Reconstruction - A Revolution

African-American slavery in the United States up until the Civil War of 1865, along with the wanton massacre of American Indians and later containment / imprisonment on reservations of any survivors, are perhaps the two greatest blights on the face of America, at least inside U.S. borders. To some, the Civil War and initial period of Reconstruction may have been a period of unbounded exhilaration due to hitherto unknown physical, intellectual and religious freedoms. To others, it was fraught with only more struggle. To still others, it meant the inhuman and often violent determination to return things back to the state that existed prior to the war.

The two tasks Lincoln set for the country were (1) emancipation of slaves and (2) reconstruction of the destruction that occurred during the Civil War. While some historians claim that Reconstruction failed, according to this author it would depend on the Dillingham flaw concept expounded by Vincent Parillo, which relates to “inaccurate comparisons based on simplistic categorizations and anachronistic observations…” such as when we “apply modern classifications or sensibilities to a time when they did not exist… To avoid the Dillingham Flaw, we must avoid the use of modern perception to explain a past that its contemporaries viewed quite differently.” Historian William Dunning argued that Reconstruction failed because the federal government was too punitive and tried to impose impossible changes on the south. Later Revisionist historians claimed that federal policies at the start of Reconstruction were not punitive or excessive. Post-Revisionists said that once the Radical faction died out, the Republicans as a whole were just too conservative in their socio-economic ambitions for the South. Michael Perman speaks of the “disappointing results of Emancipation and Reconstruction” as a given. Again, if we stay clear of the Dillingham Flaw, future historians may say that the achievements of the Reconstruction Era were astounding.

Political economist Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar defines the term “evolution” as the accelerated movement of a social cycle. “Revolution” he defines as acceleration of that movement by the application of tremendous force, and reversing the movement of the social cycle by application of tremendous force is called “counter-revolution.” Using Sarkar’s definitions, and considering the time period, considering the collective worldview of most white southerners towards African-Americans in 1860, what happened in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War during the Emancipation and Reconstruction Era can only be defined as a revolution.

University of Surrey, England Lecturer Kevin Bales, an expert on contemporary slavery, says categorically: wage slavery is bad but it is not slavery. Sharecropping is also bad, but it is not slavery. Slavery, says Bales, is about control over another person’s life, usually for economic benefit. “Bonded labor, or debt bondage, happens when people give themselves into slavery as security against a loan or when they inherit a debt from a relative.” Bales provides us the differences between the old slavery and the new slavery: Earlier, legal ownership was asserted; today it is avoided. Earlier slaves cost a lot. Today they cost next to nothing. Earlier there were low profits. Today slaves yield high profits for their controllers. Before there was a shortage of slaves. Today there is a glut of slaves (more than 27 million as per Bales), due to huge global population increase accompanied by millions of impoverished persons. Earlier slaves had long-term relations with their owners. Today relationships are short. Today’s slaves are the “disposable people.” In the past the ethnicity of slaves mattered. Today it is irrelevant. The one common denominator of all slaves today is abject poverty. Slavery today takes the form of (1) chattel slavery (Mauritania), (2) debt bondage, and (3) contract slavery.

If we follow Bales’ definitions, we will consider the plight of African-Americans throughout and after Reconstruction as abominable and unacceptable. However, Bales also points out that bonded labor and sharecropping are not the same as slavery. There are differences. In my view, the differences to the African-Americans of that period would have been astounding, despite that it was to last only a few years or decades before oppression by southern whites, aided and abetted by northern whites, resumed.

For a few years, blacks became free of whippings, chains and rape. For a few years, or at least on paper, blacks equaled one human being instead of three-fifths of a human being. For a few years, they had the new, revolutionary freedom of physical movement, freedom of education, the economic freedom to own land and conduct home businesses, the political freedom to vote and run for political office, even as high as mayor and governor.

