Eric Foner Reconstruction Quotes

Nothing in all history,” exulted William Lloyd Garrison, equaled “this wonderful, quiet, sudden transformation of four millions of human beings from … the auction-block to the ballot-box.

Frederick Douglass, who had encountered racism even within abolitionist ranks, considered Lincoln a fundamentally decent individual. “He treated me as a man,” Douglass remarked in 1864, “he did not let me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the color of our skins.

Black troops helped construct schools, churches, and orphanages, organized debating societies, and held political gatherings where “freedom songs” were sung and soldiers delivered “speeches of the most inflammatory kind.

A Northern teacher in Florida reported how one sixty-year-old woman, “just beginning to spell, seems as if she could not think of any thing but her book, says she spells her lesson all the evening, then she dreams about it, and wakes up thinking about it.

In a sense, slavery had imposed upon black men and women the rough “equality” of powerlessness. With freedom came developments that strengthened patriarchy within the black family and institutionalized the notion that men and women should inhabit separate spheres.

By all accounts, the Northern men who leased plantations were “an unsavory lot,” attracted by the quick profits seemingly guaranteed in wartime cotton production. In the scramble among army officers illegally engaged in cotton deals and Northern investors seeking to “pluck the golden goose” of the South, the rights of blacks received scant regard.

By 1870, a large majority of blacks lived in two-parent family households, a fact that can be gleaned from the manuscript census returns but also “quite incidentally” from the Congressional Ku Klux Klan hearings, which recorded countless instances of victims assaulted in their homes, “the husband and wife in bed, and … their little children beside them.

By the war’s end, some 180,000 blacks had served in the Union Army—over one fifth of the nation’s adult male black population under age forty-five.

Even as the struggle between President Andrew Johnson and Congress reached its climax, the United States acquired Alaska, one part of an imperial agenda long advocated by Secretary of State William H. Seward. Under President Grant, the government attempted to annex the Dominican Republic.

Republicans, white and black, heaped scorn upon “respectables” who did not participate directly in the violence but “could not stop their sons from murdering their inoffensive neighbors in broad daylight.” Yet their complicity went beyond silence in the face of unspeakable crimes. Through their constant vilification of blacks, carpetbaggers, scalawags, and Reconstruction, the “old political leaders” fostered a climate that condoned violence as a legitimate weapon in the struggle for Redemption.

partial exception to this pattern was the Catholic Church, which generally did not require black worshippers to sit in separate pews (although its parochial schools were segregated). Some freedmen abandoned Catholicism for black-controlled Protestant denominations, but others were attracted to it precisely because, a Northern teacher reported from Natchez, “they are treated on terms of equality, at least while they are in church.” And Catholicism retained its hold on large numbers of New Orleans free blacks who, at least on Sunday, coexisted harmoniously with the city’s French and Irish white Catholic population.

Over a century ago, prodded by the demands of four million men and women just emerging from slavery, Americans made their first attempt to live up to the noble professions of their political creed - something few societies have ever done. The effort produced a sweeping redefinition of the nation's public life and a violent reaction that ultimately destroyed much, but by no means all, of what had been accomplished. From the enforcement of the rights of citizens to the stubborn problems of economic and racial justice, the issues central to Reconstruction are as old as the American republic, and as contemporary as the inequalities that still afflict our society.

As the reach of the 1619 Project grew, so did the backlash. A small group of historians publicly attempted to discredit the project by challenging its historical interpretations and pointing to what they said were historical errors. They did not agree with our framing, which treated slavery and anti-Blackness as foundational to America. They did not like our assertion that Black Americans have served as this nation’s most ardent freedom fighters and have waged their battles mostly alone, or the idea that so much of modern American life has been shaped not by the majestic ideals of our founding but by its grave hypocrisy. And they especially did not like a paragraph I wrote about the motivations of the colonists who declared independence from Britain. “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology,” that paragraph began, “is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” Later, in response to other scholars who believed we hadn’t been specific enough and to clarify that this sentence had never been meant to imply that every single colonist shared this motivation, we changed the sentence to read “some of the colonists.” But that mattered little to some of our critics. The linking of slavery and the American Revolution directly challenged the cornerstone of national identity embedded in our public history, the narratives taught to us in elementary schools, museums and memorials, Hollywood movies, and in many scholarly works as well.16 The assertions about the role slavery played in the American Revolution shocked many of our readers. But these assertions came directly from academic historians who had been making this argument for decades. Plainly, the historical ideas and arguments in the 1619 Project were not new.17 We based them on the wealth of scholarship that has redefined the field of American history since at least the 1960s, including Benjamin Quarles’s landmark book The Negro in the American Revolution, first published in 1961; Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877; Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family; and Alan Taylor’s The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832. What seemed to provoke so much ire was that we had breached the wall between academic history and popular understanding, and we had done so in The New York Times, the paper of record, in a major multimedia project led by a Black

John F. Couts, member of a prominent Middle Tennessee planter family, confirmed that for many whites the Bureau’s presence was a humiliation: The Agent of the Bureau … requires citizens (former owners) to make and enter into written contracts for the hire of their own negroes… . When a negro is not properly paid or fairly dealt with and reports the facts, then a squad of Negro soldiers is sent after the offender, who is escorted to town to be dealt with as per the negro testimony. In the name of God how long is such things to last?

