| Title | : | The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0674013662 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780674013667 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 330 |
| Publication | : | First published September 28, 2001 |
Using newspapers, public speeches, popular tracts, Congressional reports, and private correspondence, Richardson traces the changing Northern attitudes toward African-Americans from the Republicans' idealized image of black workers in 1861 through the 1901 publication of Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery. She examines such issues as black suffrage, disenfranchisement, taxation, westward migration, lynching, and civil rights to detect the trajectory of Northern disenchantment with Reconstruction. She reveals a growing backlash from Northerners against those who believed that inequalities should be addressed through working-class action, and the emergence of an American middle class that championed individual productivity and saw African-Americans as a threat to their prosperity.
The Death of Reconstruction offers a new perspective on American race and labor and demonstrates the importance of class in the post-Civil War struggle to integrate African-Americans into a progressive and prospering nation.
The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 Reviews
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Heather Cox Richardson’s 2001 work The Death of Reconstruction builds on Foner’s explorations of northern Free Labor ideology, seeking to elevate it as the pre-eminent factor in the demise of Reconstruction. “Symbolically as well as practically, in 1877 President Rutherford B. Hayes stopped using U.S. troops to protect southern freedmen,” Cox noted. “Instead, Hayes turned the military against workers engaged in America’s first national strike,” the Great Railroad Strike and the beginning, some feared, of a new civil war between labor and capital. The observation goes to the heart of Richardson’s theme – how Northern class conflict became the prism through which the conflict over Reconstruction in the South was perceived, to the detriment of federal support for the rights of freedmen. While other scholars had fallen back on somewhat vague explanations for the withdrawal of Northern support such as weariness or racism, Richardson had doubts; “had whites reacted to freedpeople solely on the basis of racism,” for example, “they should have discriminated against both poor and prosperous African-Americans alike, and their attitudes should have been unaffected by specific events or pieces of legislation. This was not the case.”
Attempting to understand the place of Reconstruction in the Northern minds, Richardson examined changing attitudes expressed through print media and especially the newspapers which served as the primary mobilizers of partisan politics. She found that “when acting as Northerners expected free laborers to, ex-slaves enjoyed great support. In the years after the Civil War, though, as workers who believed in a conflict between labor and capital challenged the prevailing concept of America’s unique political economy, many interpreted the demands of the ex-slaves for land, social services, and civil rights as part of an attempt to subvert the American way.“ -
Richardson continues her analysis of the Republican Party that she started in her first book, The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War. Here she deals with the post Civil War years and Reconstruction. She shows that although racial prejudices underlie much of the division between the North and the South economics did as well. Indeed she shows that during Reconstruction Northerners of both parties still held to the idea of free labor based in an agricultural economy. The problem was that this was during the ending of the first industrial revolution and the beginning of the second and that small farming was on the decline and being overtaken by corporatized agriculture. Added to the problems were the events of the Paris Commune in 1870 that led to revolutionary ideas about labor and capital and they believed that some of these individuals from Paris brought their ideas to the American soil and had sown them among both white and black labor. During this period a migration of blacks from the South took place, some Northerners believed that these migrants represented the best of American ideas of the free labor and farming, while others believed they represented anti-American views of labor against capital. Eventually this all would lead the South to becoming a one-party voting block bringing about Jim Crow and a much larger migration out of the South that is recounted in Isabel Wilkerson's book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration.
Richardson concludes with a discussion of Booker T. Washington and his book Up from Slavery and how it epitomizes 19th century Republican views of economics and upward mobility. She writes in a concluding section, "[i]n 1901, Booker T. Washington tried to reclaim for the entire black community the vision of upwardly mobile African-Americans succeeding in American society. But he was fighting a holding action that ultimately failed. In the early twentieth century, the progressive idea of big business and big labor brokered by a big government eclipsed the free labor theory of the nineteenth century. As it did so, white Americans increasingly perceived a color line in society rather than a division between those who believed in individualism and those who believed in class activism...Seeing ex-slaves as abstract figures in a free labor society, Northerners had ignored the devastating effects of poverty, racism, and economic dislocation in the postwar black experience. When the majority of the Southern African-Americans could not overcome the overwhelming obstacles in their path to economic security, Northerners saw their failure as a rejection of free labor ideals, accused them of being deficient workers, and willingly read them out of American society. So strong was this Northern image of African-Americans that it overrode the reality of nineteenth-century life." -
The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901, Heather Cox Richardson, 2001, 312 pages, Dewey 973.8, ISBN 9780674006379
Class and race conflict. (Three guesses which class will win.) The prosperous elite maintained that the interests of capital and labor are the same. Those at the bottom of the vertical playing field knew that capital and labor are in conflict. pp. 113, 119-120, 124-125, 129, 131.
Elites North and South, Republican, independent, and Democratic, (and black and white!) came to believe that if disaffected workers elected the government, it would support disadvantaged groups: America would no longer strive for the equality of opportunity that permitted excellence but would settle for the equality of condition that guaranteed mediocrity. pp. 183-184, 209.