The large majority of southern blacks moved from slavery to share cropping. William Alexander Percy provides a utopian picture of sharecropping when describing the farm inherited from his father. It was “well-drained, crossed by concrete roads, with good screened houses, a modern gin, artesian-well water, a high state of cultivation, a Negro school, a foolish number of churches, abundant crops, gardens and peach trees, quantities of hogs, chickens, and cows, and all the mules and tractors and equipment any place that size needed.” According to Percy, it was “the most moral system under which human beings can work together.” Families living as tenants on the land received a house, water, fuel and garden plot at no cost. When crops were harvested, tenant-workers received a share of those crops. The defect was not in the sharecropping system but in those who participated in the system, as there was plenty of scope for the plantation owner to create a contract that was exploitative, particularly by charging high interest rates. In most cases, black sharecroppers were illiterate and did not know what they signed. Hence, the experience of sharecropping varied from family to family, depending on extent of morality and compassion in the plantation owner. One advantage of sharecropping over slavery is that the contract was between the owner and the head of the household. The rest of the family were free to help the husband/father in his work or to start small, independent businesses out of the home. These small home business in some cases enabled families to slowly save, and one fine day purchase a modest plot of their own land – one more step towards freedom. In good circumstances, share croppers had home grown food, including fresh milk, cornbread, yam, and black-eyed peas. However, if tenants signed contracts with exploitative owners, their life was abject misery. It was akin to bonded labor, which Bales terms as slavery. In such cases, the contract was set up so that tenants could never escape debt, never repay their loans, and hence never escape their owner. It was economic control and economic exploitation. When black sharecroppers went to market to sell their goods, merchants would exploit them, giving them cheap prices. Merchants also exploited sharecroppers by giving loans at killing interest rates. Hence, sharecropping was a mixed bag and the luck of the draw. For some it meant a hitherto unknown and glorious freedom. For others it was not much different from the days of pre-war slavery.

Perhaps the most stunning aspect of the revolution was in the area of African-American education. While a few underground schools existed before emancipation, at great risk to the organizers, once their freedom had been declared, blacks from all over the south simply burst forth and poured their hearts and souls into building schools – thousands of them. As James T. White said at the 1868 Arkansas Constitutional Convention, “The principle of schools, of education, is … to elevate our families.” In fact, blacks themselves were responsible for their own education, receiving only minimal financial and administrative help from northerners. Although so-called freedom had arrived, abject poverty for blacks continued. Yet, despite their continuing struggle for survival, blacks willingly gave small sums for school tuition, constructing modest schoolhouses, and teacher salaries. Whenever a school burned down, whenever additional administrative or repair funds were needed, the African-American community pitched in collectively and donated. They did not wait for white money to trickle down from the north, nor did they wait for white people to provide aid. Their collective stance of putting the highest value on education speaks volumes about African-American culture. They understood without anyone telling them that education provided a different kind of freedom, It would give articulation and moral force to their daily activities. Their first demand on getting freedom was a school for their children. In most cases they wanted black, not white teachers in charge of the school. Many benevolent societies helping blacks took the attitude that blacks need not be beggars; rather, they should support themselves, including their children’s education. When asked about such policies, Edward Everett Hale said, “Where is there not suffering in this world? We have never said that the black man’s life should be raised above suffering. We have said that he should be free to choose between inevitable hardships. This promise we perform.” The black community made tremendous strides in providing education for their children, often accompanied by struggle in the form of searching for the requisite books as well as dealing with the hostility of whites towards their progress. Throughout those years, hardcore white racists would refuse the use of churches for teaching, refuse to rent rooms to teachers, and forbid black tenants to send their children to school with the threat of being thrown out of their quarters. But they moved on. Education for blacks expanded radically from April 1865 onwards in southern states, with the greatest strides made in Georgia. In 1866 many black students heard the recitation of the Civil Rights Bill. A group of black men formed “The Mechanics Society for Mutual Aid,” where they began to study various trades. These dynamic actions only increased white hostility. Despite increasing restrictions on their newly gained freedom, black schools remained open and children continued their education.

