Wall Street Journal
Image from article, with caption: A railroad depot in Richmond, Va., the fallen capital of the Confederacy, ca. April-June 1865.
An anthology of period writings gives voice to the Reconstruction era’s hopes, fears and dashed ideals.
During the 12 years that we identify as the era of Reconstruction—from 1865 to 1877—the American nation struggled up from the wreckage of the Civil War and tried to re-attach the 11 Southern states that had bloodily amputated themselves [JB emphasis]to form the Confederate States of America. At the time, there were not many how-to models for such an effort.
Civil wars are always the most protracted and embittering of human conflicts. In most cases, postwar reconstructions are consumed by waves of executions and decades of simmering unrest. After the American Civil War, the challenge was made even more daunting by the brutal assassination of Abraham Lincoln—just at the moment when he was about to embark on the hard work of, as he put it, binding up the nation’s wounds. That work was made yet harder by the uncertainty surrounding the future of the 3.9 million slaves whose emancipation had become the great issue of the war.
Brooks Simpson’s “Reconstruction: Voices From America’s First Great Struggle for Racial Equality” offers up speeches, letters, political commentary and other writings from the period to capture its conflicts, aspirations and lost ideals. The anthology is the 303rd volume to appear from the Library of America, a publishing project that is mostly devoted to America’s literary legacy—the work of novelists, poets, memoirists and journalists—but that includes volumes documenting notable historical eras as well.
Mr. Simpson’s road to creating a volume of Reconstruction-era documents with some literary merit is a stony one. Eloquence is often in short supply when political urgency is the order of the day. Moreover, the era’s historians—and Mr. Simpson’s own books on Ulysses Grant and other Reconstruction presidents put him in the first rank—are bedeviled by a no-win choice of focus. Should the center of attention be Washington, where policy was made and where so many political battles were fought? Or should the focus be on the Southern states, where the freedpeople of the 1860s and ’70s demanded an equal place in public life with their former white masters? The anthology’s subtitle—“Voices From America’s First Great Struggle for Racial Equality”—serves notice that the second of those stories, the Southern one, will be given as much attention as possible, although Washington nevertheless manages to divert large portions of the book’s attention to itself.
Mr. Simpson divides the era into four large sections or periods: (a) 1865-66, when Andrew Johnson stepped into Lincoln’s shoes and tried single-handedly to glue the Confederate states back into the Union with little or no penalty for their rebellion; (b) 1866-69, when Congress, controlled by Republicans, imposed its own formulas for Southern re-admission; (c) 1869-73, when Grant added to the congressional effort with his own strictures; and (d) 1873-77, when the whole Reconstruction effort collapsed in ignominy.
The first document in the anthology is from no less than Frederick Douglass, whose optimistic speech in January 1865 was titled “What the Black Man Wants.” Douglass’s answer was, simply: to be left alone. “The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us. . . . I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength . . . let them fall!”
RECONSTRUCTION
Edited by Brooks D. Simpson
Library of America, 778 pages, $40
The balance of the anthology can be seen as one long, exasperated illustration of how that advice was ignored. Former Confederates had no intention of leaving the freedpeople alone, because Southern wealth and white supremacy depended on keeping African-Americans in an economic condition as close to slavery as possible. At the same time, infuriated anti-slavery Northerners, led by Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens in Congress, made it clear that they had not fought the Civil War merely to obtain some minor re-adjustments of Southern society, and the freedpeople became their proxies in a war to bury forever an anti-republican and anti-capitalist slaveholding elite. Hence the advice that Mr. Simpson quotes from the Springfield Republican, a Massachusetts newspaper, five days after Lincoln’s death: “We must govern the entire South by satraps and armies for an entire generation.”
Of course, reconstruction-by-satrap required political action in Washington, and the second section of “Reconstruction” is taken up with reports, speeches, letters and articles on the constitutional crisis over executive and legislative authority—with Sumner and Stevens on one side and President Johnson on the other. The section culminates in Johnson’s impeachment in 1868, when he was tried by the Senate for the “high crime” of dismissing certain office-holders in defiance of the Tenure of Office Act, though he was ultimately acquitted. It is not until the anthology’s third section, on the first Grant administration of 1869-73, that Mr. Simpson angles the reader’s attention back to the racial controversies in the South, and even then the shift is mostly limited to Grant’s surprisingly successful attempts to suppress the Ku Klux Klan.
In the book’s last section, attention is split between the debates on the floor of Congress over Sumner’s posthumous 1875 Civil Rights Act and testimony describing the white-supremacist massacres in Colfax, La., Hinds County, Miss., and Hamburg, S.C., which claimed, all told, more than 200 black lives. These violent episodes were the prelude to unashamed campaigns of black voter intimidation that, in the 1876 elections, brought about a constitutional crisis over who, exactly, had been elected president.
For four months after the November 1876 ballot, the nation dangled in agony until a congressional tribunal handed the victory to a temporizing Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes (and denied it to Samuel Tilden, who had won the popular vote though not indisputably the vote in the Electoral College). The price that Hayes paid for his election was acquiescence in a scheme to remove Washington from the governance of the Southern states and from the enforcement of civil-rights law. With that, as Mr. Simpson shows by quoting a prediction from the St. Louis Globe Democrat, “the last vestige of Federal interference in local politics [in the South] will probably disappear in a few days.”