"Shall we compel the Southern states to submit to the rule of ignorant field-hands?" p. 202.
In reality, the post-1880 low-wage industrial economy kept workers poor, owners rich. pp. 189-190, 206. Industrialization created an urban underclass p. 196.
Moreover, far from the laissez-faire policy elites demanded toward the working class, government at all levels lavished aid on business owners. p. 190.
In the 1880s in the South, mills hired white workers almost exclusively; large landowners pushed small farmers into tenantry and sharecropping. p. 190.
In 1890-1903, each Southern state, with Northern approval, adopted education, literacy, or property requirements for voting. pp. 209, 220. In 1894, a Democratic Congress repealed all federal elections laws. States would do as they pleased. p. 214.
In 1895 in /Debs/, the Supreme Court virtually outlawed labor strikes. p. 215. /Plessy v. Ferguson/, 1896, okayed discrimination in public facilities. p. 220. (The Supreme Court was Southerner-controlled.)
Lynchings increased dramatically beginning 1889. p. 218.
By 1880, 5 million Americans worked in factories; nonagricultural workers exceeded agricultural workers. p. 184. Between 1880 and 1900, 6.6 million workers participated in 23,000 labor strikes. pp. xiii, 185.
The South produced nearly 4.5 million bales of cotton in 1861; production would not return to that level until 1875. Cotton prices fell in 1867 to 14¢/pound, less than the cost of production. p. 28. Freed rural blacks provided 63% to 72% of the labor forced from them under slavery. p. 32.
Black people were still whipped and sold as punishment for crimes. p. 29.
The addition of 4 million freedpeople to the census would increase the South's representation in Congress dramatically. p. 42. U.S. post-Civil-War population was 35 million. p. 72.
There was a dramatic rift in the black community between the few with property and the many without, as of 1867. p. 52.
Southern whites worked to reimpose de facto slavery. p. 53.
Freedpeople wanted land, which could've been, but wasn't, confiscated from former enslavers. p. 53. White Southerners took care to make sure freedmen did not acquire land. p. 83.
Poor Southern whites were facing starvation by late 1866, after repeated crop failures. p. 55.
Black dockworkers successfully struck for higher wages in 1867 in Mobile and Charleston. pp. 55, 92.
Propertied Southern whites feared taxation and spending if blacks voted. pp. 59-60, 92, 95-96. Northern elites likewise were unhappy with the results of universal suffrage in New York City, including the spoils-based Tammany Hall city government.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamma... The Northern elite didn't want working-class immigrants to vote. pp. 78, 93-94. Elites of both sections opined that only those who owned the country should govern it, and feared for their property and position should the working class of both races unite. pp. 97-99.
The South Carolina legislature was majority black, 1867-1876. p. 89. It levied taxes. The minority of wealthy whites screamed, "taxation without representation!" pp. 112, 114, 117.
Fear of confiscatory government by have-nots realigned politics such that Democrats won a majority in Congress in 1874. p. 120.
In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes stopped using federal troops to protect freedmen--and used them instead to put down the Great Railroad Strike. p. 121
In 1879-1880, tens of thousands of blacks relocated from the South to Kansas. Chapter 5.
Heather Cox Richardson has read seemingly all the newspapers and magazines of 1865-1901, and distilled them for us in 250 pages of text.
She does the same with today's news on her blog, Letters from an American. It's a terrific summary (she's been posting at about 2am Chicago time every day; about once a week she takes a day off: "Today was an absolutely perfect July day and I'm not going to ruin it by looking at the news."--
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack... )
at
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack...
Except, bizarrely, she doesn't know that -
First published in 2001, "The Death of Reconstruction" is HC Richardson's first foray into a revisionist examination of how class, politics, and economic ideology, as well as race, led northerners to acquiesce in the abandonment of Reconstruction and African Americans. While this book is more focused on certain issues, it is a complement to her 2007 more wide-ranging book "West from Appomattox."
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This book reads like a college textbook. That's not a bad thing if you read for knowledge and information. If you enjoy entertaining non-fiction this is not the book for you. Unless you are into post Civil War economics, Reconstruction and Jim Crow society then you are better off passing this one over.
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Work, Individualism, and the American Way
The reification of rugged individualism is so omnipresent in the idea of America as an ideological construct that it is hard, if not impossible, to trace its origins. Heather Cox Richardson’s The Death of Reconstruction is not a book that attempts to discover the origins of this ideology, but it is a book that explores how individualism and its attachment to work ethic (i.e., free labor) and success, explains the failures of Reconstruction. As Cox Richardson suggests, “Upwardly mobile black people who appeared to embrace the idea of success through hard work were welcome in the American community; those who seemed to cavil at their lot and hope for a windfall to maintain them were not” (180-181). As a passage like this one suggests, so much of contemporary racial discourse in the United States emerged from this period. As Cox Richardson implies, formerly enslaved people who worked for their place in the American political experiment received rhetorical support from their white Northern counterparts. By contrast, anyone suggesting the federal government had a meaningful role in bettering the lives of not only formerly enslaved people but anyone in a disadvantageous situation was castigated as a “taker,” using contemporary terminology. As Cox Richardson suggests, “By 1880, it seemed that Republicans and Democrats in the North had reached an agreement on the nation’s approach to freedpeople. They opposed the political influence of African-Americans who wanted to use the government to redress societal inequalities” (181).
