Book Review: 'The Wars of Reconstruction' by Douglas R. Egerton
Reconstruction was meant to tear slavery from the American soil by stripping ex-Confederates of political power and transforming slaves into educated, landowning citizens.
Fergus M. Bordewich
Jan. 17, 2014 4:28 p.m. ET
For many Americans, Reconstruction is still remembered, if it is remembered at all, as a period of racial anarchy, political failure and the "humiliation" of the defeated South. Indeed, it is probably fair to say that Americans' impressions of the era have been shaped, if only half-consciously, by films such as "Birth of a Nation" and "Gone With the Wind"—with their caricatures of predatory Yankee carpetbaggers and venal scalawags—more than by detailed knowledge of what actually happened in the South between 1865 and 1876 and in the years that followed.
The Wars of Reconstruction
By Douglas R. Egerton
Bloomsbury, 438 pages, $30
An 1868 illustration evoking the difficulties faced by the Freedmen's Bureau, the agency responsible for transforming Southern society, in the face of white opposition, to accommodate freed slaves. The Granger Collection, New York / The Granger Collection
The history of that era has rarely if ever been as well told as it is in Douglas R. Egerton's forcefully argued and crisply written "The Wars of Reconstruction." Mr. Egerton presents a sometimes inspiring but more often deeply shocking story that reveals the nation at its best and worst, when newly freed slaves and idealists, both black and white, struggled heroically against pitiless white terrorism to preserve the rights that Union armies had won on the battlefield and that Republican members of Congress affirmed in the years after the war.
Mr. Egerton, a history professor at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., and the author of "Year of Meteors," a first-rate account of the 1860 election, asks us to see Reconstruction not as bad policy further doomed by corruption and incompetence but as a profoundly forward-looking program that was subverted by organized violence. Even among historians, Mr. Egerton says, the central question about Reconstruction is usually why it "failed, as opposed to ended, which hints that the process itself was somehow flawed and contributed to its own passing." In fact, he argues, the policies of Reconstruction were not only just but also economically sound, and they brought desperately needed change to the South until they were "violently overthrown by men who had fought for slavery during the Civil War and continued that battle as guerrilla partisans over the next decade."
Reconstruction was driven by a genuine moral commitment to tear slavery from American soil by its roots, by stripping former Confederates of political power while transforming former slaves into educated, landowning citizens. It also had a political dimension that was less idealistic. Republicans hoped to craft a majority for their party in the South by welding together coalitions of newly empowered blacks and Unionist whites who, some believed, were only waiting for encouragement to join hands across the racial divide.
The prospects for enlightened reform were promising in the months after the Confederate surrender in April 1865. Most Confederates understood that their power was shattered and were prepared to accept whatever terms the North offered. Mr. Egerton amasses considerable data to show that biracial Reconstruction governments were often politically dynamic and no more corrupt than their all-white counterparts. They worked hard to pass legislation and provide services that decades of antebellum planter control had neglected.
At the state level, laws expanding married women's property rights were enacted, divorce proceedings were modernized, minors were protected against parental abuse, and white fathers were made financially responsible for their mixed-race children. Black-dominated city councils paved dirt streets, established boards of health, and integrated police forces and public conveyances. Hundreds of blacks were elected to local, state and national office, including the U.S. Senate and House.
Aggressive federal land reform transformed lives. At the time of secession, almost no Southern blacks owned land; by 1880, 20% of black farmers did, a remarkable advance in the face of unremitting white hostility. Dramatic achievements were also registered in education, thanks to hundreds of black and white teachers who volunteered to work in new schools sponsored by the federal Freedmen's Bureau serving primarily black children and adults. This effort marked a revolution in a region where the education of slaves had been illegal almost everywhere. "De white folks didn' never help none of we black people to read en write no time . . . ," recalled one former slave quoted by Mr. Egerton. "If dey catch we black chillum wid a book, dey nearly bout kill us."
