After the Civil War – Reconstruction
Book notes on Reconstruction
No economic news of note today, and as usual insufficient Covid reporting over the weekend to make an update of that worthwhile, so let me dig out something from the back burner that I wanted to do for myself.
Last year I read Eric Foner’s 600+ page tome on Reconstruction, and this year read a treatment of “Lincoln and the Fight for Peace,” which described his final days and to the extent available his coalescing view of what Reconstruction should entail. I didn’t want to forget the main points, so I made a bullet-point synopsis:
1. John Wilkes Booth won.
2. Why? Lincoln was replaced with Johnson, a loyalist Southern Democrat. Whereas Lincoln wanted to follow up the South’s complete surrender with a magnanimous peace for the masses, but to exclude the Confederacy’s leadership, and to require that the South accept the result of the war, Johnson’s intent was to restore the Confederate States without restriction, i.e., to continue white supremacy, except with slavery technically outlawed. This poisoned the first several years of Reconstruction until Congress wrested control.
3. The original sin of Reconstruction: no redistribution of all or at least some of Plantation land to the slaves whose uncompensated labor sustained it. Slaves were free but impoverished. Therefore no economic power.
4. Reconstructed Southern States went on a spending spree trying to attract railroads and other improvements. But in part because of the political fragility of Reconstruction, railroads, and industry declined. Which created a vicious cycle, as it made Reconstruction even more fragile.
5. The North didn’t believe in racial equality either. Before the passage of the 15th Amendment, several Northern States defeated voting rights for Blacks, either Legislatively, or via failed ballot initiatives. As a general rule, the North wanted the racial issue settled, so they could move on.
6. In the final days of the lame duck period of his Presidency, Johnson issued pardons to all of the Confederate political and military leadership, enabling them to return to power, including both State and Federal elective office, which they subsequently did in droves – and also including 3 members of the Supreme Court that upheld segregation in Plessy vs. Ferguson. This was directly contrary to Lincoln’s plan, which would have specifically excluded them. In fact, Lincoln hoped Jefferson Davis would escape to South America, depriving him of being either a martyr or a rallying point.
7. When white insurgency via the KKK and other insurgent groups started (many of them including those former Confederate military leaders), Reconstructed governments in the South were afraid to use military muscle, or to break “norms.” So white violence was unpunished except in a few places where the Federal government stepped in.
8. On top of that, when the railroad investment bubble burst in the Panic of 1873, plunging the country into a deflationary recession, the North lost all remaining interest in expending energy on Southern Reconstruction. White insurgents pressed forward, toppling almost all of the Reconstructed Southern governments.
9. The contested Presidential election of 1876 was the final nail in the coffin of Reconstruction, as the Northern GOP traded the election of Rutherford B. Hayes to the Presidency in return for an end of Reconstruction in the South.
Had (at least large portions of) Plantation land been redistributed to the slaves working it, Freedmen would have had a base of economic power to hang on politically as well. They would have needed much less economic intervention and support from the Reconstructed State governments.
It’s possible that the alacrity (between 1863 and 1869) with which freed Blacks were given full legal equality. Still, much more importantly, equal voting rights was in large part responsible for the strength of the White backlash. In his final days, Lincoln seemed to favor a gradualist approach: immediate granting of voting rights to Black Union soldiers, plus those Blacks with property or education, with the remainder dealt with in some fashion later. *Maybe* had Black voting rights been phased in over a generation (with steps based on, e.g., education – as public schools, a priority for Freedmen, were one enduring legacy of the Reconstructed governments), with Federal protection in the interim, *perhaps* White fury would not have insisted in rolling back all of the progress made, and by 1900 Blacks would have been better off than they were under Jim Crow.
But the fact remains, that the White backlash that reversed Reconstruction is a major example of a violent sustained insurgency that was successful, systematically rolling back rights that were explicitly guaranteed in the Constitution. That insurgency remained successful for 80 years.
