Some of my posts focus on specific points of Lost Cause ideology or groups advocating them. More often, I use them to deal with historical events from a reality-based perspective.
Not that advocates of the Lost Cause care about reality. In our new era of Republican postmodernism, creating their own reality gets a lot of social support. But, as Sigmund Freud wrote in The Future of an Illusion [Die Zukunft einer Illusion] (1927):
We may insist as often as we like that man's intellect is powerless in comparison with his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds.Not with everyone, though. Freud may have been a tad optimistic in that assessment. Still, it's worth trying to maintain a realistic view of history in the face of fabrications driven by emotion, politics, religion and just plain tribal instincts.
To open this year's series of posts, I've picked Reconstruction and Post-Civil War Reconciliation by Maj. John McDermott Military Review Jan-Feb 2009. Military Review is a bimonthly US Army publication dealing with military problems. McDermott looks at post-Civil War Reconstruction in the South for possible lessons in "AR2", one of the infinite acronyms that are so popular with the military. AR2 means "amnesty, reintegration and reconciliation". His general conclusion, which he introduces early in the article, is pretty straightforward and accurate, as far as it goes:
The failure of the United States to implement post-conflict amnesty in a non-partisan manner during the Reconstruction Era exacerbated sectional and political tensions and economic recovery problems. Continuing tensions from this flawed approach led to the near-term failure of reconciliation. That failure led to over a century of social and moral dilapidation in the South and social angst in the rest of the United States. In other words, the inadequate manner in which the U.S. implemented AR2 during Reconstruction negatively affected the quality of reconciliation after the Civil War.But this framework is problematic. Providing amnesty to traitors who had mounted a massive and bloody armed rebellion against the democratic and Constitutional government was not the first priority from a democratic and humane perspective. Securing the rights of former slaves and white Unionists and enforcing the federal government's Constitutional duty to guarantee that every state provide a "republican" form of government were.
And the notion that any effective Reconstruction policy could have been "non-partisan" strikes me as completely unrealistic. The US had a two-party system going into the Civil War. The slaveowners rebellion known as the Confederate States of America was led by the dominant Southern wing of the Democratic Party. The Northern wing of the Party was split between loyal unionists and Confederate sympathizers, some of them willing to perform espionage and active subversion in support of the Confederacy. The Republican Party was essentially non-existent in the South in 1860. It was possible for Reconstruction to be realistic and fair. Being "non-partisan" was scarcely within the range of possibility.
McDermott does a half-decent job of describing the origins of the sharecropping system in the South:
The new labor system became known as “contract labor.” In time, the contract labor system helped solve the problem of locating land for former slaves to live on. Initially, the Freedman’s Bureau tried to settle ex-slaves on abandoned lands in accordance with Section 4 of the Freedman’s Act of 1865. However, there was not enough of that sort of land to accomplish this, and some landowners later appeared with deeds and claims to properties the Bureau agents thought had been abandoned. Over time, the contract labor system evolved into the sharecropping system. Sharecropping provided tenant farmers with land in exchange for their labor and a portion of profits from their crops. To some, sharecropping seemed to solve the labor problem for planters while it provided wages for former slaves and impoverished whites, but it was almost as rife with as many problems and inequalities as slavery had been. Planters complained that they lost control of their land and the workers felt under-compensated and even exploited. lack of economic progress contributed to failure in the political realm.But in this case, McDermott's neutral tone conveys a seriously misleading picture, as in, "Planters complained that they lost control of their land and the workers felt under-compensated and even exploited." History as stenography is not much different than journalism as stenography, one of the great contemporary plagues of the American press. Sharecropping did not deprive planters of the control of their land, no matter how much they may have whined about it. And sharecroppers by any half-reasonable measure were "under-compensated and even exploited", whether they "felt" that way or not. Most of them knew very well that such was the case. Presenting those claims as somehow equally valid perspectives on the sharecropping system is preposterous.
And the contract labor system was also not the technocratic undertaking McDermott's account might lead one to believe. The planters, aka, former slaveowners, had every intention of returning African-Americans to a condition of semi-slavery without resorting to reinstating formal chattel slavery, which had been completely discredited during the Civil War.
