How About Erecting Monuments to the
Heroes of Reconstruction?
Americans should build this pivotal post-Civil War era into the new politics of historical memory.
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From left to right, Senator Hiram Revels of
Mississippi, Representatives Benjamin Turner of Alabama, Robert DeLarge
of South Carolina, Josiah Walls of Florida, Jefferson Long of Georgia,
Joseph Rainey and Robert B. Elliot of South Carolina
(Public Domain Image - Library of Congress)
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Honoring our Leaders!!!
There is an obvious place to start: Congress and the 16 (yes, 16)
African American members from that era who served in both the House and
Senate. Not a single bust of any one of them can be found in the U.S.
Capitol. That should change. They were literally the world's first
black parliamentarians. It is a disgrace that the world's most powerful
legislature has ignored their service.
Another
possibility is for the Supreme Court of South Carolina to memorialize
its first African American justice, Jonathan Jasper Wright, who wrote
some 90 opinions during his seven-year tenure on that court. At the
time, the South Carolina Supreme Court was the only state supreme court
to have an African American member.
Given the sheer
number of Confederate memorials, there is bound to be another shocking
flashpoint of the kind that rocked Charlottesville and the
nation. Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee have vanished from Baltimore
and New Orleans. Chief Justice Roger Taney, who authored the truly
infamous part of the Dred Scott decision, is gone from Annapolis. So many have come down-or are up for possible removal-that The New York Times posted an interactive map to chart them all.
But
there is an alternative politics of memory that Americans can also
practice, and it might help to keep fascists out of public squares and
do something concrete, literally at the same time: honor
Reconstruction. Remembering Reconstruction ought not to shunt aside the
politics of Confederate memorials. Yet remembering this pivotal era
certainly deserves to be built into the new national politics of memory.
The
sesquicentennial of Reconstruction is September 1, 2017. Under the
First Military Reconstruction Act of March 1867, a Republican-controlled
Congress, having become justifiably concerned about profound legal and
extra-legal threats to the statutory civil rights of black Southerners,
gave the U.S. Army an administrative deadline of September 1 to directly
register all black and white adult males in 10 of the 11 ex-Confederate
states (Tennessee, the 11th, already had a biracial
electorate.) Echoing the Freedom Summer of the civil rights movement,
University of Chicago historian Julie Saville has called the summer of
1867 "Registration Summer."
These
elections set in motion deliberations in 1868 about the proper design
and structure of new state governments that were designed to be
radically more democratic than any of the South's previous incarnations.
In the fall of 1867, this new biracial electorate elected delegates to state constitutional conventions. These
elections set in motion deliberations in 1868 about the proper design
and structure of new state governments that were designed to be
radically more democratic than any of the South's previous incarnations. Those
state governments were also expected to formally support the 14th
Amendment to the Constitution, which established African American
citizenship and more broadly a new, expansive view of civil rights.
Americans
have been arguing about Reconstruction ever since. Like the republic
founded in 1787 in Philadelphia, Registration Summer produced a deeply
imperfect political system. The ratification of the 14th Amendment
expressly kept all women from voting. Native Americans and Chinese
Americans in California soon discovered that the new constitutional
amendments-the 13th, 14th, and 15th-did not quite include them (at least
not without arduous litigation in the federal courts).
The
sesquicentennial of Reconstruction will clock past one anniversary
after another, including the insurrection of the Ku Klux Klan against
state and local governments run by black officials and white Republican
allies; the militant defense of democracy by the Grant administration;
and little-known post-Reconstruction anniversaries like the black
Exoduster movement to Kansas and black migrations to Oklahoma territory
and Liberia. As Americans ponder these milestones, debates over the
meanings of these events are certain to follow.
Finding
a middle ground will be difficult. The protagonists of the Civil War
have always seemed noble. That war seems to have been fought over higher
ideals than Americans see in today's petty political squabbles. As polls show, this is one reason why many Americans remain uneasy about the removal of Confederate monuments.
Reconstruction's
teeming cast of characters, who were busy at party politics, setting
and collecting taxes, and executing public contracts, never quite
measure up. Moreover, it has taken three-quarters of a century to come
to grips with the basic democratic nature of the period. Writing during
the Great Depression, W.E.B. Du Bois carefully showed how deeply weird
the then-dominant literature on Reconstruction was-he did this at the
close of his 1935 masterpiece, Black Reconstruction. The
standard view was that it was all a terrible mistake. Du Bois argued,
rightly, that it was much more of a triumph than most educated whites
understood. In colleges and graduate programs all around the country,
people were buying into a racist caricature.
Thanks
to that work's enduring impact, and to the careful work of Du Bois's
great successors, historians John Hope Franklin and C. Vann Woodward,
and of theirstudents
and successors like Eric Foner, Du Bois's alternative view-that
Reconstruction was a great democratic expansion-has become largely
accepted.
The
post-bellum system of crop liens (the credit arrangements sorting out
who got paid when crops were sold) were fair, labor unions emerged for
the first time, the courts were impartial, and police forces were
integrated.
