The Arc is a Long One

We’re back, and we’re talking about the legacy of that tricky concept in American history known as Reconstruction.

ED: Reconstruction has a strange capacity, a strange quality that no matter which way you turn it in the light, it can look like a failure. So if you are a person formerly held in slavery, and for that moment– as we saw in the letter from Nashville, Tennessee– you can imagine what an America would look like that treated you fairly, Reconstruction feels like a failure. If you are a Radical Republican in the North who believes that this war can be redeemed by truly creating a union of justice and equality, Reconstruction looks like a failure.

If you’re a former Confederate who believes that, OK, we lost the war, but now we will be reintroduced into the Union as equals, Reconstruction looks like a failure. So Joanne, Nathan, how should we evaluate what we just heard about?

NATHAN: Well, the first thing that jumps out is that you have at the end of the Civil War, and then in the moment of Reconstruction, a sense of deep expectations among African-Americans that they should no longer be subject to physical violence. You have also a set of expectations among Southern whites who were hoping to become part of the master class in the sense of accumulating wealth through slave labor, and that has now been snatched away as a possibility, and that leads to obviously a certain amount of bitterness and inciting of violence that I think really defines much of the experience of the late 19th century South. So it’s a very clear example of how unfilled expectations can lead to violence. But sometimes things even worse than that.

JOANNE: And I’ve got some actually more expectations to throw into this mix. It’s natural, I think, when we’re talking about Reconstruction to think about the people who are trying to make that happen in Washington and the place where it is happening in the South. But what about Northern expectations during Reconstruction?

ED: Yeah, well, you know the expectations are very strong there too. I mean, one baseline expectation is that my sons will not have died in vain. You know the North loses 350,000 men, and the risk is they look at scenes such as those that Kidada explained to us are that what did they die for if the white South is going to be in control of everything again and something much like slavery is going to be re-instituted? What was all that sacrifice for?

NATHAN: Right. Right. Yes, I was thinking too about just the attempt to expand the federal government, the belief that you can use the power in Washington to try to effect some kind of lasting transformation. The parable that constantly jumps out to me about the late 19th century and Reconstruction, of course, is the Freedman’s Bank, this effort to try to create an institution where former slaves can extend their destinies by depositing money, by getting lines of credit. But some 61,000 African-Americans lose almost $3 million in deposits when the bank fails.

JOANNE: Well, expectations of institutions, and then also expectations on an even more fundamental level on laws, policies, enforcement on the most basic level of how a government system is supposed to operate. You have expectations that if a law is on the books in some way–

NATHAN: It’s going to be enforced, right?

JOANNE: You would hope. Yeah.

NATHAN: For sure. For sure.

ED: Well, that leads to the situation where somewhat to their surprise, I think, the Radical Republicans end up pushing the law farther than they thought would be necessary. I don’t think that people thought they would have to create the 14th Amendment and then a 15th amendment to cement their expectations of what defeating the Confederacy in war and ending slavery should have meant.

It’s like this mix in which everybody’s expectations are being defeated at every turn. It’s hard for me to know who gets out of Reconstruction what they expected. And the answer would have to be nobody.

JOANNE: Wow.

NATHAN: That’s a pretty sobering conclusion. No, but I think it’s actually right. And I think in a lot of ways it kind of explains frankly why the era of the New South, the late 1890s into the turn of the century, looks the way that it does with the constant meting out of other forms of vigilante violence. I think people are actually trying to impose what was not realized.

JOANNE: Well, it was really, it’s such an interesting echo of the initial founding moment. We talked a little bit earlier about this as a moment, a rebooting moment much like the Founding. And this is yet another way in which national power even as it’s being reestablished still is being defined and people aren’t quite sure how far it’s going to reach.

ED: To go back to your point about expectations, Nathan, I think it’s important to remember. And this was what complicates these easy statements about Reconstruction being a failure, sort of a classic midterm exam question– why was Reconstruction? The thing is is that ambition that Kidada talked about about African-Americans exerting right out of slavery never dies despite every obstacle being put in the way of disfranchisement and of violence.

We need to remember that the post-emancipation African-American population of the United States is the most successful post-emancipation population in the Western hemisphere if you measure it by the amount of property that people were able to acquire. If you measure it by the amount of literacy they were able to pass on to their children. If you measure it by the number of institutions that they were able to establish.

So how we balance these things to not basically negate African-American history after Reconstruction by measuring it against the standards of what white people imposed against black people is a tricky thing because you don’t want to act as if you’re not sensitive to all the injustice and suffering. On the other hand, that did not define the entirety of the African-American experience after Reconstruction. They did not give up.

JOANNE: Right, which raises the problem with that midterm question about is Reconstruction a success or a failure? Because what we’re talking about is the problem of measurement. How do you measure something that is, on a human level, on a ground level, making a difference?

That’s not something that’s so easy to measure. I mean, you can measure the enforcement of laws, but everything you’re talking about, which has such a power to it, Nathan, I mean that’s something that’s hard to measure. And yet it has an enormous impact.

NATHAN: Absolutely.

JOANNE: Well, that’s going to do it for today. But you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought about the episode or ask us your history questions. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter @backstoryradio. And feel free to review the new show in the iTunes store. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

NATHAN: This episode of BackStory was produced by Andrew Parsons, Brigid McCarthy, Nina Earnest, Emily Gadek, and Ramona Martinez Jamal Millner is our technical director. Diana Williams is our digital editor, and Joey Thompson is our researcher.

Additional help came from Sequoia Carrillo, Emma Craig, Aidan Lee, Courtney Spagna, Robin Blue, and Elizabeth Spach. Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from Ketza and Podington Bear.

JOANNE: Special thanks to our voice actor, [? Kai ?] Millner. And as always, to the radio studios at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

ED: BackStory is produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vernon Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment. And by History Channel, history made everyday.

JOANNE: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia, and the Dorothy Compton Professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.