows the intellectual geography of the Civil War-era Republicans better than Foner, whose first book, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (Oxford Univ. Press, 1970) remains one of my desert-island favorites.

5. Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Harvard Univ. Press, 2001), p. 217.

6. John C. Rodrigue, Reconstruction in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to Free Labor in Louisiana's Sugar Parishes, 1862-1880 (LSU Press, 2001), pp. 2-6, 139-140.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.