There was robust party competition at all levels, from local to state to national electoral politics. The
post-bellum system of crop liens (the credit arrangements sorting out
who got paid when crops were sold) were fair, labor unions emerged for
the first time, the courts were impartial, and police forces were
integrated.
Public
education came to the South: The University of South Carolina Law
School was desegregated and the New Orleans school system was
desegregated for a brief period. A nascent system of black higher
education emerged. Literacy rates among African Americans rose sharply,
as did property ownership. A vibrant two-party press
flourished. Religious liberty surged as African Americans quickly built a
vast system of churches and church schools.
Contrary
to the oft-asserted statement that Reconstruction was a time of white
disenfranchisement, both white and black voters voted at very high
rates. The disenfranchisement of major ex-Confederate officeholders was
lifted by Congress. This, too, was good for American democracy. But many
Americans wonder: If Reconstruction was so great, why did it fall apart
so suddenly? However, the premise of the question is wrong.
The post-Reconstruction decades after the 1877 Compromise were
much more democratic than is widely known. They certainly featured
white-on-black electoral violence, which was also rampant during
Reconstruction. There were anti-black electoral fraud and several steps
toward legal black disenfranchisement. Yet these years also featured a
major biracial party insurgency in Virginia, such as the little-known
but important biracial Readjuster movement,
and a similar movement about 15 years later in North Carolina in the
1890s. African Americans continued to vote at remarkably high rates
during the post-Reconstruction decades and before the onset of black
disenfranchisement.
Historians
sometimes suggest that post-Reconstruction politics was a charade and
point to the violent overthrow of the biracial Populist-Republican
fusion government of North Carolina at the end of the 19th century. The
idea here is that those who really had political power took the gloves
off everywhere in the South and smashed their opposition when they
decided that it was finally time to end any prospect of biracial
government.
But
the North Carolina putsch hardly shows that disenfranchisement swept
all at once through the South. Instead, formal legal disenfranchisement
was an extended and uncertain process of policy diffusion and change
that began in Florida in 1889 and ended in Georgia in 1907, or in
Oklahoma in 1910, depending on which definition of the South one
uses. The disenfranchisers hardly knew in advance that they would
eventually sweep most of these state and local governments away; there
was a repeated and strenuous effort to disenfranchise African Americans
in Maryland that utterly failed.
Nowhere
else in the 19th-century world, in Europe or Latin America, did people
who had been in slavery or serfdom shift so rapidly and transformatively
into equal and full political, indeed constitution-amending,
citizenship.
The
most important point is that from 1867 up to the creation of a
single-party/single-race rule in the South, the United States was
unique: It was the world's only biracial democratic republic. No other
post-emancipation society anywhere ever had a comparable experience-not
Cuba or any of the Caribbean slave societies, Brazil, or Russia. Nowhere
else in the 19th-century world, in Europe or Latin America, did people
who had been in slavery or serfdom shift so rapidly and transformatively
into equal and full political, indeed constitution-amending,
citizenship. Nowhere
else did a myriad of officeholders and national legislators-men who had
either themselves been recently enslaved or who, though free-born, had
lived and worked previously under a fiercely unequal system-come to play
prominent roles in legislation, local courts, and state and local
administration.
With
Reconstruction, Americans invented a new kind of regime, unique among
19th-century nations. It was profoundly and massively redistributive in a
way that the world had never seen up to that point, for it sealed the
emancipation of human property and reversed the de-facto re-enslavement
of 1866 by the white supremacist governments that President Andrew
Johnson created by proclamation during his "presidential
Reconstruction."
Thanks
to the long civil rights movement, and to bipartisan action in the
1950s, 1960s, and after, America reinvented the biracial republic in new
form, now more multiethnic and, thanks to the impact of the 19th
Amendment, much more gender-neutral than the first one. During those
decades, Americans grew to see Reconstruction very differently than they
did during the heyday of Jim Crow, when Reconstruction was instead
widely execrated among whites as a policy disaster.
As
the campaign to bring down Confederate monuments shows, many Americans
have grown to see the early 20th-century heyday of Confederate
commemoration differently. That commemoration was meant to celebrate the
final suppression of Reconstruction's democratic
revolution. Commentators regularly point this out. But the next question
in the conversation hasn't happened: You never hear someone on
television asking, "Why don't we commemorate Reconstruction?"
There
is an obvious place to start: Congress and the 16 (yes, 16) African
American members from that era who served in both the House and
Senate. Not a single bust of any one of them can be found in the U.S.
Capitol. That should change. They were literally the world's first black
parliamentarians. It is a disgrace that the world's most powerful
legislature has ignored their service.
Another
possibility is for the Supreme Court of South Carolina to memorialize
its first African American justice, Jonathan Jasper Wright, who wrote
some 90 opinions during his seven-year tenure on that court. At the
time, the South Carolina Supreme Court was the only state supreme court
to have an African American member.
There
are, in fact, many commemorative possibilities. Americans hardly have
to mount plaques or build statues for all of them-indeed, so many people
merit commemoration that there would be a glut of tributes. But there
were thousands of African American office-holders and there were
countless events. They are all rich with meaning for understanding a
democratic world that in many ways is still lost to us. Recovering and
remembering them would certainly help Americans to see their own
democracy with new eyes.
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