Speaking Of Reconstruction...

by hilzoy

I was just reading this fine piece at Sadly No!, which skewers an article by Glenn Reynolds. So, naturally, I had to read the article itself, and what should I find but this rather astonishing quote:

"I've noted before that one of the great American accomplishments was to get over the Civil War without the kind of lingering bitterness that often marks -- and reignites -- such conflicts elsewhere."

Really? What an extraordinary view of American history! I mean, who would have thought that this picture, from Reynolds' own state of Tennessee, revealed any of that unseemly bitterness or latent conflicts?

And look at these happy, smiling faces: no bitterness here!

I was under the impression that after the Civil War, white Southerners carried out a campaign of terrorism and extrajudicial violence aimed at doing as much as possible to prevent the war from having any lasting effects on their cherished way of life. Guess which organization was founded in Tennessee, the same state in which this picture was taken?

From the New Georgia Encyclopedia, the South's magnanimity in action:

"Most Klan action was designed to intimidate black voters and white supporters of the Republican Party. Klansmen might parade on horseback at night dressed in outlandish costumes, or they might threaten specific Republican leaders with violence. Increasingly during 1868 these actions became violent, ranging from whippings of black women perceived as insolent to the assassination of Republican leaders. It is impossible to untangle local vigilante violence from political terrorism by the organized Klan, but it is clear that attacks on blacks became common during 1868. Freedmen's Bureau agents reported 336 cases of murder or assault with intent to kill on freedmen across the state from January 1 through November 15 of 1868.

The political terrorism was effective. While Republican gubernatorial candidate Rufus B. Bullock carried the state in April 1868 elections, by November Democratic presidential candidate Horatio Seymour was in the lead. In some counties the contrast was incredible. In John Reed's Oglethorpe County, 1,144 people had voted Republican in April, while only 116 dared to vote Republican in November when Reed's armed Klansmen surrounded the polls. In Columbia County armed Klansmen not only intimidated voters but even cowed federal soldiers sent to guard the polling place. Not surprisingly, while 1,222 votes had been cast in Columbia County for Republican governor Rufus Bullock in April, only one vote was cast for Republican presidential candidate Ulysses Grant in November 1868. Similar political terrorism and control of the polling places help account for Georgia's quick "redemption" and return to conservative white Democratic control by late 1871."

People were voted into office in free and fair elections: white Southerners did whatever they could to prevent them from being seated. Blacks tried to vote: white Southerners tried to prevent them, and carried out large-scale campaigns of violence to intimidate them. After a decade or so, the Federal government more or less gave up on trying to enforce the law of the land in the South, as far as blacks' civil rights were concerned. The South did not get to nullify the thirteenth amendment, but it did succeed in preventing the fourteenth and fifteenth from being implemented.

Having done so, the white South was, understandably, much less interested in confrontation with the Federal government. White Southerners continued to employ terrorism against blacks, of course, but they were generally more civil to Northern whites, at least as long as they were not interested in enforcing the Constitution, or unduly sympathetic to blacks.

Of course, that all changed once the Federal government decided to try to enforce the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. Suddenly, all those old grudges and hostilities reappeared, as if from nowhere:

""It is very appropriate that from this cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us time and again down through history. Let us rise to the call for freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.""

How peculiar that in such a magnanimous region, where bitterness is unknown and generosity abounds, old conflicts should suddenly reignite -- almost as though they had been there all along!

-- It's not that I don't in any way understand why losing a war, being occupied by the soldiers who had just killed your husbands and sons and brothers, and being asked to accept as equals people you had built your lives around regarding as animals might be difficult. I do, in the sense of understanding that does not imply anything remotely resembling approval. What I don't understand is why Glenn Reynolds, who should know better, buys into a lie about his own country's history-- a lie that does harm to this day, for instance in Reynolds' use of it to deny any kinship between the occupied South and occupied Iraq. That's a comparison he might learn something from if he weren't so busy saying silly things like this: "American southerners know something that apparently a lot of other people seem to have trouble with: how to lose a war and not hold a grudge."

Comments

[Ugh]

If the Third World wants to rise up and achieve our level of prosperity, more power to them.

This reminds me of a poll taken in the 1980s that was shown to me as an economics major in the early 1990s, where Americans were asked to choose between two future states of economic well-being:* (i) where their future economic well being had increased by 5% and the economic well being of the Japanese was 5% below Americans'; and (ii) where their future economic well being had increased by 10% and the economic well being of the Japanese was 5% above Americans'. The vast majory chose (i) over (ii) despite the fact that they were more economically well off under (ii).

*I almost certainly mucked up the details of the poll.

[rilkefan]

"If the Third World wants to rise up and achieve our level of prosperity, more power to them."

Let me backpedal a la Ugh's comment and note I wouldn't enjoy a future in which a US-parity China annexed its neighbors and effectively ended their cultures, where a Europe-parity Africa was run by fundamentalist Christians, where [your highly unlikely dystopia here]. Or a future where parity led to instability and ungovernable violence. On the other hand I'm by disposition an optimist about the future of humanity and suspect things will work out well, at least until the computers achieve singularity.

[double-plus-ungood]

If the Third World wants to rise up and achieve our level of prosperity, more power to them.

That, actually, is well underway. There is an enormous transfer of wealth to other nations occurring at the moment. This will likely require a significant reduction in the living standards of most Americans in the years to come, by a large factor. Also called "poverty."

[Phil]

Don't think that's parallel - enslaving a people and not helping the whole Third World enough (in the absence of agreement on a clear practical path to equality) aren't the same.

Neither are "not helping the Third World enough" and "colonizing much of the Third World, taking away many of their resources, fighting wars on their land, breaking their traditional societies, then going home and leaving them poor and tits-up in the bargain."

[SomeOtherDude]

DaveC,

Don't feel so bad, I'm sure all those "good-ole-boys" and down-home Christians were just defending Western civilization.

[liberal japonicus]

If anyone cares to keep at this, a post at TiO awaits

[Prodigal]

Quoth zmulls:

Can anyone name issues causing North/South tension that were *not* traceable to issues (moral and economic) related to slavery?

Although the cotton was being produced in the South, the majority of the industrial plants that processed that cotton were in the North, allowing for at least a little price-gouging when the thingsmade from cotton were sold back to the people who's grown the raw product.

Saith Slartibartfast:

Well, I'm thinking that hilzoy's post had quite a few lynchings of black people in it. Conflating that with north/south animosity doesn't seem to be well done.

Neither is it particularly well done to do as Glenn Reynolds did and choose to willfully ignore the fact that they took place, since that's the only way one can argue that America came out of the Civil War with no lingering bitterness the way he did. Trying to spin what Hilzoy wrote about it into a claim that she was attempting to "think of the Civil War as the South's war on black people" comes across as at least slightly disingenuous, Slarti.

Speaking of Hilzoy, she contributed this to the conversation:

It did not succeed in rolling back the 13th amendment, though one could argue (I chose to duck this issue) that the sharecropper system, as implemented in large chunks of the South, wasn't that far removed.

As the descendant of white sharecroppers, I feel a need to point out that while this may qualify as an attempt to roll back the 13th amendment, it was not anti-black as much as anti-poor.

And then dmbeaster had this to say:

There was nothing amicable at all about the process of reconciliation between North and South.

As I learned things, it wasn't until theSpanish-American War that the soldiers from the South began to completely accept that they were citizens of America, rather than just of their home states.