This understanding of Black Americans as either “workers” or “takers” cast both groups into broad categories that linger to this day. For those who work hard and aspire to work hard, they enjoy the privilege of having people think of them as meaningfully contributing to the success of the United States. In short, they are good Americans. By contrast, “takers” are subversive figures; they surreptitiously want America to fail, and to accomplish this goal, they believe the federal government should grow and extend its reach. As Cox Richardson suggests, “By 1880, Northerners saw the black population as divided into a larger mass that wanted to dominate and subvert the government, and a small but growing group of hard workers who were making rapid progress toward complete equality in American society” (182). This perceived divide reflects contemporary American politics, specifically, the assumptions we make about individuals and groups who advocate for more substantial government intervention and individuals and groups who advocate for the opposite. While Cox Richardson never uses this language, these ideas return in moments of social and political instability. “The Red Scare” in the mid-20th century is an excellent example.
But the larger point Cox Richardson makes is a causal one, or, more precisely, a point many 19th-century Northerns derived from an incorrect causal conclusion. She writes, “When the majority of the Southern African-Americans could not overcome the overwhelming obstacles in their path to economic security, Northerners saw their failure as a rejection of free labor ideals, accused them of being deficient workers, and willingly read them out of American society. So strong was this Northern image of African-Americans that it overrode the reality of nineteenth-century life” (241). If someone read this passage without context, they might understandably conclude Cox Richardson was writing about political dynamics in the 21st century, not the 19th century. Furthermore, by thinking in binary terms (i.e., one is either a hard-working American or a shiftless subversive), 19th-century Northerns rejected the nuances of social and political realities, which is a simplistic but also seductive framework. For Cox Richardson, we must understand this binary way of thinking about an individual’s role in society in racial terms. That is to say, we cannot disassociate characterizations of “workers” from racial realities. Furthermore, these characterizations and realities have traction even today. Once again, from Cox Richardson: “Republicans came to agree with Democrats that the man of ex-slaves hoped to survive off government largess, rather than through hard work” (242). -
Makes the case that Reconstruction eventually failed by losing the support of Northern politicians. Before and especially after the Civil War the Republican Party was _heavily_ committed to the political economy ideology of "free labor". Simply looking into the term "free labor" -even without this particular book- sheds a whole lot of light on what went on in the latter half of the 1800s.
At the beginning by "free labor" Republicans meant a system whereby every single individual worked for their own profit (as opposed to slaves working because they were told to). [This ideology was already rather suspect, partly because it had already been tried in several other countries and had always failed, and partly because it didn't at all fit industrializing societies. But the Republicans strongly favored it anyway.] By the end of the period, by "free labor" the Republicans mainly meant something more like 'not socialistic'.
The main things I learned from the book though were not about Reconstruction at all, but rather about how our national politics works. Back then a century and a half ago -just like nowadays- politicians were mainly interested in getting elected and neither had reasoned plans nor stuck to anything for more than a few years. Worse, those politicians made their decisions purely according to their own thoughts, with NO checks at all from either statistical surveys or academic thought.
Our national congress did seem to recognize their information vacuum, so they constantly sent out 'fact finding' missions. But somehow those missions _always_ reported back "facts" that were exactly consistent with the beliefs of the people that had sent them out; those missions _never_ introduced any conflicting thoughts or ideas into the discussion.
While I very much liked the learning that this book prompted, I didn't particularly like the book itself for a couple reasons. First, the author collected a great mass of quotes from various publications back then, and reports every speck of that information in great gory detail. The result is such a dense timeline it's hard to keep track of the thread of the ideas being presented. It seems more like a compendium of talking points from the election campaigns every couple of years. And second, while the basic idea is considered in some depth from some angles, other angles are skipped over completely.
One of the issues seems to be that since there never was any redistribution (the proverbial "forty acres and a mule"), attempts to coerce the government into becoming a source of economic support continued for decades, eventually to the point of causing the North to back off support for universal suffrage because it smelled too much of "patronage".
Our national government's intention of knitting our country back together in a kind, non-revengeful way is quite admirable. But I couldn't avoid the thought that without consulting any sociologists or political economists, the effort was doomed to eventually fail. And after a few decades it did indeed fail; the clear separation of populations by skin color of the Jim Crow days was _much_ worse than the social situation right after slavery (in fact it's arguable that even today's situation is inferior to 1875). -
A good book with important argument, but I just prefer her newer book.