That opponents of the White violent insurgency now are making the same mistake of being afraid to violate “norms” in order to defeat it that the Southern Reconstruction governments made, makes me very pessimistic for the future of this country over the next few decades.
well, i suppose.
but “giving” land to freed slaves would have been a little more difficult than you appear to be suggesting. the people of the South had not lost their legal rights, and if their legal rights had been taken away from them, it would not have taken them long to regain their property by the same shenanigans banks have used against poor farmers since the beginning of time. or simply by armed violence. i don’t think the North was likely to engage in fighting a guerilla war, or even a legal battle to protect Black “rights” against a population not willing to grant them. shameful, i know, but it is the way the world works.
Each freed slave was given forty acres and a mule, except without the forty acres and without the mule.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/04/15/40-acres-mule-slavery-reparations/
40 acres and a mule: How the first reparations for slavery ended in betrayal
By DeNeen L. Brown
April 15, 2021 at 7:30 a.m. EDT
At 8 p.m. on Jan. 12, 1865, days after his “march to the sea,” Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman met with 20 Black ministers on the second floor of his headquarters in Savannah, Ga.
The Civil War would soon end, and the matter at hand that night was urgent.
Sherman had called the Black ministers to confer with him and President Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. On the agenda were pressing questions: How would the country provide for the protection of thousands of Black refugees who had followed Sherman’s army since it invaded Georgia? How would thousands of newly freed Black people survive economically after more than 200 years of bondage and unpaid labor?
Four days after the meeting, Sherman would issue Special Field Order, No. 15, confiscating Confederate land along the rice coast. Sherman would later order “40 acres and a mule” to thousands of Black families, which historians would later refer to as the first act of reparations to enslaved Black people.
But the order would be short-lived. After Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865, the order would be reversed and the land given to Black families would be rescinded and returned to White Confederate landowners. More than 100 years later, “40 acres and a mule” would remain a battle cry for Black people demanding reparations for slavery…
{ continued at link above }
it would have been harder maybe, but they could have use eminent domain to do the trick, and yes, they would have to pay for it, but after the war, the large land holders might have been just all but broke anyway, and be happy to get the money, in Lew of getting maybe being tried for treason (the constitution defines taking arms against the government as that, for a reason). but it would have made the whites very angry. or at least some of them, course they could have broken up just the large land holdings, and gave it to whites and blacks.
dw
of course, “they” can always use eminent domain, subject to the Courts, of course.
as for Treason, the States were careful to secede before taking up arms, so maybe not treason?
might be hard to determine just which landowners “took up arms” in any case.
and it would not have mattered. you would have had civil war…after Appomattox. just not army against army, but “the people” against “the conqueror.” these things are never as simple as they look.
Ron
I wish this had not been turned into a demand for reparations. I don’t think I can address that subject without making people mad.
Slavery officially ended one hundred and sixty years ago. The injustices of slavery have by now been so mixed with the general flood of injustices to and by all people as to be meaningless. Meanwhile, this country has been making provisions to mitigate the continuing poverty and injustice suffered by the decendants of slaves. There is no rational way “reparations” could be assigned to any living person. Meanwhile the demand for reparations just angers the people we need to have on our side to fight against the injustice and poverty we all suffer from due the accidents of history.
Here is an anecdote that may be relevant: I sometimes look at the videos on youtube of police crimes against black people (also against white people..but black people have the stage right now). Most of those episodes are indeed horrific and arouse my anger and feelings of a need to put a stop to it. this is a real problem. that we have today. now. but last night i watched a video, by no means the only one of its kind: As far as I could tell a black person had been treated badly by a worker in a pizza parlor of “takeout.” He was demanding … well it was hard to tell what he was demanding… but the police were called. Again as far as i could tell, the policeman was doing his best to calm the situation down, but the black “victim” wouldn’t have it. He kept demanding that the “disrespect” he had been showed be somehow fixed or atoned for. and escalating the level of noise if not yet actual violence. Ultimately he got arrested…violently…and taken to jail. My point here is that I think black people are being taught to be oversensitive to “disrespect.” No doubt they have a right to be angry. But most of us long ago learned the lesson of not making a situation you can’t fix worse by throwing a tantrum. sorry, those are the words that come to me. find better ones to suit your own understanding.
