Reconstruction Historiography

From Conservapedia

The scholarly interpretation or historiography of Reconstruction has swung back and forth several times. Nearly all historians, however, have concluded it was a failure.[1] Northern historians first took an approach of how the Civil War and Reconstruction preserved the Union and destroyed slavery. After 1900 Southern historians emphasized claims of corruption that spoiled whatever good there was, and claimed that blacks were pawns in the hands of Carpetbaggers. In recent years historians have adopted a Neoabolitionist pro-black perspective, that sees the failure in not fully guaranteeing genuine freedom and civil rights for blacks.

1865-1890[edit]

In the 1865-75 period, most writers took the view that the ex-Confederates were traitors and Johnson was their ally who threatened to undo the Union's Constitutional achievements. In the 1870s and 1880s many writers argued that Johnson and his allies were not traitors but blundered badly in rejecting the 14th Amendment and setting the stage for Radical Reconstruction.[2]

Black views[edit]

Among black scholars Booker T. Washington, who grew up in West Virginia during Reconstruction, concluded that, "the Reconstruction experiment in racial democracy failed because it began at the wrong end, emphasizing political means and civil rights acts rather than economic means and self-determination."[3] His solution was to concentrate on building the economic infrastructure of the black community.

Southern whites: popular white[edit]

In popular literature two novels by Thomas Dixon—The Clansman and The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden — 1865–1900—romanticized white resistance to Northern/black coercion, hailing vigilante action by the Ku Klux Klan, which had been founded by members of the Democrat Party as that party's terrorist wing.[4] Other authors romanticized the benevolence of slavery and the happy world of the antebellum plantation. These sentiments were expressed on the screen in D.W. Griffith's anti-Republican 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation.

Dunning School[edit]

The Dunning School of scholars based at the history department of Columbia University analyzed Reconstruction as a failure, at least after 1866, for quite different reasons. They claimed that it took freedoms and rights from qualified whites and gave them to unqualified blacks who were being duped by corrupt carpetbaggers and scalawags. As one scholar notes, "Reconstruction was a battle between two extremes: the Democrats, as the group which included the vast majority of the whites, standing for decent government and racial supremacy, versus the Republicans, the Negroes, alien carpetbaggers, and renegade scalawags, standing for dishonest government and alien ideals. These historians wrote literally in terms of white and black."[5]

Revisionism[edit]

In the 1930s, "revisionism" became popular among scholars. As disciples of Charles A. Beard, revisionists focused on economics, downplaying politics and constitutional issues. They argued that the Radical rhetoric of equal rights was mostly a smokescreen hiding the true motivation of Reconstruction's real backers. While conceding that a few men like Stevens and Sumner were thoroughly idealistic, Howard Beale argued Reconstruction was primarily a successful attempt by financiers, railroad builders and industrialists in the Northeast, using the Republican Party, to control the national government for its own selfish economic ends. Those ends were to continue the wartime high protective tariff, the new network of national banks, and to guarantee a "sound" currency. To succeed the business class had to remove the old ruling agrarian class of Southern planters and Midwestern farmers. This it did by inaugurating Reconstruction, which made the South Republican, and by selling its policies to the voters wrapped up in such attractive vote-getting packages as northern patriotism or the bloody shirt. Historian William Hesseltine added the point that the Northeastern businessmen wanted to control the South economically, which they did through ownership of the railroads.[6] However, historians in the 1950s and 1960s refuted Beale's economic causation by demonstrating that Northern businessmen were widely divergent on monetary or tariff policy, and seldom paid attention to Reconstruction issues.[7]

Neoabolitionists[edit]

In the 1960s, neoabolitionist historians emerged, led by John Hope Franklin, Kenneth Stampp and Eric Foner. Strongly aligned with the Civil Rights Movement, they rejected the Dunning school and found a great deal to praise in Radical Reconstruction. Foner, the primary advocate of this view, argued that it was never truly completed, and that a Second Reconstruction was needed in the late 20th century to complete the goal of full equality for African-Americans. The neo-abolitionists followed the revisionists in minimizing the corruption and waste created by Republican state governments, saying it was no worse than Boss Tweed's ring in New York City.[8] Instead they emphasized that poor treatment of Freedmen was a worse scandal and a grave corruption of America's republican ideals. They argued that the real tragedy of Reconstruction was not that it failed because blacks were incapable of governing, but that it failed because the civil rights and equalities granted during this period were but a passing, temporary development. These rights were suspended in the South from the 1880s through 1964, but were restored by the Civil Rights Movement that is sometimes referred to as the "Second Reconstruction."

Recent studies[edit]

More recent work by Nina Silber, David Blight, Cecelia O'Leary, Laura Edwards, LeeAnn Whites, and Edward J. Blum, has encouraged greater attention to race, religion, and issues of gender while at the same time pushing the "end" of Reconstruction to the end of the nineteenth century, while monographs by Charles Reagan Wilson, Gaines Foster, W. Scott Poole have offered new views of the southern "Lost Cause."

Bibliography[edit]

Surveys[edit]

National politics and Constitutional issues[edit]

full text online, by leading conservative historian

National politics: biographies[edit]

South: regional, state & local studies[edit]

Social and economic history[edit]

Primary Sources[edit]

Newspapers and magazines[edit]

Freedman's Bureau[edit]

Primary sources[edit]

General[edit]

Education[edit]

Specialized studies[edit]

Compromise of 1877 and end of Reconstruction[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ↑ McPherson 1965
  2. ↑ Fletcher M. Green, "Walter Lynwood Fleming: Historian of Reconstruction," The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 2, No. 4. (Nov., 1936), pp. 497-521. in JSTOR
  3. ↑ Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington in Perspective (1988) p. 164; A. A. Taylor, "Historians of the Reconstruction," The Journal of Negro History Vol. 23, No. 1. (Jan., 1938), pp. 16-34 in JSTOR.
  4. ↑ A Short History of Democrats, Republicans, and Racism
  5. ↑ Williams 1946 p. 473; Green (1936).
  6. ↑ Williams 1946 p470
  7. ↑ Foner 1982; Montgomery, vii–ix)
  8. ↑ Williams, 469; Foner p. xxii

Categories: [Reconstruction] [American Civil War] [The South] [Gilded Age] [Civil Rights] [Black History] [Historians]

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