“Reconstruction” conveys the struggle for racial equality better than many other anthologies documenting the era. Edward McPherson’s “The Political History of the United States of America During the Period of Reconstruction” (which went through several editions in the 1870s) is a meticulous compilation of political statements, speeches, bills, convention resolutions and statistical tables, but black voices are hardly more than a whisper in its 648 eye-squint pages. Walter Lynwood Fleming’s two-volume “Documentary History of Reconstruction” (1907) is more comprehensive than Mr. Simpson’s volume, but it is also unashamedly sympathetic to Southern whites and the downfall of Reconstruction. Harold Hyman’s “The Radical Republicans and Reconstruction, 1861-1870” (1967) is superb in its documentary coverage of equality legislation, but it contains only one African-American (Douglass) and ends quixotically with the Force Acts of 1870-71, which were designed to facilitate prosecution of the Klan. Only John David Smith’s “A Just and Lasting Peace: A Documentary History of Reconstruction” (2013) offers a wider sampling of African-American writing.
Mr. Simpson works diligently at giving a megaphone to black voices. We read excerpts from black testimony during the 1865-66 hearings held by Congress’s Joint Committee on Reconstruction, as well as samplings from the petitions and resolutions of various conventions of “Colored Men,” most of which called for voting rights and freedom to negotiate labor contracts. And there are the black accounts given to investigating committees in the wake of Ku Klux Klan violence. But Mr. Simpson has to labor under the expectation that these voices will also serve the Library of America’s injunction (as he notes in the introduction) to be “about Americans and their language,” which means that work-a-day materials are often absent.
There is, for instance, only one major document concerning the Freedmen’s Bureau, which oversaw economic assistance to the freedpeople, and no excerpts from the most obnoxious effort of the defeated Confederate states to keep free blacks in near-slavery, the notorious “Black Codes” of 1865 and 1866. These codes imposed penalties for so-called vagrancy (in effect, a charge leveled at a black man who refused the terms of a labor contract); excluded blacks from voting, jury service and public office; and even forbade the ownership of guns and knives. The Colfax Massacre of 1873 is described through the words of the committee that interviewed its survivors, but its disastrous sequel—the Supreme Court’s decision in U.S. v. Cruikshank—never appears as a stand-alone document. In that case, the court decided that it had no civil-rights jurisdiction in the massacre since the murders were the actions of private citizens and not the state of Louisiana or the federal government. Alas, other court decisions from the Reconstruction era did as much as the Ku Klux Klan to undermine the campaign for civil equality. One wishes that there had been room in the anthology to sample from them.
On the perfect Reconstruction wish list there would be examples of African-American political and educational organization and economic agency, not to mention the emergence of autonomous black churches. There might also be documents recording black-on-black political rivalries—for example, the conflict between Douglass and Martin Delany, a black nationalist whom Douglass criticized for “going about the same length in favor of blacks, as the whites have done in favor of the doctrine of white superiority.” But the perfect is the enemy of the good, and what Mr. Simpson has given us in “Reconstruction” is definitely very, very good.
The anthology cannot be read without a sigh for what might have been in post-Civil War America—for a republic not only restored geographically and politically but genuinely built, as Lincoln had hoped, around the principles of free-labor economics and constitutional equality. In one of the last excerpts in “Reconstruction,” Grant muses to John Russell Young, the journalist and diplomat, that an extended military occupation would have probably been the best strategy after all. And indeed, it might have allowed the “de-Confederatization” of the South through the education of a new political generation and the creation of a middle-class black economy.
But this might-have-been scenario assumes that Americans in 1865 had a clear idea of what such a reconstruction would require and that they were willing to pay for it. In practice, they didn’t and weren’t, and much of what ensued was raw improvisation. By 1877, political rule in the Southern states was once again in the hands of a white oligarchy, and the ex-slaves had been legally hemmed in to an economic peonage little better than slavery. The Grant administration might have done more to hold back this revanchist tide. But by 1874 a resurgent Democratic Party had regained control of the House—and the funding for any further Reconstruction initiatives—and persuaded the country that Reconstruction itself was the problem.
At least Reconstruction managed to bring the former Confederate states back into normal constitutional alignment with the rest of the nation—in the narrow sense that the Southern states elected representatives and senators to Congress and paid federal taxes. It also managed to avoid treason trials, hangings and large-scale exiles for the losers. In fact, the greatest contrast of America’s Reconstruction with other postwar restorations lies in how its political violence was visited mostly on the victors—on Northern entrepreneurs who tried to transform the Southern economy, on Southern Unionists who had been silenced under the Confederacy, on the former slaves—rather than the vanquished.
But in every other respect, the Civil War might as well have never happened. The old plantation system remained intact; cotton was still the export king; and Southern blacks, though legally free, were largely without the vote and under the heel of Jim Crow. “Who won the Civil War, anyway?” asked Fawn Brodie, the biographer of Thaddeus Stevens, in 1962. A century and a half after the war, we still don’t have a full answer to that question.
—Mr. Guelzo is a visiting professor in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.
