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Nice piece on Reconstruction. Two things are always missing from the narrative, however, Black political efficacy and the failure to adopt a policy of wealth redistribution. The white South won because we are still using their language and assumptions. newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…
First, we can start with activists such as Callie House, who argued for reparations and planned to use seized Southern cotton to fund it. Naturally, she was arrested and jailed. Mary Frances Berry wrote her biography in My a Face is Black is True penguinrandomhouse.com/books/12958/my…
Next, we can look at politicians themselves. We talk a lot about representation, but what good is representation if it isn’t effective? We need to be clear that black politicians in Reconstruction were dangerous because they were quite effective. nber.org/papers/w24190
And was their redistribution? In a word, no. And this is important— the correlation of slaveholding to landholding was positive. The economies of scale on southern plantations was significant. In an agrarian society, land was the key source of wealth and was not redistributed.
A clue to why this is important is in @KeriLeighMerrit’s excellent book. After the Panic of 1837 many small white landowners lost their land and became poor whites of the South. How were they treated? Terribly! cambridge.org/core/books/mas…
This became the template for how freedmen and freewomen would be treated. And, worse, the Southern Homestead Act redistributed wealth to poor whites, so while people talk of a lack of allies for blacks in the South they never talk about how unequal policies played a crucial role
And it’s important to note that the violence of the time was not only racial, but also political. The South had always lagged in public goods, and to upset that oligarchy was to face violence. More than 10% of black politicians at the time were violently attacked.
It’s also a falsehood to blame this on the Klan alone. Militia groups, gun clubs, and other loosely organized vigilante groups made voting dangerous business. A disproportionate number of race riots, up to a third, took place the week before elections during Reconstruction.
While Enforcement Acts were passed in 1870 and 1871, by the 1872 election cycle the violence was back. “White Men’s Clubs” kept “dead books” which listed the names of black political leaders. They “patrolled” voting locations on Election Day in the early 1870s.
After the Colfax Massacre in 1873, there was an attempt to prosecute those responsible for the murder of over 100 blacks. But (as you would expect) the SCOTUS ruled that they could not be prosecuted under the Enforcement Acts. It was open season on blacks.
Blacks were forced to resign their office, not allowed bonds so their opponents would win by default, threatened with jail if they voted. The “Alabama Plan” became the de facto strategy. Just enough violence to win, but not enough to draw federal attention
In South Carolina, armed whites brought their own cannon and attacked the black town of Hamburg in July of 1876, killed five men. Warrants for 87 men responsible for the violence were issued, including Benjamin Tillman, would become governor of South Carolina a short time later
If that didn’t work they just cheated— more whites voted in South Carolina than there were eligible voters in the state. Did this invalidate the election returns? Ha! Grant eventually had a policy to send federal troops only if a state raised its own militia! End of story!
I could go on (and I will in a upcoming paper!) but the point is that we need to release ourselves from the existing narrative and note that violence and policy were critical, and they were necessary NOT because blacks were helpless, but because they were successful.