According to Michael Perman, the Republicans were moderate in their ideas and programs for the emancipation of African-Americans. The Radical Republicans wanted radical change. However, even this faction became moderate in outlook after 1865. The party members had to contend with growing violent backlash by white southerners and former slave owners who, although they lost the war, had no intention of changing their worldview or of giving up their racial hatred. It was a prime reason for the failure of Reconstruction, as white northern politicians finally compromised and catered to racist southerners and turned a blind eye to their nefarious deeds that grew with each passing year. As an example, on the issue of integrated schools, carpetbaggers were silent. William Harris in his article “Carpetbaggers in Reality” suggests that their reason was not to offend white southerners. However, historians Philip Klinkner and Rogers Smith have a different take on northern views to Reconstruction. Charles Francis Adams, Jr. spelled out publicly on numerous occasions what may be considered as the inner mindset of so-called northern liberals, including even Radical Republicans. Forty years after Reconstruction he repudiated “the hateful memory of … the Reconstruction period…” and declared that the very idea of promoting black enfranchisement and egalitarianism was “worse than a crime.” What America reconstructed, after official Reconstruction, was “White Construction” and “Jim Crow.” Klinkner and Smith maintain that the real reason for the impetus on the part of certain northerners to give blacks more rights and more equality was the fact that blacks had fought and died during the war. They point out that racial reforms occurred after each World War for this very reason. Antislavery groups also worked to push this idea into the heads of politicians. However, once the war was over and slavery abolished by law, the zeal of those few persons died. After the war Charles Adams began saying that “the negro was wholly unfit for cavalry service, lacking… the essential qualities of alertness, individuality, reliability, and self-reliance.” Then came Darwin’s The Descent of Man in 1871, which was used to bolster the worldview of most northerners that blacks as a race were simply inferior. During this same period, eugenics took birth in the United States. Thus in 1871 itself, Charles Adams Sr., Charles Adams Jr. and others advocated a halt to Reconstruction as it related to furthering African-American rights, and pushed forward the sole agenda of economic development. By this time many white northerners were asking what was the necessity for pushing rights for blacks. Dr. Wells Brown nailed it on the head by saying, “There is a feeling all over this country that the negro has got as much as he ought to have.”

The assassination of Lincoln and subsequent catapulting of Andrew Johnson to power certainly hastened the process of non-implementation of Reconstruction, as Johnson proceeded to oppose every bill of benefit to African-Americans and passed all bills favoring wealthy Confederates. In 1866 he vetoed Senate Bill 60, which would have made the Freedmen’s Bureau a permanent institution. Despite passage of the 15th Amendment in 1869, the Ku Klux Klan was almost immediately active in the night, terrorizing blacks to keep them far away from polling stations. The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments exemplified the revolutionary aspect of Emancipation and Reconstruction. However, the key point here is that they were not enforced. Of what use are the greatest laws if they are not enforced? By the time the 1876 Republican convention rolled around, people had thoroughly lost interest in black rights, causing the great Frederick Douglas to ask the delegates, “… what is your emancipation? … what is your enfranchisement? What does it amount to, if the black man, after having been made free by the letter of your law, is unable to exercise that freedom, and having been freed from the slaveholder’s lash, he is to be subjected to the slaveholder’s shot-gun?” Memories of African-American service to the north during the Civil War simply faded away, to be replaced by the traditional racism embedded in whites living both north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line. It was exemplified by a rash of legal devices such as literacy tests, poll taxes, tests on knowledge of the Constitution and complicated registration requirements , such that the barriers facing blacks casting a vote became horrendous and finally not worth the effort. Those that dared often paid with their lives by lynching.

As Leon Litwack writes in Been in the Storm So Long, it would seem that newly freed African-Americans took a conciliatory, magnanimous approach towards their former slaveholders and oppressors. They longed simply to share their future with whites on a level playing field. They surely rejoiced in their newfound freedom, but also understood how very precarious that freedom was, physically and economically. Despite all their earlier sufferings, they continued to put faith in the white hearts of white southerners. It takes time for the oppressed to understand that they are no longer oppressed. Thus, due to their continuing docility and obedience to their oppressors, another half-century would pass before the next explosion occurred, leading to another revolution and a greater degree of rights for African-Americans.