He also omits many of the practical aspects of the shortage of capital for investment in reconstruction in the South during that period. As with much of his article, the following is another all-right-as-far-as-it-goes analysis:
During the Reconstruction Era, the economy of the South suffered from neglect and exploitation. A ruined infrastructure and low levels of capital investment caused southern states to fall behind their northern counterparts and created feelings of isolation and regionally focused identities. Instead of helping them integrate into the larger national economy, these failed policies reinforced many southerners’ localized sentiments and loyalties. [my emphasis]His description makes it sound like this problem was a failure of federal imagination, which in part it certainly was. But it's impossible to evaluate the Reconstruction policies themselves without recognizing some basic facts about that postwar situation.
One was that the South's shortage of local capital was not only due to the physical destruction of the war. The planters' main investment was in their human property, the slaves. When Robert McElvaine was a history professor of mine a number of years ago, he once observed that in real dollars terms, the expropriation of property represented by the 13th Amendment that permanently freed the slaves exceeded in real dollar terms that carried out by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution.
I don't mention this to encourage any kind of lunatic, Glenn Beck-style Bircher fantasies. But it was a fact of the situation. They had invested their capital in slaves. The slaves had to be freed, the capital which they represented for their owners had to be liquidated, in order for democratic development to proceed in the South. That part was neither short-sighted nor mistaken. It was a basic essential required in that situation to put an end to slavery. Compensated emancipation would have been theoretically possible before the war. Doing such a thing after the war would have been to put tremendous wealth into the pockets of the very men (and under the South's property laws they basically were all men) who had lead the rebellion in the first place.
What the South needed after the war was political democracy, protection of basic human rights, and Northern capital. Their failure to provide the first two contributed mightily to their inability to attract the third. The political unrest, including the violent activity of the Ku Klux Klan and other white terror groups that were extensively documented at the time in Congressional hearings, created a climate of uncertainty and fear that was anything but conducive to Northern investment and in-migration. Those were disadvantages that conservative white Southerners chose for themselves, not ones imposed on them by federal failures. For the white power structure in the South, preserving white supremacy even in the absence of slavery was more important than democracy, the Constitution or Northern capital investment.
McDermott's description of the political evolution of Reconstruction is essentially a brief for President Andrew Johnson's lenient policy, known as the Presidential Reconstruction period. He portrays Johnson's policy as idealistically aimed at breaking the power of the old planter class but as generous and pragmatic in its terms for readmission of former Southern states and granting amnesty to former Confederate officials. The Reconstruction plan later effectively imposed by the so-called Radical Republicans, known as Radical Reconstruction or Congressional Reconstruction, he presents as crass partisan opportunism by the Radical Republicans.
He does eventually point out that the Radical Republicans were reacting in part to credible reports of political violence in the old Confederacy. But he frames it as undesirable "victor's justice":
The idea of victor’s justice also influenced radical Republicans. Congressional leaders voiced concern for loyal southern Unionist residents and ex-slaves. In March 1867, passed three military acts that became known as the Reconstruction Acts, the first of which was passed over a presidential veto. With this act’s passage, the generals who commanded the military districts had the authority to hold elections, control voter rolls, enforce laws, and try citizens by tribunal. The Military Act of 2 March 1867 ended Presidential Reconstruction and began the military administration of the southern states.McDermott's account leaves an impression that Radical Reconstruction was largely a matter of harsh and often arbitrary military rule. And it suffers from the stenography problem noted above. For instance, in describing court verdicts, he writes:
However, many white southerners thought the military tribunal system treated them unfairly because of the severity of its punishments. They claimed that men convicted of crimes such as discouraging freedmen from registering to vote received 90 days to two years of hard labor in the Dry Tortugas, while Freedman’s Bureau agents convicted of corruption received "guilty, but acquitted" verdicts. Some white southerners insisted a punishment of ten years in prison for murdering a freedman was harsh, a sentiment that reflected the prevailing racism that existed in the civilian courts.Again, this is history as stenography. So, the eternal "both sides" complained, the sides in this case being white and blacks. But what was the reality of the situation? Stenography doesn't tell us. Ten years for murdering a freedman, i.e., an African-American former slave doesn't seem especially harsh by today's standards. But without some contexts of what contemporary comparisons were, it really doesn't tell us much. It would be especially important to know how the sentences for whites killing blacks compared to whites murdering whites, blacks murdering blacks, or (especially) blacks killing whites. The inevitable result of this kind of description is to elevate the whining of the defeated white Southerners to a greater credibility than it deserves on the face of it.
