Freedom and equality: Un-American activities

A master historian argues that Reconstruction ideals, far from reflecting America's deepest values, contradicted them

By Andrew O'Hehir

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An 1867 print depicts a former slave voting for the first time.

Jan. 16, 2006 | Amid the racist darkness of the 1930s -- an era when bigotry against African-Americans may have been worse than under slavery, and when the vast majority of white Americans collaborated in their systematic subjugation -- W.E.B. Du Bois kept alive the memory of another day and another social order. "The unending tragedy of Reconstruction," wrote the legendary black intellectual, "is the utter inability of the American mind to grasp its real significance, its national and world-wide implications ... This problem involved the very foundations of American democracy, both political and economic."

These words not only serve as the epigraph to Columbia University historian Eric Foner's new book "Forever Free," they are the clarion call Foner has spent his whole career answering. Foner may not possess the pop-culture appeal of Harvard professor Howard Zinn, but he is without doubt the other important radical historian of the American academy. If Zinn's specialty is the grand, sweeping generalization -- the idea, more or less, that everything you think you know about American history is wrong -- Foner's work has remained tightly focused on the contentious idea of freedom, that amorphous concept that has meant so many different things to so many Americans. (Among the titles of his 13 books are "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men," "Nothing but Freedom," "Freedom's Lawmakers," "The Story of American Freedom," "Give Me Liberty!" and now "Forever Free.")

Foner's field of special expertise is what might be called without exaggeration the crucible of American freedom: the Civil War, the emancipation of the slaves and the ambiguous, myth-shrouded period that followed known as Reconstruction. He never puts it this directly, either in this new, somewhat compressed popular history or in his 1988 magnum opus, "Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877," but he sees Reconstruction, with all its contradictions and unrealized possibilities, as the key to all of American history.

Given the many thousands of words Foner has already devoted to the topic of Reconstruction, the existence of "Forever Free" requires a little explanation. It was originally intended to be the companion volume to a television series that has yet to be produced; the residue of that project can be seen in Joshua Brown's interpolated "visual essays," which explore the changing representations of African-Americans and race relations throughout the period. To avid readers of history, there isn't much here that's dramatically new, but as a cogent and gripping account aimed at a wide audience, "Forever Free" fills a valuable niche.

More than that, this stripped-down narrative makes the long-term resonances and contemporary significance of Reconstruction more apparent than ever. One should be cautious about drawing parallels between the vastly different societies of America in 1865 and America in 2005 (and Foner never does so directly). But in both cases, we see a society so sharply divided along racial and cultural lines that it encompasses opposing and indeed incompatible worldviews. Undoubtedly it's simplistic to reduce the now trite "red-vs.-blue" division of the 21st century to an extended Civil War hangover, but it's not completely misguided either.

The age of emancipation and Reconstruction saw an explosive collision between federal and state power, and between Congress and the White House. It saw the federal government intervene in local affairs to serve as the protector of a persecuted minority group's civil rights, and saw local regimes of low taxation and limited government used as a smokescreen for reestablishing white supremacy and traditional oligarchy. Along the way, it remade the landscape of electoral politics, shaping both major political parties into recognizable precursors of their modern selves. And as Du Bois tried to remind the 20th century, it asked still-unanswered questions about whether freedom for African-Americans -- or any other Americans -- signified more than the freedom to sell their labor rather than have it beaten out of them.

Whatever else it was, the period of a dozen or so years after the Civil War was one of incredible political drama, unlike anything else in our history. Four million newly minted United States citizens, who had been other men's chattel months earlier, were thrust into the historical and political limelight. In alliance with both the "radical Republicans" of the North and a surprising array of Southern whites, they tried to build a biracial democracy on the ruins of a slave society. The legacy of this revolutionary experiment -- more revolutionary than any social change ever effected in the U.S., before or after -- has been debated ever since. Indeed, it was debated extensively at the time, and its participants were aware that it cast the notion of American freedom into sharp relief. In the words of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, the former slaves were to be "then, thenceforward, and forever free." But what did that mean?

Leaving aside the question of how to understand Reconstruction, its basic facts are astonishing enough. After the surrender of the Confederacy and the assassination of Lincoln, the Republican majority in Congress was (at least briefly) determined to crush the spirit of Southern rebellion and provide full citizenship to the freed slaves. Waging a ferocious battle against President Andrew Johnson (whose vision of Southern Reconstruction was, to put it gently, less ambitious), Congress drove through the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, enshrining the concept of universal equality before the law in that document for the first time. That extraordinary Washington conflict reached its climax in 1868, when Johnson was impeached by the House and avoided removal from office by a single vote in the Senate.

Whether newly emancipated or free-born, African-Americans flooded into the political and civic life of the Reconstruction South with prodigious enthusiasm. Many of the social organizations that had persisted underground under slavery, such as the black churches, black schools and black social organizations, became legitimate for the first time. (A fair number of these Reconstruction institutions, such as the traditional black colleges and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, remain prominent in African-American life today.) Within a few years, a middle class of black preachers, doctors and other professionals had begun to emerge, partly because of existing disparities in wealth and education between free blacks, rural plantation slaves and urban domestic slaves (some of whom had led relatively privileged lives).

These are the most energizing sections of Foner's propulsive narrative: Even white Southerners with openly racist attitudes and allegiances to the defeated aristocracy were struck by black Americans' appetite for literacy, political discourse and civic engagement after emancipation. "You never saw a people more excited on the subject of politics than are the Negroes of the South," wrote an Alabama plantation overseer in 1867. "They are perfectly wild."

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