We made progress under Martin Luther King. We are losing that progress by demanding unreasonable “reparations” for remote crimes against out ancestors (mine too). This is not helping. Us, The U.S., or that poor (black) guy who couldn’t let go of a trivial show of “disrespect.”
[The rest of this comment seems to have disappeared. It mentioned gains made under the leadership of Martin Luther King, and those gains being lost by people using “race” as a means of promoting hate..people on the Right and the Left.]
Coberly,
I don’t have time to find better words of my own, but more importantly though then I cannot disagree with what you wrote.
My referral to the story of 40 acres and mule is not a pseudo-legal case for reparations, but rather the story of how freed slaves were left to their own as an underclass with few rights other than the freedom to vote for Republican carpetbaggers just as they might for Democrats now. Former slaves became tools for the advance of the Republican takeover of the state apparatus rather than human beings, not so different from native Americans in the advance of manifest destiny. Republicans had assumed the mantle of champions for the causes of bankers and industrialists concluding the duel between Hamilton and Burr in which Hamilton both died and yet won. From Federalists to Republicans was no great leap. OTOH, the enemy of my enemy is definitely not my friend. After all, the landed antebellum gentry kept slaves and stole land from natives. Only a fool would expect the rich and powerful to actually care about the dispossessed. We are just losers and props in their passion play, sacrificial lambs as it were.
I was an antiwar and civil rights activist in the late 60’s, so making people mad was a rite of passage for young men such as me then. Now it is merely a hobby.
Bob Dylan – With God on Our Side (Live on BBC, 1964) [HD FOOTAGE]
Ron
I pretty much agree with you about all that. As for reparations, I wan’t accusing you of advocating them, just lamenting that the word had come up, since I felt I had to address it and I knew it wouldn’t do any good.
by coincidence, i was just reading a biography of Rob’t E Lee in which I learned that he advocated offering slaves their freedom, their family’s freedom, “and a house,” if they fought for him. There were all kinds of things wrong with that idea, but it does sugget to me that I don’t know as much as I thought I did.
To which I can only add, if I were God I would do things different.
Ron
I went to grade school in Chicago, middle school in Los Angeles, High school in Los Angeles and Dunedin* Florida, College in Florida and Los Angeles and Massachusetts. In none of those places was a taught that the Indians were the bad guys, or that Blacks were inferior, or even that God was on our side.
Quite the opposite. Even in the South I got the feeling that people were ashamed of slavery and racism…but proud of their country (“the South”) and their courage in the civil war. Of course there were racists, and the politicians and governments nursed it.
I think we could do well, did do well for a time, emphasizing justice and decency while allowing them their patriotism and religion.
I liked Dylan, still do. probably because he was the poet of “our” time, and his poetry and music were provocative…not politically so much as what i will call “artistically” because I can’t think of a better word (imaginationally?) Maybe he helpd focus our generation against injustice and racism and that was good…but somehow it seems to me, we have gotten carried away with imagining ourselves heroes in the war against injustice and racism without actually doing anything much about it, and becoming agents of hate ourselves.
This seems (to me) to be a universal human behavioral constant. and I do hate to seem to them that I am on the “other” side.
*the name of the town is important. Dunedin was a hotbed of working class northern decency (probably southern decency, too). Very unlike, say, Belleglade or Pahokee. I could see no difference between Daytona, Miami, or Gainesville, and Hollywood.
Coberly,
Yes sir. I could not have said it any better, so will not try.
Fortunately enough life is still good despite the efforts of politicians.
Take care.
Ron,
yes, and I need to be reminded of that. thank you.
it occured to me while i was writing that, that in Hollywood (I can’t speak for all of Los Angeles) there was not a trace of racism, not even from the politicians or government…. but then , to be fair, neither did i personally see any in any of the other places I lived. Just another clueless white person, I guess.