Especially in the Deep South, where Democratic victory was impossible without the neutralization of part of the black electorate, it also implied a revival of political violence. And, a noticeable shift away from support for state-sponsored modernization (the economic corollary of the discredited New Departure) accompanied the reemergence of white supremacist rhetoric. The depression heightened the attractiveness of retrenchment and tax reduction to white voters who associated expensive government with new state programs that primarily benefited corporations and blacks, and who feared that high taxes threatened both planters and yeomen with the loss of their land. And with Republicans proposing as an economic program little more than a milder version of “reform,” they had little to offer white voters to counteract Democrats’ racist appeals.64

Ironically, as Illinois Sen. Richard Yates pointed out, opponents of expansionism employed arguments extremely reminiscent of proslavery ideology, while its supporters upheld the principle that nonwhites could be successfully incorporated into the body politic. (No people, quipped Nevada Sen. James W. Nye, were “too degraded” for citizenship: “We have New Jersey, and all things considered, it has proven a success.”)

New laws also redefined in the interest of the planter the terms of credit and the right to property—the essence of economic power in the rural South. Lien laws now gave a landlord’s claim to his share of the crop precedence over a laborer’s for wages or a merchant’s for supplies, thus shifting much of the risk of farming from employer to employee. North Carolina’s notorious Landlord and Tenant Act of 1877 placed the entire crop in the planter’s hands until rent had been paid and allowed him full power to decide when a tenant’s obligation had been fulfilled—thus making the landlord “the court, sheriff, and jury,” complained one former slave.

On the West Coast, Democrats added antiChinese appeals, arguing that the Republican doctrine of “universal equality for all races, in all things” would lead to an “Asiatic” influx and control of the state by an alliance of “the Mongolian and Indian and African. ”61

The amendments’ “plain purpose,” he wrote, was to place under national jurisdiction “the whole subject” of citizens’ rights. But too many rights had been lost as soon as they reached “that grave of liberty, the Supreme Court of the United States.”50

These are the times foretold by the Prophets, ‘when a nation shall be born in a day',” declared the call for a black political gathering in 1865. A Tennessee newspaper commented in 1869 that freedmen habitually referred to slavery as Paul’s Time, and Reconstruction as Isaiah’s Time (referring perhaps to Paul’s message of obedience and humility, and Isaiah’s prophecy of cataclysmic change brought about by violence). God, who had “scourged America with war for her injustice to the black man,” had allowed his agent Lincoln, like Moses, to glimpse the promised land of “universal freedom” and then mysteriously removed him before he “reached its blessed fruitions.

By the end of the war, small groups of freedmen were already learning their first lessons in political participation. At Mitchelville, in the South Carolina Sea Islands, blacks, under army supervision, had elected a mayor and city council, who controlled local schools and the administration of justice. On Amelia Island, Florida, blacks voted alongside whites in a local election.

As late as December, the President signed an agreement with an entrepreneur of dubious character for the settlement of 5,000 blacks on an island off Haiti. (Four hundred hapless souls did in fact reach île à Vache; those fortunate enough to survive returned to the United States in 1864.)

The war vindicated their conviction, itself a product of the slavery controversy, that freedom stood in greater danger of abridgment from local than national authority (a startling reversal of the founding fathers’ belief, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, that centralized power posed the major threat to individual liberties).

In 1863 West Virginia was admitted to the Union as a separate state, with the proviso that it abolish slavery. A popular referendum then approved a plan whereby all blacks born after July 4, 1863, would enjoy freedom. By the end of the war, complete emancipation had been enacted.

The fundamental underpinning of this interpretation was the conviction, to quote one member of the Dunning School, of “negro incapacity.” The childlike blacks, these scholars insisted, were unprepared for freedom and incapable of properly exercising the political rights Northerners had thrust upon them. The fact that blacks took part in government, wrote E. Merton Coulter in the last full-scale history of Reconstruction written entirely within the Dunning tradition, was a “diabolical” development, “to be remembered, shuddered at, and execrated.” Yet while these works abounded in horrified references to “negro rule” and “negro government,” blacks in fact played little role in the narratives. Their aspirations, if mentioned at all, were ridiculed, and their role in shaping the course of events during Reconstruction ignored. When these writers spoke of “the South” or “the people,” they meant whites. Blacks appeared either as passive victims of white manipulation or as an unthinking people whose “animal natures” threatened the stability of civilized society.2

the emergence during the Civil War and Reconstruction of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and a new set of purposes, including an unprecedented commitment to the ideal of a national citizenship whose equal rights belonged to all Americans regardless of race.

