Reconstructing Reconstruction
Gordon, David

Frequently an accepted version of the past turns out to be based on mythology, created to advance special interests. Even when we become aware of these interests, it is difficult to break loose from the common opinion. In few areas of history has the conventional wisdom assumed such dominance as in the Reconstruction era (1865–77) that followed the War between the States.

The best way to free ourselves from the accepted dogma is to study the period from a completely opposed standpoint. The opposed view need not be accepted as entirely correct to serve this purpose: the very extremity of the contrast between the accepted version and the new picture will shock us out of our complacency. James Ronald Kennedy and his twin brother, William, have been engaged for many years in a campaign to vindicate the cause of the Confederacy, and the two of them have produced many valuable books.

To appreciate the challenge that Kennedy’s latest volume poses, let us first look at the conventional opinion. After 1865, the Confederate States accepted the abolition of slavery only with great reluctance. The Southern white elites did all in their power to bring the position of the newly freed blacks as close to slavery as possible. They did this through the Black Codes that deprived blacks of their fundamental liberties; by instituting a sharecropping system that reduced blacks to debt peonage; and by terrorizing blacks through murderous raids and wanton killings. To rescue the blacks, the Radical Republicans who controlled Congress installed military governments in the defiant states. Under military supervision, blacks were able to serve in elected offices and vote. The governments enacted many good laws. They spent a great deal of money, but they were no more corrupt than their Northern counterparts. Unfortunately, white rule was restored after the withdrawal of Union troops in 1877, and the condition of blacks soon deteriorated.

Here is Kennedy’s account of this period: “Reconstruction was not a time of rebuilding the destroyed South. It was a time in which the conquered and occupied people of the Confederate States of America were forced, at the point of bloody Yankee bayonets, into a political torture chamber. . . . Uneducated and ill-prepared former slaves were manipulated by local Scallywags and Northern carpetbaggers to establish a system of fraud, corruption, and lawlessness unheard of in Western Christian civilization.”

Kennedy’s remarks sound exaggerated, but there is much to be said in their favor. In fact, as he mentions, most American historians, Northern as well as Southern, interpreted Reconstruction very similarly down through the 1930s, with Claude Bowers’s 1929 The Tragic Era: The Revolution after Lincoln achieving wide recognition as the best popular survey of the period. (Bowers was by no means a right-winger, either: as ambassador to Spain under Franklin Roosevelt, he supported aid to the communist-controlled Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War.) It was only after a concerted campaign led by the US Communist Party that the view now prevailing took over much of the historical profession.

Kennedy stresses the vindictiveness of the Radical Republicans, underscoring the leading role of Pennsylvania representative Thaddeus Stevens, who argued that by rebelling against the Union, the Confederate States had committed “state suicide” and could be treated as conquered territory. He adopted the Roman policy of vae victis (woe to the losers). As an example, Stevens and his cohorts refused to recognize Southern state governments that had not ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, holding that the state legislatures must do what the Union demanded of them. He even proposed expelling all whites from Florida and turning it over to blacks, though fortunately this was not carried out.

It might be claimed in Stevens’s favor that he was motivated by hatred of slavery, but Kennedy is skeptical. Stevens openly avowed that high tariffs were a more important issue than slavery. His personal interests were behind this position: Stevens’s iron foundry depended on high protective tariffs, which the South opposed. Only by installing compliant politicians in Southern state governments could he keep his business afloat.

In his support for high tariffs, Stevens was by no means idiosyncratic. The issue had been a dominant theme in the conflicts that led to the War between the States. Tariffs were by far the main source of revenue for the federal government, and as most international trade was conducted using Southern ports, the Southern states were in the unenviable position of bearing the principal cost of the federal government while increasingly losing power to the North, which had a higher population and more industrial power.

In essence, Kennedy holds, the North did not want to assume a fair share of the tax burden but preferred to exploit the South. Certainly, Abraham Lincoln held this position, as may be seen from his first inaugural address. In it Lincoln said that “duties and imposts” would be collected from the seceding states, meaning that he would use force if necessary to collect the tariffs. Lincoln also supported the Corwin Amendment, which would have guaranteed the indefinite maintenance of slavery in nonseceding states where it existed.

One might be inclined to object to Kennedy in this way: “You are right that Lincoln did not embark on war to end slavery. But slavery ended as a result of the war. Further, much of the conventional view of Reconstruction is true. The Southern states did enslave blacks before the war, and afterward the Black Codes came close to reinstituting slavery.”

Kennedy is well aware of this objection, and although his response will surprise many readers, he is able to supply substantial evidence for it. He points out that the dominant opinion in the South was that slavery was an evil system and that blacks could be educated so that they could gradually and peacefully assume their responsibilities as free citizens. Confederate president Jefferson Davis, as well as many other Southern luminaries, held this view.

Kennedy mourns a history that “could have been,” in which slavery ended peacefully. He suggests that progress toward this peaceful evolution came to an end because of Northern incitement of bloody slave rebellions and because of abolitionist propaganda depicting white Southerners as evil. For those who point to the gross mistreatment of slaves before the war and of freedmen after it, he notes that many whites and blacks got along well, to the extent that blacks often remained loyal to their former masters and were willing to die for them.

Although Kennedy has demonstrated the errors of the conventional view, I am inclined to think that some of his claims are exaggerated. But surely, he is right that the policy of centralized despotism that Lincoln instituted has continued down to the present and has enslaved us all.

David Gordon is Senior Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He was educated at UCLA, where he earned his PhD in history. He is the author of Resurrecting Economics, An Introduction to Economic Reasoning, An Austro-Libertarian View (three volumes), andResurrecting Marx.  He is also editor of Secession, State, and Liberty and coeditor of H.B. Acton’s Morals of Markets and Other Essays.

Dr. Gordon is the editor of the Mises Review and the Journal of Libertarian Studies, and a contributor to such journals as Analysis, the International Philosophic Quarterly, the Philosophical Quarterly, the Journal of Libertarian Studies, and the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.

 

 

 

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