Revising Thoughts on the Irreversible

To most people, Reconstruction is a tragedy in four sorrowful acts. Abraham Lincoln, gentle and compassionate, sought ways to ease the South back into the Union as the Civil War rumbled to a close. After his martyr's death his program was left in the well-meaning but bumbling hands of Andrew Johnson, who managed to organize Southern governments which accepted the war's outcome and pledged fair treatment for the poor and homeless Negro.

But soon Radical Republicans, motivated by hate, greed, and lust for power, wrested control from Johnson. They shed crocodile tears for Lincoln and rammed through a plan for Reconstruction which raped the South, using Negroes as puppets to plunder and destroy. Finally, in 1877, the last military governments were dismantled, leaving the South in the hands of virtuous whites and race relations in permanent tatters.

The man who first articulated this account was a Columbia professor, William A. Dunning, who wrote a series of monographs condemning Radical Reconstruction at the turn of the century. Much of what. Dunning and his followers said was true: the carpetbag governments were indeed faulty, corruption was all too prevalent, the tragedy of the Negro was unquestioned. They made a myth that still persists in American historiography.

Kenneth Stampp, a skillful and pungent professor of history at the University of California, comes at the end of a line of revisionist scholars who have discredited Dunning's interpretation. Their origins go back to the 1930's, when immigrants and minority groups were at last gaining access to political power, and when the Supreme Court was beginning to interpret the 14th amendment as a defense of civil rather than economic liberties. They have re-examined the conventional assumptions about Reconstruction, and have tried to resurrect the Radical Republicans as visionaries and idealists who believed in the potentialities of the Negro and who wrote this belief into the Constitution.

Stampp's book summarizes and synthesizes the revisionists' research. Without completely overturning the Dunningites, it significantly shifts their emphases, re-interpreting every major figure and policy of the postwar decade. A taut, provocative essay, The Era of Reconstruction will, like Stampp's earlier book on slavery (The Peculiar Institution), undoubtedly become an indispensable classic in its field.

Stampp is particularly acute and concise in his sketches of Lincoln and Johnson. These architects of Reconstruction faced three broad problems: the formation of loyal state governments in the South, the treatment of those who had voluntarily supported the Confederate government (who were therefore subject to trial for treason), and the future of the Negro. Both Presidents were deeply concerned with the first two issues, but they approached the Negro problem with distrust and dismay, not with imagination.

In broad terms, Stampp sees both men acting in consonance with the political convictions they held before they rose to power. Lincoln, the Whig, was always a Unionist, never an integrationist. Before the war he had opposed slavery, but he had wanted to colonize the slaves in Africa rather than to liberate them in America. He never conceived of Negroes as equal, fully capable participants in American society. His greatest concern after the war was indeed to bind up the nation's wounds through clemency for the South. he also intended to revive Whig strength by restoring the political prominence of the upper economic classes of the Confederacy. Lincoln's plan for Reconstruction, therefore, was to grant pardons to most rebels, quickly install white Southerners in the state houses, and forge a national conservative alliance. The Negro would be a free but second class citizen who would best return to Africa.

Andrew Johnson, argues Stampp, was a class-conscious Jacksonian. He nourished the self-made man's hate of the aristocratic planter class. This gave him a superficial bond of allegiance to the Radicals. But Johnson wished to thrust the poor Southern whites upward, and cared not a whit for the Negroes. When Johnson's aim became clear, many Republicans thought they had been betrayed and turned against him. Johnson's difficulties with the Congress multiplied when, through his ineptness, the planter class, not the yoemanry, gained ascendence in the Southern states. The aristocrats proceeded to enact the Black Codes, stripping the Negro of the educational, economic, and political opportunities which the Radicals had tried to secure for him.

If the Negro's lot would have been only slightly improved under Lincoln or Johnson, was it still inevitable that he would profit little from Reconstruction? In discussing the program of the Radicals, Stampp answers, No, well, maybe. To a small core of Republicans the war would not be won without social and political revolution in the South. Their goal was to reverse the Black Codes passed under Johnson, establish military government, and give the Negro civil and political rights. But when the Union armies departed, as ultimately they had to, the Negro would not be able to maintain his newly acquired status without an economic base.

Thus, Stampp contends, the crucial issues in the Radicals' plan were land reform and a controversial experiment in social engineering, the Freedman's Bureau. Land reform would give the Negro economic resources, and the Freedman's Bureau would cultivate a spirit of self-sufficiency. But reform was defeated and the Bureau proved short-lived. Nonetheless it is doubtful that even these measures could have prevented the subjugation of the freed slaves. Stampp does not convince me that when the influence of the Federal government was gone, the Negroes, whatever their gains economically and educationally, could have sustained themselves. The inevitable failure of Reconstruction, not the specific mistakes of men and of policies, make it a truly tragic epoch.

Still, Stampp is not of the might-have-been school. He wants to reorient our view toward a crucial and misunderstood era in history. And he succeeds. For he persuasively demonstrates that the pains of Reconstruction were only a symptom, not a cause, of the American dilemma, that the Radical Republicans were the precursors both of modern liberals and of Gilded Age politicos.