The end of last year witnessed a perfect storm hit of news stories on race and history in the United States. At one end was Mississippi governor Haley Barbour’s nostalgic reminisces of the Citizens Councils, which attempted to put a “respectable” (and more effective) face to white supremacy. The story breaking on the 150th anniversary of South Carolina’s declaration of secession seemed too perfect as a demonstration of how alive the gap between ideals and realities of equality remain. At the same time, these incidents illuminate a profound deficit in how the history of racism and the struggle for equal rights are remembered. For in our popular imagination, the great struggles over these issues exist at two poles separated by exactly a century: the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. With regards to historical memory, the Civil War in the next years is sure to burn brightly, as the 150th anniversaries of innumerable battles, the Emancipation Proclamation, etc arrive. However, as obviously significant as the Civil War is, focusing on the actual conflict does a disservice to understanding the full history. Certainly the war created many dramatic and concrete transformations, most notably the end of slavery and the intensification of modern capitalism’s emergence. Yet, especially when talking about the African-American community, the war’s greatest importance lies in the possibilities it created for even deeper changes and which, albeit with limitations, were seized upon during Reconstruction.
As well known as the Civil War’s contours are, outside of academics who study it, Reconstruction appears lost in a haze. The single best known depiction of the period remains Gone With the Wind, which traffics in the frankly racist viewpoint which received academic validation from historians of the “Dunning School” (think a somewhat toned down Birth of a Nation in footnoted book form). For the Dunning school, Reconstruction was a tragedy in which the North (or more specifically the Radical Republicans) imposed unfairly harsh conditions on Southern states' re-entry to the Union and Northern opportunists (so-called “carpetbaggers”) swept into the South to take financial advantage of a defeated land. Furthermore, in this interpretation, African-Americans were unable to take advantage of freedom; proving dangerously incompetent at governing or building independent lives. The advent of Jim Crow and the return to Democratic rule are thus seen as the forces that rescued the South from further misery.
Corruption and exploitation by Northern businessmen, entrepreneurs, and politicians of the Southern states did exist. To see Reconstruction as a tragic period is certainly apt, yet the tragedy lies not in its severity, but in its limitations. Many of the struggles for civil rights of the 1950s and 1960s were in fact efforts to regain rights that African-Americans enjoyed, briefly, one hundred years earlier. The period saw significant reforms to southern society beyond those directly concerned with the freedmen and women, such as the establishment of public school systems, economic development (such as railroad lines and non-agricultural industry). The reversal of the period’s gains, especially regarding African-American rights and dreams of fairness, represented a severe blow to creating a United States whose policies reflected its highest ideals. To forget it is to forget one of the most concentrated attempts to build a true “land of the free.”
Note: In a second post (and I’ll actually do it!), I’ll go into more detail on the specific history of the period, its gains and failures.