Notes

1 Vincent N. Parrillo, Diversity in America, 2nd Edition, Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 2005, p. 14.
2 Michael Perman, Emancipation and Reconstruction, 2nd Edition, Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc. 2003, p. 2.
3 One could say the very same thing today as regards most issues: health care and jobs in America and serial imperialist wars and genocides waged abroad. Our Senators and Congressmen do not seem to be ready to step out on a limb to fight for the rights of the common people. Senator Wellstone was one great exception.
4 Perman, p. 3.
5 Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, Ananda Sutram, Ananda Marga Publications, Kolkata, 1996, pp. 70-71.
6 Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, p. 5.
7 Ibid, p. 9.
8 Ibid, p. 15.
9 Bales gives an example of American farm workers who are locked inside their barracks and work under armed guards as field slaves. They have no escape because armed guards are at all gates of the property, which is surrounded by high fences. This is going on today in places like Florida. How many Americans know about this?
10 Philip A. Klinkner with Rogers M. Smith, The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, p. 79.
11 William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee, Copyright 1941 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in Paul D. Escott, David R. Goldfield, Sally G. McMillen, and Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Major Problems in the History of the American South: Volume II: The New South, 2nd edition, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999, p. 65.
12 Ibid.
13 William A. Owens, “This Stubborn Soil,” Scribner & Sons, 1966, in Escott, et al, p. 67-68.
14 Herbert G. Gutman, “Schools for Freedom,” in Major Problems in African-American History, Volume II: From Freedom to “Freedom Now,” 1865-1890s, ed. by Thomas C. Holt & Elsa Barkley Brown, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000, p. 56.
15 Ibid, p. 57.
16 Ibid, p. 59
17 Ibid, p. 61
18 William C. Harris, “Carpetbaggers in Reality,” in Major Problems in the History of the American South: Volume II: The New South, 2nd edition, ed. by Paul D. Escott, et al, p. 47.
19 Philip A. Klinkner with Rogers M. Smith, The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, p. 72-73.
20 Charles Francis Adams was the great-grandson of John Adams and grandson of John Quincy Adams, son of Ambassador Charles Francis Adams, Sr.
21 Klinkner and Smith, The Unsteady March, p. 73.
22 Ibid, p. 75.
23 Garda Ghista, “Eugenics: Born in Germany or Born in the U.S.A.?” World Prout Assembly. http://www.worldproutassembly.org/archives/2006/01/eugenics_a_born.html. This article demonstrates that eugenics was born in the U.S. and then spread to other countries such as Germany, Sweden and Australia. Germany picked it up from American scientists and took it to the extreme. But the ideas, and the first so-called scientific documentation of the theory of eugenics was born in the U.S.
24 Klinkner and Smith, The Unsteady March, p. 85.
25 Ibid, p. 77.
26 One can make the comparison with international law. Noble treaties and conventions have been signed and ratified between nations, including the UN Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They comprise the body of international law. However, these treaties and conventions have never been enforced. There was/is no way to enforce them. As a result, there has been little improvement in the world, either politically or socio-economically. For this reason, it is time to consider a world government that will have the authority to intervene in the affairs of individual nations, for the sole purpose of preventing injustices (against minorities, for example) from occurring. The visionary President Hugo Chavez already offered this idea in his speech to the United Nations in the Fall of 2006.
27 Klinkner and Smith, The Unsteady March, p. 88.
28 Ibid, p. 94.
29 Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery, New York: Vintage Books, 1980, p. 515.
30 When I lived in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates, whenever the Arabs wanted to say that a person was a good person, they would say, “He has a white heart.”
31 Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar talks about oppression, repression and suppression in his article by that title, and says that when oppression has reached a certain point, there will be an explosion. That explosion is inevitable. I believe that Frederick Douglas (?) made a related statement – that people will be oppressed to a lesser or greater degree exactly so long as they tolerate that oppression.