The Freedmen's Bureau schools quickly achieved what Mr. Egerton calls "spectacular gains in literacy." Less than two months after the end of the war, freedmen's schools were educating 2,000 children in Richmond, Va., alone. By the spring of 1866, at least 975 schools and 1,400 teachers were educating more than 90,000 students in 15 Southern states. By late 1869, more than 250,000 pupils were enrolled in freedmen's schools. As Mr. Egerton notes, literacy was imperative for black economic security: Ex-slaves needed to read in order to understand deeds and labor contracts.
Although freedmen's schools were open to whites, few attended. "Despite the absence of statewide systems in most Southern states," Mr. Egerton writes, "most parents preferred to consign their children to illiteracy rather than to see them educated alongside black children." White Families who did send their children to bureau schools were typically ostracized or physically beaten.
Mr. Egerton notes that, in the postwar years, blacks in the North, inspired by the new civil-rights legislation and the heroic example set by black Union troops during the war, were more willing to confront authority and challenge the North's own ingrained racism. Northern blacks, though not subject to the same systemic violence as in the South, were sometimes denied equal schooling, segregated in public conveyances and abused when they tried to vote.
Although defenders of the old South will doubtless disagree, Mr. Egerton makes a compelling case that American society as a whole would have benefited mightily had Reconstruction been permitted to fulfill its early promise. In particular, it would have saved the U.S. from the long Jim Crow agony of racial repression and the distortion of national politics by the South's determination to protect segregation at any price. So what went wrong?
Reconstruction's problems began with what was arguably the worst decision that Abraham Lincoln made as president, when he dropped from his 1864 re-election ticket his capable vice president, the abolitionist Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, and replaced him with Andrew Johnson, the Unionist Democrat from Tennessee. Fearing defeat in the November election, Lincoln hoped to shore up support among Northern Democrats and win the trust of voters in the reconquered areas of the seceded states.
Lincoln's assassination, a week after Appomattox, put Reconstruction in the hands of a racist, formerly slave-owning alcoholic who sabotaged efforts to extend civil rights—and physical protection—to newly freed slaves. Johnson encouraged Southern whites to reassert their power and ignored violence against freedman and white Unionists who were trying to form biracial coalitions. By executive order, he returned hundreds of thousands of acres to white planters. Republican military officers were replaced with compliant Democrats, many of whom averted their gaze when armed "white leagues" drove teachers from their schools, assassinated local black leaders, and intimidated defenseless black and white Unionist voters. Blacks who dared to defend themselves were murdered wholesale. Lawlessness, not Reconstruction, became the order of the day.
In Arkansas, one freedman reported in a letter to Pennsylvania Rep. Thaddeus Stevens that "the Rebbels" had "Burned Down a fine African Church which Cost the Freed Man about $5000" and left "24 Negro Men Women and Children" hanging from trees around their cabins. In New Orleans, 34 blacks and three white allies where shot down under white flags. In Texas, at least 62 freedmen were murdered in December 1867 and January 1868. In the run-up to the 1868 presidential election, across the South, as many as 1,300 black voters may have been murdered.
Johnson was impeached in 1867 and came within a hair's-breadth of being removed from office, a cliffhanger ably described by Mr. Egerton. (A more exhaustive treatment can be found in David O. Stewart's "Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy," published in 2010.) Ulysses Grant of course won the 1868 election, and for a few years federal troops attempted to protect Republican voters in the South. But the violence didn't end. Vigilante outfits—the Ku Klux Klan was just one of many—had learned that they could get away with murder and continued to do their bloody work.
Mr. Egerton vividly chronicles local terrorist campaigns across the South. While not usually coordinated from state to state, they followed similar patterns of ruthless vigilante warfare. Rarely did gangs of white "redeemers," as they liked to call themselves, bother to conceal their identity. In 1873, more than 100 black Republicans were massacred in Colfax, La., almost all of them unarmed, after they had surrendered to a force of white vigilantes. Similar slaughters took place across the former Confederate states; only the numbers of the dead varied. One white participant in the Colfax massacre, quoted by Nicholas Lemann in "Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War" (2006), which deals at length with this atrocity, blithely reported: "Luke lined [five men] up and his old gun went off, and he killed all five of them with two shots. Then it was like popcorn in a skillet."
