Reconstruction And Indecision
Graham, Otis L.
I never met a colleague in the teaching of a college history course who expected to learn very much from grading a batch of blue books. Yet an untidy pile of essays on my desk—essays designed...
...Negroes roamed the roads, unfit for the life of freedom...
...The discouraging thing in these essays was their blithe combination of both these views...
...Not that my students were passive or uninterested— nor even disinterested...
...were ill-advised...
...Among historians, Dunning's pro-Southern view came under attack in the 1930s and has never been quite the same...
...I read on in these papers and find that new trends in historical writing have made their impact—or, the same forces that move modern historians have influenced my students...
...Yet an untidy pile of essays on my desk—essays designed to persuade me that my students knew something about the Reconstruction period—has just offered me a glimpse into the divided mind of white America...
...In fact, they crowded forward with crisp judgment, and they knew their history well enough...
...You can't have it both ways, of course...
...As we decide this question, we will have to do it without him...
...He is either unwilling or unable to see that the "right" path is forked before him, and that, having but one body and soul to commit, it is time for choice...
...In 1866 the choice was precisely this—either a commitment to the Negro, backed by federal law and force, or an accommodation through abandonment of the Negro...
...They were made by those who were concerned for the Negro (occasionally you get from a student, just as you get from historians such as Charles Beard and Howard K. Beale, the view that the radicals weren't doing it for the Negro primarily, but for business and/or party interests) and who used force permanently, but somehow unnaturally, to strengthen the position of the black American...
...I suppose Carl Degler's fine synthesis of American history, Out of Our Past, is the best example of recent perspective...
...These histories blamed an unsatisfactory Reconstruction on the very idea of a forced alteration of Southern social arrangements...
...One expects a certain consistency in outlook from a Southern white — or a Negro—and usually gets it...
...Its gains were real, its flaws reproduced outside the South during the same period, and most importantly, it was a reform of Southern society admirably begun and regrettably abandoned...
...And he is most of us...
...Special blame fell to men like Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner, Northern "radical" Republicans who insisted on bayonetbacked reforms in a section of the country foreign to them...
...My students struggled through that argument well enough: the Reconstruction Acts (providing for military reconstruction, dividing the South up and placing her under five Major Generals, etc...
...For while my own position is akin to that of most Negro and liberal historians, to every man his own view of the Negro and his treatment...
...At a time when the "Negro question" might have been solved for good, while Southern defenses were down, why didn't the Republicans press for an equitable social order in the South —arranged, naturally, at the expense of the former slaveholding class...
...the Negro was not fit to assume political, let alone social, equality...
...Who made mistakes, where, and why...
...Another mistake, they went on to say, was that nothing lasting was done for the Negro...
...He winds up being, therefore, a confused moderate...
...Reconstruction was too harsh on the prostrate South," they almost invariably began, reflecting here the classic interpretation for which William A. Dunning's Reconstruction: Political and Economic (1907) may stand as the scholarly, and Claude Bowers' The Tragic Era (1929) as the popularized prototype...
...My students cherished states' rights and the welfare of the Negro, and criticized Reconstruction for not remaining loyal to both...
...From Negro historians like W. E. B. DuBois and John Hope Franklin to Southerners like Francis B. Simkins, Reconstruction no longer appears a simple blunder by radical politicians and illiterate Negroes...
...In the language of one essay, "the radicals didn't understand Southern conditions, and forced the Negro [usually capitalized] on the white before either was ready...
...Most of the participants saw this clearly, and decided one way or the other...
...That sort of person is no strong supporter of intervention to change Southern society, but neither is he willing to leave the Negro to his fate without casting about for some forceful remedy...
...Why, they complain, wasn't something enduring accomplished, so that our current problem would never have arisen...
...You have a divided mind...
...He was left to the devices of his racist exmasters in 1876, deserted by the "radicals" who simply traded him for a bunch of railroad stock and Rutherford B. Hayes...
...But what I saw reflected in these tests (written by Border/Northern students) was a curious confusion which goes to the very sources of commitment and judgment in the Negro problem...
...My students, having assimilated this new angle of vision, proceeded to reverse their field...
...Thanks to new studies of the various state experiences with Reconstruction, and of such special topics as the Negro in politics or the Freedman's Bureau performance, it now appears that Reconstruction was not so lamentable after all...
...And so on...
...And so the essays straggled on, each to its divided conclusion...
...This isn't 1907, nor even 1947, but post-Brown decision America...
...I was left with this schizoid effort, and expected to attach an appropriate letter "grade" to the whole...
...Fine, I can take that...
...So the mistakes were made by those who conceived of a social reconstruction in the first place...
...Instead of possessing at least that much clarity, he wishes both sides well, and at that fork, with all the good will in the world, he squats...
...they were asked, after several sessions and considerable reading in the Reconstruction era...
...When I get a logical exposition of the "Reconstruction itself was a mistake" theory, and some supporting data, I am—at least in my pedagogical role—satisfied...
...In a man who sees each of these courses of action as flawed, who takes a stand for federal nonintervention and Negro equality, for let-alone and for social justice, you do not, I think, have a sort of determined and calculated duplicity...
...Why this inexplicable fatigue among Northern humanitarians, this loss of commitment...
...the Scalawag and Carpetbagger were unscrupulous meddlers, etc...
...But no, the students aren't finished...
...But they were on both sides of the question at once, and as I read, it was hard not to guess that their divided mind is a general one, and perhaps I understand now why this thing is so hard...
Vol. 12 • September 1965 • No. 4
