Interpreting American History: Reconstruction , livre ebook

Interpreting American History: Reconstruction
INTERPRETING AMERICAN HISTORY SERIES
Brian D. McKnight and James S. Humphreys, series editors
T HE A GE OF A NDREW J ACKSON
Edited by Brian D. McKnight and James S. Humphreys
T HE N EW D EAL AND THE G REAT D EPRESSION
Edited by Aaron D. Purcell
R ECONSTRUCTION
Edited by John David Smith
INTERPRETING AMERICAN HISTORY
RECONSTRUCTION
Edited by
J OHN D AVID S MITH

The Kent State University Press
Kent, Ohio
© 2016 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
A LL RIGHTS RESERVED
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2015036113
ISBN 978-1-60635-292-2
Manufactured in the United States of America
L IBRARY OF C ONGRESS C ATALOGING - IN -P UBLICATION D ATA
Names: Smith, John David, 1949- editor.
Title: Interpreting American history : Reconstruction / edited by John David Smith.
Description: Kent, Ohio : The Kent State University Press, [2016] | Series: Interpreting American history series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015036113 | ISBN 9781606352922 (paperback : alkaline paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865-1877) | Southern States--Politics and government--1865-1950. | Southern States-- History--1865-1951.
Classification: LCC E668 .I58 2016 | DDC 973.8--dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015036113
20  19  18  17  16              5  4  3  2  1
Once again for Randall M. Miller— teacher and friend
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Reconstruction Historiography: An Overview
John David Smith
2 Presidential Reconstruction
Kevin Adams
3 Radical Reconstruction
Shepherd W. McKinley
4 Reconstruction: Emancipation and Race
R. Blakeslee Gilpin
5 Reconstruction: National Politics, 1865–1877
Edward O. Frantz
6 Reconstruction: Gender and Labor
J. Vincent Lowery
7 Reconstruction: Intellectual Life and Historical Memory
K. Stephen Prince
8 Reconstruction: Transnational History
Andrew Zimmerman
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
Foreword
Interpreting American History Series
Of all the history courses taught on college campuses, historiography is one of the most challenging. The historiographic essays most often available are frequently too specialized for broad teaching and sometimes too rigorous for the average undergraduate student. Every day, frustrated scholars and students search for writings that offer both breadth and depth in their approach to the historiography of different eras and movements. As young scholars grow more intellectually mature, they search for literature, sometimes in vain, that will clarify historiographical points. As graduate students prepare for seminar presentations, comprehensive examinations, and dissertation work, they continue to search for works that will help to place their work within the broader study. Then, when they complete their studies and enter the professoriat, they find themselves less intellectually connected to the ideas that they once showed a mastery of, and they again ask about the lack of meaningful and succinct studies of historiography … and the circle continues.
Within the pages of this series, innovative scholars discuss the different interpretations of the important eras and events of history, focusing not only on the intellectual shifts that have taken place but also on the various catalysts that drove these shifts. It is the hope of the series editors that these volumes fill the aforementioned intellectual voids and speak to young scholars in a way that will supplement their other learning, that the same pages that speak to undergraduate students will also remind the established scholar of his or her historiographic roots, that a difficult subject will be made more accessible to curious minds, and that these ideas are not lost among the details offered within the classroom.
B RIAN D. McK NIGHT , University of Virginia’s College at Wise J AMES S. H UMPHREYS , Murray State University
Acknowledgments
I thank Brian D. McKnight and James S. Humphreys for asking me to contribute this book to their series, so too to editor Joyce Harrison at Kent State University Press. Joyce also did a superb job preparing the bibliography. The contributors to the book responded thoughtfully to my requests for revisions, and I hope that they agree that their hard work contributed to a better book. Jeffrey J. Crow kindly critiqued sections of the manuscript and Michael Levine expertly copyedited the manuscript. As always, I thank Sylvia A. Smith for her unwavering love and patience.