Reconstruction is part of our lives even today. Issues that agitate American politics—who is an American citizen and what rights come along with citizenship, the relative powers of the national government and the states, affirmative action, the relationship between political and economic democracy, the proper response to terrorism—are Reconstruction questions. Reconstruction is embedded in our judicial processes. Every session of the Supreme Court adjudicates issues arising from the Fourteenth Amendment and the civil rights legislation of Reconstruction.

Reconstruction revisionism arose in tandem with and provided a usable past for the civil rights movement. More than most historical subjects, Reconstruction history matters. Whatever the ebb and flow of historical interpretations, I hope we never lose sight of the fact that something very important for the future of our society was taking place during Reconstruction.

East Tennessee would remain the most conspicuous example of discontent within the Confederacy. From this area of bridge burning and other acts of armed resistance, thousands of men made their way through the mountains to enlist in the Union army. But other mountain counties also rejected secession from the outset. One citizen of Winston County in the northern Alabama hill country believed yeomen had no business fighting for a planter-dominated Confederacy: “All tha want is to git you … to fight for their infurnal negroes and after you do their fightin’ you may kiss their hine parts for o tha care.

The minimum capital requirement of $50,000 and a proviso barring national banks from holding mortgages on land restricted these institutions to large cities. The system both promoted the consolidation of a national capital market essential to future investment in industry and commerce and placed its control firmly in the hands of Wall Street.

The potent cry of white supremacy provided the final ideological glue in the Democratic coalition. Sometimes the appeal to race was oblique. The Democratic slogan, “The Union as It Is, the Constitution as It Was,” had as its unstated corollary, blacks as they were—that is, as slaves. Often, it was remarkably direct. “Slavery is dead,” the Cincinnati Enquirer announced at the end of the war, “the negro is not, there is the misfortune.

One can begin with the expansion of the source base available to scholars brought about by the digital revolution. When I began work on Reconstruction, the World Wide Web did not exist (nor did email, so that scholars wasted a lot less of their time than nowadays).

Richard Reid, “A Test Case of the ‘Crying Evil': Desertion Among North Carolina Troops During the Civil War,” NCHR, 58 (Summer 1981), 234–62;

Confederacy. Mountainous Rabun County, Georgia, was “almost a unit against secession,” and secret Union societies flourished in the Ozark mountains of northern Arkansas, from which 8,000 men eventually joined the federal army.25 Discontent developed more slowly outside the mountains, with their cohesive communities of intense local loyalties, where slaves comprised only a tiny fraction of the population. It was not simply devotion to the Union, but the impact of the war and the consequences of Confederate policies, that awakened peace sentiment and social conflict. In

The Democrats did play a role in Reconstruction—they worked to block it. The party struck out against Reconstruction in two ways. The first was to form a network of terrorist organizations with names like the Constitutional Guards, the White Brotherhood, the Society of Pale Faces, and the Knights of the White Camelia. The second was to institute state-sponsored segregation throughout the South. Let us consider these two approaches one by one. The Democrats started numerous terror groups, but the most notorious of these was the Ku Klux Klan. Founded in 1866, the Klan was initially led by a former Confederate army officer, Nathan Bedford Forrest, who served two years later as a Democratic delegate to the party’s 1868 national convention. Forrest’s role in the Klan is controversial; he later disputed that he was ever involved, insisting he was active in attempting to disband the organization. Initially the Klan’s main targets weren’t blacks but rather white people who were believed to be in cahoots with blacks. The Klan unleashed its violence against northern Republicans who were accused of being “carpetbaggers” and unwarrantedly interfering in southern life, as well as southern “scalawags” and “white niggers” who the Klan considered to be in league with the northern Republicans. The Klan’s goal was to repress blacks by getting rid of these perceived allies of the black cause. Once again Republicans moved into action, passing a series of measures collectively termed the Ku Klux Klan Acts of 1871. These acts came to be known as the Force Bill, signed into law by a Republican President, Ulysses Grant. They restricted northern Democratic inflows of money and weapons to the Klan, and also empowered federal officials to crack down on the Klan’s organized violence. The Force Bill was implemented by military governors appointed by Grant. These anti-Klan measures seem modest in attempting to arrest what Grant described as an “invisible empire throughout the South.” But historian Eric Foner says the Force Bill did markedly reduce lawless violence by the Democrats. The measures taken by Republicans actually helped shut down the Ku Klux Klan. By 1873, the Klan was defunct, until it was revived a quarter-century later by a new group of racist Democrats.

There is an excellent account of the coming of emancipation in Peter J. Parish, The American Civil War (New York, 1975), 226–61. 12. John Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen (New

James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, 1964), 59–82.

