Reconstruction and the Rise of Jim Crow: 1864-1896

Summary: Short history of Reconstruction and Jim Crow.

I am a fan of the idea of concise introductory books about big topics that give enough information and context to a subject but do not overwhelm the idea. Several publishers have books like these. For example, the Oxford Very Short Introduction series has over 300 books, including the excellent Very Short Introduction to Protestantism and the awful Very Short Introduction to the Bible or African History. In addition, Christian publishers have the Armchair Theologian series, which I think is equally mixed, on Niebuhr Brothers, John Knox, Aquinas, and John Calvin. The Drama of American History is a similar project with books that are about 100 pages.

I have previously read Eric Foner's book on the three constitutional amendments that occurred during reconstruction and his more extended overall history of reconstruction and David Blight's book on the historical memory of the Civil War in the 50 years after. But the movement into Jim Crow is something I have less background on. One of the problems of a short book on a subject area is that it tends to rely on the easy-to-tell story, not the nuanced, more difficult to explain aspects that tend to be less well known. The standard history of reconstruction is a “Lost Cause” narrative. Except for WEB DuBois' work on reconstruction, the common historical narrative is that it was a failure because of northern incompetence, the poor work ethic and education of the formerly enslaved, and the corruption of carpetbaggers and scallywags. There are still some threads of the Lost Cause in this book, although it is also trying to tell a more accurate story.

The problem with a short book is that there is only so much room in a hundred pages. The book does include the problems of a lack of education for the formerly enslaved and the corruption of Grant's administration. It also speaks of the rise of the KKK and political terrorism, the lack of political will (as well as the concern about the constitutionality of federal supervision of state perversion of justice). But in a book that primarily focuses on political history, there is a limit to exploring the issues of white superiority within both the North and South, the Democrat and the Republican/Unionist parties. For example, many Northerners favored a number of the Black Codes that stripped Black citizen's rights, allowed for unjust arrest and re-enslavement through the penal system or through forced adoption or apprenticeship programs, and voting restrictions that also applied to both Black and poor White citizens.

There was discussion of political violence, but not enough. And there was discussion about the corruption of justice systems, the lack of funding for education, the to-short political will at the end of the Civil War, and the problems of federal enforcement of the new constitutional amendments. But in many ways, the very nature of a short book on this topic means that even when it isn't trying to support Lost Cause narratives, the lack of more extensive context means that the book isn't doing enough to counter the white-centered story narrative of the Lost Cause.

Looking at reconstruction from the formerly enslaved perspective, it makes sense that Black families did not want women working in fields under white field supervisors that could routinely and, without any consequence, rape black women. It made sense that Black farmers wanted to grow subsistence crops to feed their families instead of cash crops that could only be sold to systems controlled by the plantation owner who still believed in and acted upon their white supremacy. And the justice system that could be corrupted to arrest (or lynch) anyone that started to become independent from traditional white-controlled mercantile systems was not a real justice system.

Reconstruction is a complicated story. There are many reasons why it failed to fully incorporate the Black population of the US as full citizens. But the primary blame needs to be correctly pointed to a racist President Johnson, a corrupt administration of President Grant and Grant's lack of investment in protecting Black citizenship rights, the state's rights orientation of the political philosophy at the time, and the pressure to quickly re-incorporate the former Confederacy back into the US. There were also problems with abuses of the Freedman's Bureau being run as an arm of the US military. And corruption was a widespread problem at the time. But the story has to be told in a more complicated and nuanced way to get at the problems of how the story has most often been presented over the past 150 years.