McDermott apparently wishes us to take the following case as an instructive example of the ways military government unnecessarily alienated the put-upon Southern whites:
As much as selective censorship of the press angered white southerners, the military government’s role in taxation brought the impact of military governance directly to their doorsteps. To white southerners, a murder trial over tax assessments — the Yerger case — was an example of military dictatorship, while northern radicals saw the murder as another instance of southern intransigence. In 1869, Edward M. Yerger stabbed a U.S. officer to death while the officer was attempting to collect a tax bill from Yerger. The Army arrested Yerger and held a military tribunal. After Yerger sought a writ of habeas corpus from the circuit court and then the Supreme Court, the attorney general and Yerger’s counsel agreed that the Army would hand Yerger over to Mississippi authorities for prosecution. Yerger was placed in a Mississippi jail, but he secured his release by posting bail and moved to Baltimore where he died in 1875. No civilian court ever tried him for murder.It's hard to imagine that any kind of responsible government anywhere is going to look kindly on people murdering tax collectors. Except, apparently, for the Mississippi court who let this accused murderer walk. In one of the endnotes to the article, McDermott does observe, "Many treat the military leaders sympathetically as good men put in a bad situation, but there also tends to be a degree of hyperbole, especially in the narrative in the South." Yes, "a degree of hyperbole" would be one way of putting it.
Perhaps the worst part of McDermott's account is the way he leaves the impression that the mixed-race legal state militias formed by the democratically-elected state governments - that would be the state militias for which the Second Amendment really was meant - to be the impetus for the forming of anti-democracy white terrorist groups:
The political mobilization of the freedmen by the radicals led to problems with respect to the militia and the police forces. Radical [i.e., Republican pro-democracy] political leaders in the South created Loyal Leagues. Because many freedmen active in the Republican Party joined the new state militias, southern whites began to view the Loyal Leagues and the state militias as one and the same. Loyal Leagues conducted military style maneuvers often as a show of force to intimidate voters. This unified white southerners against the Radical Republican state governments and led them to develop their own armed organizations.That's an amazingly credulous description of the beginnings of the Ku Klux Klan and other white terrorist groups. Blaming it on the formation of state militias is pretty much just a Lost Cause ideological version of what happened.
The Ku Klux Klan offered itself as the first such organization. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 in Tennessee as a social organization for Confederate veterans. Early Klansmen did not view their organization as political. They often rode at night and conducted pranks such as making ghost sounds to frighten superstitious freedmen. Many freedmen viewed the actions of the Klan as silly. However, this early and relatively benign organization soon became a terrorist group and the Klan rapidly expanded beyond Tennessee. Disaffected white southerners joined the Klan or the Knights of the White Camellia. These groups were known as patrol groups or nightriders because they conducted intimidation operations under cover of darkness. [my emphasis]
McDermott essentially completely ignores the overthrow of the democratic state government in the South by force and violence on the part of the Democratic Party and the Klan groups, which were really pretty much the same thing. He gives the misleading impression that President Grant in 1871 largely solved the problem of terrorist violence by acting to suppress the Klan in South Carolina.
In evaluating Reconstruction, McDermott misses the nature of the critical needs of the country in the Reconstruction policy: the guarantee the rights of the freed slaves, to establish stable democratic state governments, and to encourage economic development of a kind that would have substantially undercut the postwar power of the old planter oligarchy. His description of the course of Reconstruction winds up being at best a choppy version that obscures some of the most serious problems and failures of the federal government. And he misses the significance for the rights of African-American citizens in the corrupt deal in 1876 to allow Rutherford Hayes to assume the Presidency.
So his conclusions, based on such a shaky foundation of analysis, are pretty timid and not very informative. The primary one being:
Thus, the failures of political leaders to place the national interest above partisan political agendas led to the return of sectionalism in the United States.That sounds like a hymn to the David Broder ideal of Sacred Bipartisanship.
Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, reconstruction, us south
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