2019 marks the 150th anniversary of U.S. Grant’s inauguration as President of the United States. It also has sparked a renewed interest in Reconstruction, particularly the notion that America failed to capitalize on an “unfinished revolution” as the communist historian Eric Foner describes the period.
This general description of the 1860s has been used by both radical leftists like Foner and neoconservative historians and pundits, meaning that the postbellum period in America has received an establishment consensus. If only America had followed the Radical Republican agenda in 1868, the United States would have been a better, more tolerant place.
Take for example an upcoming PBS documentary produced by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. based on his forthcoming book, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. The tone of both the documentary and book are clear: Reconstruction was a missed opportunity for a radical restructuring of American society with freedmen being the central actors in a great struggle for “true citizenship” as Adam Gopnik argued in a recent piece in The New Yorker.
Stony the Road: Recons...
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Gates’s collection of characters includes former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu and of course Eric Foner. It will undoubtedly be hailed as a seminal moment in American film making, a truly objective and tragic view of a violent and repressive period, and both leftist and neoconservative politicians and talking heads will praise Gates for his courage in denouncing Southern racism and violence and for championing equal justice. The Republican Party, after all, has carried on a concerted effort in recent years to attach the modern GOP to the radicals of the 1860s. It was the Democrats, not the Republicans, who rode as Klansmen and authored Jim Crow legislation. Neoconservatives like Dinesh D’Souza and Bill O’Reilly are, in essence, attempting to out social justice the social justice warriors. Even their tepid response to the toppling of Confederate monuments has shown that they are receptive to the Foner narrative on Reconstruction, meaning they agree that Southerners were traitors who deserved punishment, and the South would have been better off if former Confederates were permanently disfranchised and prohibited from holding political office.
That is the Grand Old Party line from 1869. But is this true? In short, not really.
Certainly, it is easy to sympathize with former slaves clinging to new found political power and general rights of citizenship, to recoil at the racial violence of the Reconstruction period. But this is only part of the story. No one has ever bothered to ask Gates or Foner if they were to be disfranchised and governed by a newly created and at times foreign ruling class because of a crime (treason) no one in the South ever faced trial for if they would simply concede and capitulate. This is what was asked of the vast majority of white Southerners in the 1860s and 1870s. They deserved it is not a valid rebuttal. The Anglo-American tradition rests on the rule of law, and while blacks were being abused by extra-legal and unjust means (lynching, mock-trails, and terrorism), white Southerners faced illegal, unjust, and unconstitutional property confiscation, the suspension of habeas corpus, and disfranchisement. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but it is the modern “American Way” to pick a sympathetic winner and believe the loser earned the punishment.