As the years passed, Southern revisionists turned such massacres into glorious "victories" against "armies" of savage blacks that had never existed. Today, in Edgefield, S.C., there is a shrine to the "Red Shirt" movement whose bloody "redemption" of South Carolina from biracial democracy is dramatically rendered in Stephen Budiansky's "The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox" (2008). Red Shirt leader "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, who boasted of his role in a notorious massacre in Hamburg, S.C., in which several disarmed black militiamen were murdered, was later elected to the U.S. Senate and became a role model for the young Strom Thurmond.
Paradoxically, Andrew Johnson's incompetence helped to empower congressional radicals who, in 1868 and 1870, pushed through passage of the 14th and 15th amendments guaranteeing black citizenship and the right to vote. But Northern attention, never wholly committed to the cause of black rights, soon drifted elsewhere. Federal troops were needed on the western frontier, and the enforcement of civil rights flagged.
The close presidential election of 1876 was pivotal. With key votes in dispute, neither Samuel Tilden nor Rutherford Hayes had a clear majority in the Electoral College. White-dominated former Confederate states, in a notorious compromise, agreed to yield their votes to allow the election of Hayes, a Republican, in return for guarantees that federal troops be withdrawn from the South. Thereafter the Democrat-controlled House agreed to approve military appropriations only if federal troops were never used again in the Southern states. One might say that the violence that had crushed Reconstruction's highest aspirations now reaped its reward: Northern abdication and Jim Crow.
"The Wars of Reconstruction" won't entirely replace Eric Foner's magisterial and equally wide-angled "Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877" (1988), which devotes more attention than Mr. Egerton's book to economic and labor matters and to the development of capitalism during the period. Mr. Egerton's prose, however, is more readable and compelling than Mr. Foner's. He moves his narrative forward with a fine eye for the drama of events, offering a chorus of contemporary voices along the way: those of ex-slaves, war veterans, do-gooders, opportunists, educators, churchmen and politicians of every stripe, among them defenders of racial privilege. He includes as well ex-Confederates such as the politically courageous James Longstreet, Robert E. Lee's senior corps commander, who after the war became a Republican and embraced biracial reform, and Northern black crusaders such as Octavius Catto of Philadelphia, who helped make the assertion of civil rights a national cause. Collectively these figures, speaking to us amid Mr. Egerton's always acute presentation of the intricacies of federal and state politics, bring to life the war that was taking place not just in the halls of government but also deep in the small towns, red-dirt hamlets and cotton fields, where the bloodiest combat of Reconstruction took place.
The author remedies a particularly glaring deficit in our memory. He shows that black officeholders in the early Reconstruction era—demeaned by many pro-Southern historians and portrayed as lascivious buffoons by fictionalizers such as Thomas Dixon Jr., whose novels became the basis for "Birth of a Nation"—were substantial citizens well-prepared to govern. They had often risen from a middle class of ministers and businessmen that existed in antebellum America beyond the view of racist whites. By the turn of the 20th century, however, once-effective biracial coalitions across the South had been destroyed and black voters almost completely disenfranchised through physical intimidation and electoral trickery. White supremacists took control in all the former Confederate states.
Anyone who lived or worked in the Jim Crow South could see the price that African-Americans paid for the crippling of Reconstruction. In the mid-1960s, I spent a couple of seasons registering black voters in a remote rural county in Virginia. It was always difficult to persuade would-be voters to appear before hostile white registrars, even more so after the Ku Klux Klan held a rally festooned with Confederate flags on the steps of the courthouse where the blacks were required to register. On one occasion, I saw an entire black family flee out the back door of their cabin when I, an unfamiliar white man, approached.
Mr. Egerton makes abundantly clear why, a century after the Civil War, blacks in the South could still feel so vulnerable that they would flee at the sight of a white stranger. He reminds us, through the irresistible force of accumulated facts, that postwar history might have been very different and that we would today be a better nation for it. As he writes: "Members of a nation who rightly regard themselves as residents of a more just and democratic society than many others on the planet are collectively loath to admit that good and honorable policies were consciously overturned by a reactionary minority while thousands of people across the nation found it easier to look the other way."
—Mr. Bordewich's most recent book is "America's Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise that Preserved the Union."
