Draft - Standard VUS.7b

Aaron Sheehan-Dean
Department of History, University of North Florida

No period in American history has undergone as dramatic a reinterpretation as the period of Reconstruction. Up through the Second World War, the writing of post-Civil War history was dominated by the "Dunning School" historians - scholars whose undeniably meticulous research was fatally flawed by their racist assumptions of black inferiority. They conceived of and portrayed Reconstruction in the South as a detestable period of "Negro domination," spearheaded by a Republican political party and buttressed by Northern military might. William Archibald Dunning's interpretation, encapsulated in his Reconstruction, Political & Economic, 1865-1877, deviated little from white southerners' accounts of Reconstruction. Dunning largely accepted the rationale given by the Redeemers - white southern politicians who took power from Republicans at the end of Reconstruction - for their violent seizure of power in the 1870s. The misrule synonymous with the period, he argued, stemmed from black political empowerment rather than northern revenge. The U.S. encounter with Nazi Germany profoundly shook American attitudes toward race. Recognizing the failure of the ideology of white supremacy, scholars of the late 1940s and 1950s were increasingly willing to question earlier presumptions of black inferiority. These scholars began to re-conceptualize the issues surrounding the nation's attempt to integrate the freed slaves (and black people in general) into the body politic. The Civil Rights movement of the late 1950s and 1960s gave a strong, final impetus to the revised view of Reconstruction. In recent years, scholars have broadened their analyses of the period while maintaining a central focus on the ways that racial identity and race-based policies shaped public and private life.

Scholars commonly divide the period following the Civil War into two phases: presidential reconstruction, a period of southern ascendancy overseen by Andrew Johnson, and congressional reconstruction, characterized by tight federal control of southern states. While Andrew Johnson served as military governor of Tennessee during the war he imposed harsh conditions on Confederates and many expected him to continue similar policies as president. Instead, Johnson gave the recently defeated states leeway to reestablish governments staffed by the men who led secession and the Confederacy in war. Among the first actions taken in several southern states were the imposition of "Black Codes," laws that limited the autonomy of recently-emancipated African Americans. The leniency with which Johnson treated ex-Rebels, and his acceptance of the black codes, spurred Congressional Republicans to seize control of the process of readmitting the southern states into the Union. Great divisions existed within the Republican party, but the reconstruction policies passed by Congress, and the trio of amendments passed in the years after the war, mandated greater freedom and opportunity for freedmen and their families. A strong majority of northerners supported the policies of congressional reconstruction, but by the early 1870s pressing issues on the national scene and persistent racial and social conflict in the South led many northern voters to turn their attention away from the South. With the election of 1877, the last three southern states still under Republican rule were "redeemed" by southern Democrats and the process of Reconstruction concluded.

The national story of Reconstruction commanded the attention of scholars for many decades, but beginning with Dunning's students, historians have plumbed the individual experiences in states across the region. Out of this work, particularly monographs written in the last three decades, has emerged a sophisticated picture of the process of Reconstruction on the ground. Paramount among the accomplishments of this approach has been a detailed examination of how white and black southerners negotiated the new freedom and social relations created by the Civil War. Some African Americans stayed on the plantations where they had been enslaved to work for old masters, but many left for southern cities and towns. This prompted the rise of shanty towns near southern cities and created a labor glut that complicated employment prospects. Because of these problems, some freedpeople returned to plantations. Many freedmen used their liberty to search for lost family members and most legalized their marriages.

Although migration to urban areas continued into the twentieth century, most southerners lived and worked in rural settings. In particular, black southerners were anxious to possess their own land. White land owners, in contrast, sought greater control over labor. The system of sharecropping developed to meet these needs; it allowed African American families to work the land according to their wishes while also guaranteeing the owners a share of the profit. The dominance of staple crops, the scarcity of credit, and the vagaries of global economy all contributed to undermine the effectiveness of the arrangement, from the sharecroppers' perspective. Recent studies suggest that freedmen and women viewed sharecropping as the best possible alternative given their circumstances. Despite the problems that befell black sharecroppers in the late nineteenth century, sharecropping was a product of negotiation.