Issues that agitate American politics—who is an American citizen and what rights come along with citizenship, the relative powers of the national government and the states, affirmative action, the relationship between political and economic democracy, the proper response to terrorism—are Reconstruction questions.

Another, recognizing his former master among a group of military prisoners, exclaimed: “Hello massa; bottom rail top dis time!

One citizen of Winston County in the northern Alabama hill country believed yeomen had no business fighting for a planter-dominated Confederacy: “All tha want is to git you … to fight for their infurnal negroes and after you do their fightin’ you may kiss their hine parts for o tha care.

Fundamentally, however, blacks resented not only the incidents of slavery—the whippings, separations of families, and countless rituals of subordination—but the fact of having been held as slaves at all. During a visit to Richmond, Scottish minister David Macrae was surprised to hear a former slave complain of past mistreatment, while acknowledging he had never been whipped. “How were you cruelly treated then?” asked Macrae. “I was cruelly treated,” answered the freedman, “because I was kept in slavery.”4

from local than national authority.

The tide of change rose and then receded, but it left behind an altered landscape.

By this time, everyone understood that [President] Hayes would adopt a new Southern policy. "As matters look to me now," wrote the chariman of Kansas' Republican state committee on February 22 [1877], "I think the policy of the new administration will be to conciliate the white men of the South. Carpetbaggers to the rear, and niggers take care of yourselves." (p.581)

The [Republican] party's mainstream option was probably voiced by Massachusetts Congressman Henry L. Dawes, who admitted the "medicine" was "extreme" but asked whether any alternative existed: "Am I to abandon the attempt to secure to the American citizen these rights, given to him by the Constitution?" [Note: in reference to Enforcement Acts of 1870/71]

The law on the side of freedom is of great advantage only where there is power to make that law respected." - Frederick Douglass

For like the [American] Revolution, Reconstruction was an era when the foundations of public life were thrown open for discussin. Republicanism offered a potent argument for black suffrage, but ruled out the massive disengranchisement of Southern whites.

Black suffrage, of course, was the most radical element of Congressional Reconstruction, but this too derived from a variety of motives and calculations. For Radicals, it represented the culmination of a lifetime of reform. For others, it seemed less the fulfillment of an idealistic creed than an alternative to prolonged federal intervention in the Southh, a means of enabling blacks to defend themselves against abuse, while relieving the nation of that responsibility. Many Republicans placed utopian burdens upon the right to votet. "The vote," Radical Senator Richard Yates exclaimed, "will finish the negro question; it will settle everything connected with this question...We need no vast expenditures, we need no standing army....Sir, the ballot is the freedman's Moses." When such expectations proved unrealistic, disillusionment was certain to follow.

Uncompromising opposition to slavery's expansion, emancipaion, the arming of black troops - all enjoyed little support when first proposed, yet all had come to be embraced by the mainstream of Republican opinion. "These are no times of ordinary politics, " declared Wendell Phillips. "These are eformative hours: the natinal purpose and thought grows and ripens in 30 days as much as ordinary years bring it forward."...Whatever the merits of legal and political equality for blacks, a correspondent of moderate Ohio Senator John Sherman noted, "if you reconstruction upon any principle short of this, you cause a continuous political strife which will last until the thing is obtained.

Because they failed to come to grips with the plantation itself, the leaders of Presidential Reconstruction lacked a coherent vision of Southern progress.

The Fourteenth Amendment was a crucial step in transforming, in the words of the Republican editor George William Curtis, a government “for white men” into one “for mankind.”34

So profound were these changes that the amendments should be seen not simply as an alteration of an existing structure but as a “second founding,” a “constitutional revolution,” in the words of Republican leader Carl Schurz, that created a fundamentally new document with a new definition of both the status of blacks and the rights of all Americans.1

On the eve of the Civil War, the federal government was “in a state of impotence,” its conception of its duties little changed since the days of Washington and Jefferson. Most functions of government were handled at the state and local level; one could live out one’s life without ever encountering an official representative of national authority. But the exigencies of war created, as Sen. George S. Boutwell later put it, a “new government,” with a greatly expanded income, bureaucracy, and set of responsibilities.40

The world, declared the Radical Chicago Tribune, commenting on the draft, needed to be shown that the American government “can confidently command the support of its citizens, and make the duty of the individual to the state a debt to be collected.” Such views were forcefully echoed among Northern reformers and intellectuals

As Georges Clemenceau, reporting on Reconstruction for a French newspaper, observed after the war, “Any Democrat who did not manage to hint that the negro is a degenerate gorilla would be considered lacking in enthusiasm.”57

Accelerating the emergence of an American industrial bourgeoisie, the war tied the fortunes of this class to the Republican party and the national state.

As history shows, progress is not necessarily linear or permanent. But neither is retrogression.