Introduction
Writing in 1935 in his brilliant and brooding Black Reconstruction , the African American historian, sociologist, and propagandist W. E. B. Du Bois lamented America’s post–Civil War Era as a missed opportunity to reconstruct the war-torn nation in deed as well as in word. “If the Reconstruction of the Southern states, from slavery to free labor, and from aristocracy to industrial democracy, had been conceived as a major national program of America, whose accomplishment at any price was well worth the effort,” Du Bois complained, “we should be living today in a different world.” Seven decades following the end of America’s bloodiest war, Du Bois judged Reconstruction not just “a failure, but a splendid failure.” 1
Like Du Bois, historians have largely defined Reconstruction as a failed effort in what the historian Eric J. Hobsbawm termed “forced democratization.” 2 In his recent The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era , historian Douglas R. Egerton rejects the notion that Reconstruction was a failure, instead interpreting the period as “a noble attempt to create a more democratic America.” “Too often the central question becomes why Reconstruction failed ,” Egerton notes, “as opposed to ended , which hints that the process itself was somehow flawed and contributed to its own passing.” In his book, Egerton underscores the various ways that white violence, what he terms “the wars of Reconstruction,” cut short “the nation’s first meaningful campaign for racial equality.” 3
Most historians, however, who have plowed what historian Bernard A. Weisberger termed “The Dark and Bloody Ground of Reconstruction Historiography,” have judged the dozen years following the Civil War a disastrous moment in U.S. history—an unequivocal failure. 4 Those, including neoabolitonists and later racial liberals, who found President Abraham Lincoln’s promised “new birth of freedom” unfulfilled during the postwar years, regarded Reconstruction as both a missed opportunity and a travesty of justice for black southerners and white Unionists. In contrast, those who identified with white southerners and the Lost Cause mentalité condemned Reconstruction as a usurpation of federal power and the imposition of “Negro rule.” According to Egerton, by the late nineteenth century “the wars of Reconstruction had entered a new campaign, as writers, activists, and intellectuals sought to impose their vision of the period on American readers.” 5
The first generation of professional, “scientific” scholars, immersed in Jim Crow–era legal definitions of race and Social Darwinist understandings of human progress, sympathized unabashedly with the Lost Cause perspective. These scholars attacked Reconstruction as a proverbial “chamber of horrors,” populated by venal carpetbaggers, treasonous scalawags, and ignorant freedmen—all manipulated by unscrupulous Republicans who wreaked vengeance against former Confederates. The early historians described Reconstruction as a period characterized by “unrelieved sordidness in political and social life.” 6 In 1910 William Archer, a British observer of America’s so-called race problem, captured the tone of contemporary American historians by referring to “the bad old days of Reconstruction.” 7
Led by Columbia University’s William A. Dunning and his doctoral students (the so-called Dunning School of historians), early-twentieth-century scholars denounced Reconstruction because the period exemplified what they considered the imposition by the federal government of punitive, vengeful interference in the affairs of the former Confederate states and an unwise experiment in racial democracy. 8 As historian Eric Foner explains,
The villains of the piece were vindictive Radical Republicans, who sabotaged [President] Andrew Johnson’s lenient plan for bringing the South back into the Union, and instead fastened black supremacy upon the defeated Confederacy. An orgy of corruption and misgovernment allegedly followed, only brought to a close when the South’s white communities banded together to restore “home rule” (a polite euphemism for white supremacy). Resting on the assumption that black suffrage was the gravest error of the entire Civil War period, this interpretation survived for decades because it accorded with and legitimated firmly entrenched political and social realities. 9
According to historian Glenda Gilmore, the Dunningites in their writings “completely rewrote the history of the conflict.” They interpreted the Civil War as “a tragic misunderstanding and that Reconstruction had been a scurrilous punishment foisted upon helpless white southerners by arrogant Yankees who exploited African Americans by giving them citizenship rights.” 10
Despite attempts by Du Bois and other black and white scholars to rehabilitate Reconstruction’s reputation, and consequently to “sustain the black counter-memory” of the Civil War and Reconstruction Eras, the Dunning interpretation generally dominated representations of the period in American popular culture and historiography from the turn of the century until after World War II. 11 White supremacy and its concomitants, including racial segregation, disfranchisement of black southerners, and racial violence held sway in these years. Throughout the period, films, novels, popular histories, and textbooks perpetuated beyo