Freedom and equality: Un-American activities

Upward of 2,000 African-Americans were elected or appointed to office across the South before Reconstruction had run its course, a number not matched for more than a century afterward. These included the first two black U.S. senators, Hiram R. Revels and Blanche K. Bruce, both of Mississippi (with Revels actually taking the Senate seat that had been abandoned by Jefferson Davis), and the wonderfully named Pinckney B.S. Pinchback, who served briefly as governor of Louisiana amid the chaos of that state's 1872 gubernatorial election. Far more important were the many hundreds of black men who served as sheriffs, magistrates, constables, county supervisors and other local officials across the region; it was their prevalence that made hostile whites believe that they were living through "a terrifying social and political revolution," or as hostile later historians would put it, a botched experiment in "Negro rule."

In fact, high office was almost universally reserved for whites throughout Reconstruction, and while several states had black electoral majorities or near-majorities, only South Carolina ever had a black majority in its state Legislature. That state's African-Americans, in fact, consistently called for the most radical and sweeping reforms during Reconstruction (including the confiscation and redistribution of plantation land), which may be why they had to endure an especially repressive segregationist regime in later years. Across the South, the Republican Party remained an uneasy coalition between freed slaves, free-born blacks, Northern "carpetbaggers" and Southern white "scalawags," which mostly meant small farmers and other less affluent whites who had little attachment to the antebellum slave economy.

Reconstruction governments were often awkward and plagued with problems that would draw the eager attention of later scholars. But there can be no doubt, Foner insists, that "the appearance of African Americans in positions of political power a few years after the end of slavery represented a truly radical transformation in Southern and American history." By the early 1870s, he goes on, "biracial democratic government, something unprecedented in American history, was functioning throughout the South," and "the old planter elite had been evicted from political power."

As one South Carolina legislator would put it in a later memoir: "We were eight years in power. We had built schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system, provided for the education of the deaf and dumb ... rebuilt the bridges and reestablished the ferries. In short, we had reconstructed the State and placed it on the road to prosperity." Even Foner admits this is too rosy a portrait. Some Reconstruction governments were corrupt, although not exceptionally so by 19th century standards, and the Republican Party became increasingly divided by factional infighting, sometimes between blacks and whites and sometimes between radicals and moderates.

What was even more important, and not much discussed by later scholars hostile to Reconstruction, was the fact that the Southern experiment in biracial democracy came under violent attack from virtually its moment of birth. Various counterrevolutionary white militia groups had emerged by the late 1860s; the best known of them, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan. Klansmen and similar "night riders" murdered dozens of black public officials, burned out freedmen who had purchased "white land," and frequently assaulted whites who spoke out for equal rights, taught blacks to read or simply voted Republican. By some accounts the Klan murdered 1,300 people during the 1868 election campaign; Foner calls the Reconstruction-era Klan "the most extensive example of homegrown terrorism in American history."

President Ulysses S. Grant moved aggressively to crush this white terrorist resistance in the early 1870s, using the far-reaching powers granted him by the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. Indeed, the Bush administration's Patriot Acts were self-consciously modeled after the KKK Act, which responded to a perceived national emergency by federalizing a whole range of criminal offenses and suspending the writ of habeas corpus. The Nation, then as now a liberal newsweekly, complained about the unprecedented expansion of federal power. But the KKK Act also looked forward to the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. "If the federal government cannot pass laws to protect the rights, liberty and lives of citizens," asked former Union Army Gen. Benjamin Butler, "why were guarantees of those fundamental rights put in the Constitution at all?"

Foner, in fact, doesn't quite give Grant his due. As a leading exponent of the radical reassessment of American history, Foner tends to steer away from the deeds of Great Men and focus instead on mass movements, local organizations and community leaders we're unlikely to know about. This is all to the good when it foregrounds stories like those of John R. Lynch, a former slave who became a Louisiana justice of the peace and influential memoirist, or Abram Colby, a Georgia legislator who was abducted by the Klan and whipped viciously before his wife and daughter. The Klansmen asked him, "Do you think you will ever vote another damned radical ticket?" He assured them he would vote Republican till the day he died. "They set in and whipped me a thousand licks more."

But Grant, so often derided by later historians as a drunkard and incompetent -- judgments more recently called into question -- was almost certainly the last president before Dwight Eisenhower to behave as if the federal laws mandating racial equality actually meant something. (It may not be an accident that both men had experience commanding black troops in combat.) Grant was apparently given to vulgar racial talk in private life, but it's reasonable to assume that African-Americans preferred a president who called them ugly names but crushed the Klan to the many who followed, who said polite things about "the Negro" but tolerated vicious regimes of white supremacy and racist violence.

In the North, political leaders were increasingly concerned with the rising power of labor unions and the resulting workplace strife, developments fueled by a major influx of new immigrants from poor European countries like Ireland, Italy, Poland and Russia. As the Democrats began to identify themselves more and more distinctly as the party of the white working class, moderate Northern Republicans became the party of stability and order, identified with affluent WASPs and big business. In this context, the enduring turmoil and racial discord of the South seemed like a distraction, even an embarrassment. By the mid-1870s, the abolitionist generation of radical Republicans had left the stage, Grant's administration was embroiled in scandal, and both parties were eager to restore what was deemed normalcy to the South.

Next page: For African-Americans, the age of freedom promised after emancipation was delayed for almost a century