Reconstruction and Its Consequences

...Indeed, representatives of Northern states where the few free Negroes were not allowed to vote backed the wholesale enfranchisement of the more backward and more illiterate former slaves in the South...

...the freedman's dream of "40 acres and a mule" was never realized...

...He did raise the question of the franchise and he mentioned to the Loyalist Governor of Louisiana: "I barely suggest, for your private consideration, whether some of the colored people may not be let in, as, for instance, the very intelligent and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks...

...Although he can be eloquent in stating the Myth of Reconstruction which dominates the Southern mind, and although he gives convincing evidence that Reconstruction in practice meant a good deal of tyranny, graft and general mismanagement, Carter gives full weight to the scholarly findings that the era was not so one-sidedly dark as it has been painted...

...Carter gives a picture of Albert Morgan, the former Union officer who settled in Mississippi and married a colored woman, as a man of considerable intelligence and ideal ism...

...But Hodding Carter, a Southern editor and journalist who has always been rated as a moderate on the explosive issue of race relations, steers a pretty level headed middle course between the extreme black-and-white views rep resented on one side by the once-famous motion picture, The Birth of a Nation (in which all the Southern whites are spotless heroes, and the blacks, except for a few who remain faithful to their former masters, are villainous wretches), and Howard Fast's Freedom Road, in which the roles of the races are neatly and equally unrealistically reversed...

...There were Southern moderates, like Wade Hampton in South Carolina, who would have gladly settled for a pro gram of gradual enfranchisement, such as Lincoln apparently had in mind...

...The Scalawags were not all depraved scoundrels like Frank Moses in South Carolina...

...Perhaps the whole Radical Reconstruction and the en suing reaction were like stages in a Greek drama, implacably foreordained...

...some of the Negro leaders who emerged, notably Hiram Revels in Mississippi, were decent, well-intentioned men who...

...The Reconstruction era was one of raw violence, with human life cheap in the wake of a long destructive war and because of the passions aroused...

...During this period an extremist majority in Congress, overriding the opposition of the Southern Unionist President, Andrew Johnson, tried to reverse, at least politically, the former roles of masters and slaves in the Southern states...

...As Carter shows, this was the after math of a short-lived cooperation of Negro and poor white farmers under the Populist banner...

...This is the story of an important era in American history, which casts long shadows over the "integration" struggle in the South, told vividly, fairly, comprehendingly...

...Lincoln was unmistakably a moderate in his attitude toward the extremely vexing and difficult problem of how to fit the liberated, but still generally illiterate and ignorant, Negroes into the political life of the Southern states...

...It was all over by 1876...

...One fault may be noted in this generally excellent and often fascinating story of the tragic aftermath, in the South, of America's great fratricidal war...

...To write unemotionally of this period is almost impossible...

...The Carpetbaggers, so-called because they were supposed to come with all their belongings in a carpetbag, were Northerners who helped to organize Republican state governments with the aid of the new Negro vote...

...when the last three states under Radical rule—South Carolina...

...He marshals a good deal of evidence to show that the Radicals, as they were then called, who pushed through the more extreme Reconstruction measures, were more actuated by desire for revenge and a desire to perpetuate Republican rule than by genuine concern for the Negro...

...Not all the Reconstruction political figures were crooks and incompetents...

...Rutherford B. Hayes...

...Could race relations have taken a better turn if the spirit of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, ("With malice toward none, with charity for all") had dominated Northern policy toward the defeated South, instead of the brutal vengefulness of Stevens and Butler and Wade...

...The Scalawags (a modern name for them might be "collaborators") were the Southerners who allied themselves with the Northern political invaders...

...Not all the Carpetbaggers were vultures, intent on pillaging the prostrate South...

...There was no economic implementation of the social revolution...

...The Reconstruction experiment finally collapsed for several reasons...

...Organization of the material leaves much to be desired: the sequence of events is often cloud ed and unclear...

...It was only some 20 years later, however, that the Negro was completely excluded from the political life of the South...

...The downfall of the state Radical ad ministrations was hastened by internal feuds among their leaders...

...in an atmosphere less charged with bitter war memories and race antagonism, could have made genuine contributions to the new necessity of racial coexistence on a non-slave basis...

...This was a long way from the wholesale enfranchisement of an illiterate electorate by means of which the Radical bosses in Congress hoped to keep the Southern states voting Republican forever...

...Duels among editors, even within the Democratic fold, or between editors and irate citizens who had been butts of intemperate, generally libelous attacks, were frequent, and the mortality rate among news papers and their editors was high...

...they included Southerners who had always opposed secession and others who felt that it was possible to spare their home land some of the worst pains of defeat and social revolution by swimming with the tide and trying to exert some influence on the course of events...

...As the author says: "It was considerably less important for an editor of a Democratic newspaper during Reconstruction to be a grammarian than to be a quick and willing man with a Navy colt, a dirk or a shotgun...

...By enfranchising en masse the mostly illiterate Negroes and disfranchising the active Confederates, the Congressional majority—led by men like Thaddeus Stevens, the uncompromising South-hater from Pennsylvania, Ben Wade of Ohio, Ben Butler and Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the latter of much higher moral and intellectual caliber—created conditions for what the South generally called rule by "Carpetbaggers" and "Scalawags...

...Carter leaves no doubt that Re construction is a nightmare memory in the South and has done much to poison race relations...

...On this point Carter offers no assurance...

...Louisiana and Florida—were tacitly allowed to elect conservative state governments as part of an unspoken bargain by which their presidential votes were counted for the Republican candidate...

...But were there enough of them...

...With a journalist's quick eye for drama, Carter has packed his book with first-hand records of the time, ranging from the recollections of former slaves to the defiant statement of Jefferson Davis, delivered before a highly "unreconstructed" cheering, weeping Mississippi legislature in 1884: "Remembering as I must all which has been lost, disappointed hopes and crushed aspirations, yet I deliberately say: If it were to do all over again I would again do just as I did in 1861...

...Some of the laws passed by Reconstruction administrations, notably the provision for a free public school system, could be considered overdue measures of social reform...

...at times, a little confusedly...

...One would have gladly traded some of the digressive sections of the work for a straight, play-by-play account of what happened in just one or two states, the way in which the elections were fought, the issues that were debated, and the events that led finally to the downfall of the Radicals' power in the South...

...And, as war passions cooled and the spirit in the North became more and more averse to holding down the South by the bayonets of Federal troops, resistance organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia in Louisiana spread terror and discouragement in the Radical ranks...

...to write fairly is difficult...

...Reviewed by William Henry Chamberlin Author, "The Evolution of a Conservative" "The Russian Revolution" THE NEAREST thing to a social revolution that ever occurred in the United States was the decade of so-called Reconstruction in the South after the end of the Civil War...