The Republican state governments that came to power on strength of the black vote repealed the black codes and gave sharecroppers, white and black, a greater claim on crop. African Americans used their new freedom to build the social institutions outlawed under slavery. They constructed independent churches, schools, and benevolent associations, participated actively in political life, including voting and party work, as well as building a vibrant social and economic life. In addition to guaranteeing political and civil rights to blacks, southern legislatures enacted a host of progressive policies during Reconstruction. They mandated the construction of public schools, implemented social welfare measures, and reformed criminal and tax laws.

As new studies explore the complexity of economic change and political conflict during the period, it has become apparent that white and black southerners experimented with a variety of strategies as they pursued autonomy and security. Not all blacks voted uniformly. Thomas M. Holt's study of South Carolina and Michael W. Fitzgerald's recent study of Alabama reveal that pre-war elites clashed with freedmen over policies and the appropriate level of cooperation with white voters. Not all whites were Democrats. Some southern whites joined the Republican party - the infamous Scalawags - and many more formed fusion arrangements with conservative Republican politicians. Certain issues blurred party lines while sharpening class lines. The frenzy of railroad building that characterized Reconstruction was supported widely by members of both parties. At the same time, it was the working classes, both white and black, that pushed for debt forgiveness and liberal credit policies.

Today's scholars characterize Reconstruction as a period of unrealized promise. This theme is captured most fully in Eric Foner's Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution. Foner and others agree that Reconstruction provided ex-slaves with an opportunity to make impressive inroads into the political system, but they lament that the changes had been temporary and not very far-reaching. Congress had passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, enfranchising blacks, and sent federal troops to enforce the new laws following the re-enfranchisement of southern whites. When the troops pulled out, southern blacks were left to defend their own gains. Through corruption, fraud, and violence the Redeemers returned to power and succeeded in reversing or nullifying much of the work of Reconstruction in the South. Nonetheless, recent works point to the difficulty of attributing the accomplishments or failures of the period to one explanation. Southern blacks created sophisticated political machines where they could and bargained with whites for using political and economic leverage.

Today's scholars also approach Reconstruction with the view that race relations themselves are the product of historical change rather than part of a pre-determined process. AS C. Vann Woodward showed long ago, in The Strange Career of Jim Crown, a surprising fluidity in race relations prevailed through much of the South after the war. One of the first benefits of freedom that former slaves seized was the opportunity for travel and movement. Individuals and families traveled the South tracking down lost members and reuniting loved ones sold away under slavery. Edward L. Ayers, in The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction, has shown how this social movement and dynamism generated new tensions, as did the little economic growth that occurred during the period. As blacks and whites competed more directly over scarce resources conflicts erupted. The laws of segregation, known as Jim Crow, emerged from the disputes of the post-war world. In short, historians can now offer social, economic, and political explanations for processes and events that used to only be interpreted through a narrow window of race.

The text of the Black Codes (Mississippi's are widely available on the World Wide Web) and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments make a great starting point for students wishing to explore the meaning of freedom in the post-war world. These documents also offer a window onto questions of federalism and state rights that can be linked back to discussions of the same topics for the war period. Another widely used source for discussing the period is the movie "Birth of a Nation." The movie is trickier to use in a classroom since its cruel use of racial stereotypes alienates some students, but it provides students with a vivid sense of alternative explanations for the period. A full discussion of the movie, which situates it in its early twentieth-century origins, opens up the opportunity to have students discuss the process of shifting historical interpretations. Another option is to link Reconstruction themes through to historical changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sharecropping could be traced from its origins in the years after the war through the cotton crisis and into the period of the black migration to the North, when many rural African Americans abandoned farming entirely.

Further reading:

The Revisionist tradition of Reconstruction historiography began with W.E.B. DuBois in the early twentieth century, though his lead was not followed white scholars for another sixty years. In Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1935), he argues that the central tragedy of Reconstruction was the failure of white lower and middle class workers and farmers to identify their shared objectives with black Americans. Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), stands as the principal text of revisionist historiography, summarizing several decades of literature that refocused attention on the accomplishments and failures of Reconstruction. Richard Bensel's Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), provides one of the fullest analyses of the economic legacies of the war and reconstruction. William Gillette's Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869-1879 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979) and Michael Perman's The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869-1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984) offer two important discussions of the political course of Reconstruction at the federal level. Heather Cox Richardson's recent book, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), connects the national story of southern reconstruction with the themes of the Gilded Age North.