David S. Reynolds, May 21, 2018 6:37 p.m. ET, wsj.com
Image from article, with caption:
An agent from the Freedmen's Bureau separates two groups of armed men, one comprised of white men and the other of freed slaves, 1868.
In D.W. Griffith’s landmark 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation,” the era of Reconstruction—the dozen years just after the Civil War when the federal government sought to administer the South’s recovery and reinclusion—is portrayed as a near-disaster that turned out well, thanks to the Ku Klux Klan.
In Griffith’s rendering, the North created havoc by sending agents to protect the voting rights of freed slaves, who sent scores of inept blacks to local and federal legislatures. At the film’s climax, a troop of white-robed Klansmen gallop to the rescue and eventually assist in preventing blacks from voting, restoring white rule in the South. The historian David Levering Lewis has said that the film was “responsible for encoding the white South’s view of Reconstruction on the DNA of several generations of Americans.” And it wasn’t just the film. Reactionary arguments by historians and segregationist decisions by the courts reinforced the Southern view.
An utterly different interpretation of Reconstruction arose with the rise of civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. From the new perspective, the brief time of African-American power just after the Civil War was a bold effort at racial equality, snuffed out and then forgotten during the nearly eight decades of Jim Crow. A number of historians— John Hope Franklin, Eric Foner and Philip Dray, among them—have led the way in offering this revised interpretation.
Allen C. Guelzo’s “Reconstruction: A Concise History” is a streamlined overview of the era by one of the major historians of the Civil War period. In this succinct but informative work, Mr. Guelzo traces the course of Reconstruction over time—its troublesome political and legal path—and helps us grasp both what it accomplished and why it failed.
Among much else, Mr. Guelzo describes the apostasy of President Andrew Johnson, whose administration oversaw the beginnings of Reconstruction but whose personal racism led to excessive clemency toward ex-Confederates; the fight by Radical Republicans in Congress to enforce social justice through the military occupation of the South; the efforts of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which provided education and job training to ex-slaves; the election, in several states, of black politicians and the harsh Southern backlash, launched by the KKK and other groups; the growing desire of the North and South to put aside their differences; and the collapse of Reconstruction in 1877, when the federal government withdrew its troops from the South and gave up on its commitment to enforcing equality there, followed by decades of discrimination, voter suppression and lynching.
PHOTO: WSJ
RECONSTRUCTION: A CONCISE HISTORY
By Allen C. Guelzo
Oxford, 180 pages, $18.95
Oxford, 180 pages, $18.95
This overall pattern is familiar enough, but Mr. Guelzo, with economy and grace, brings it into sharp focus. While praising the Radical Republicans who assisted in the rise of Southern blacks, he avoids the common error of overstating their accomplishments. As he notes, the Radicals fought nobly to override President Johnson’s vetoes of civil-rights legislation, but their success proved short-lived, not only because of white resistance in the South but because many of the Northerners who assumed power during the military takeover of the South proved to be incompetent. Johnson’s successor as president, Ulysses Grant, comes across in Mr. Guelzo’s handling as a well-intentioned supporter of civil rights whose effectiveness was stymied by a weak economy and political corruption.
Perhaps Mr. Guelzo’s most original contribution is his discussion of successive Supreme Court rulings that undermined the Radical Republican program and opened the door to Jim Crow. Lincoln’s appointment in 1864 of Salmon P. Chase as the court’s chief justice boded well for civil rights. A long-time defender of the cause of African-Americans, Chase initially turned the Supreme Court in a progressive direction in the aftermath of his predecessor, the pro-slavery Roger Taney, who had led the court in stripping blacks of citizenship in the Dred Scott decision of 1857.
The passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments between 1865 and 1870 emancipated millions of enslaved people and awarded black men the right to vote. Chase strongly supported this right, but key decisions of the Chase court hobbled the power of the president and Congress to guarantee full citizenship rights to African-Americans. For instance, Blyew v. United States ruled that a Kentucky law that forbade blacks from testifying against whites did not contradict the Civil Rights Act of 1866, thus helping to solidify white supremacy in the South. After Chase’s death in 1873, the Supreme Court under Morrison Waite and then Melville Fuller sped the collapse of the progressive agenda, leading to the legalization of segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).
Although Mr. Guelzo traces the squelching of Radical policies, he doesn’t take a completely dour view of Reconstruction. He observes that it restored America as a federal union, negated secession as a means of settling disputes, gave the vote to the freed slaves, and prevented mass executions and imprisonments of the kind that might well have followed a civil war. “Merely to call Reconstruction a failure,” Mr. Guelzo concludes, “is too simplistic. Reconstruction was overthrown, subverted, and betrayed,” and its hesitations and failings were replicated in “dreary repetitions” over the years. Many of the struggles we face today—over race, voter suppression, states’ rights and incompetency in high office—are holdovers from Reconstruction.
The troubling story of Reconstruction reminds us that democracy—the last best hope of earth, as Lincoln called it—is subject to the threats of racism, corruption and xenophobia. The history of America since Reconstruction shows that preserving democracy lies in the hands of forward-thinking reformers and politicians who challenge these threats and demand justice for all.
Mr. Reynolds is Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and, most recently, the editor of “Lincoln’s Selected Writings,” a volume in Norton’s Critical Editions series.
