April 21, 2006
The Story of the Story of Reconstruction
I have begun to wonder if, perhaps, calling the years following the Civil War in the South might not better be named the Unreconstruction Era. Despite the best efforts of Reconstruction, virtually nothing changed that really mattered, i.e. in the hearts and minds of the people of the South. In fact, if possible, I would dare say that for at least sixty years after the Civil War, the average Southerner "out-Heroded Herod" in his desperation to retain the attitudes and beliefs of his antebellum forebears.
Before the Civil War there is strong evidence of Southerners willing to question themselves and their own beliefs and ideas. The South suffered a humiliating defeat after four years of exhausting commitment to proving their point by force of arms, followed by occupation and the attempts at reformation. This is largely responsible (I think) for the closing of ranks seen in the "Solid South" and the assumption that no one who criticizes any aspect of the South can be a friend of the Southerner.
Our readings on Reconstruction came from two books: Interpretations of American History: Patterns & Perspectives, and Eugene Genovese's A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South. The former had a nice little outline of the development of Reconstruction historiography which is worth reproducing here.
The first school to emerge shortly after Reconstruction is known as the Dunning school. Founded in a highly racist and somewhat emotional view of events, the Dunning historians interpreted Reconstruction in terms of an epic battle between good and evil, which good eventually won by overthrowing the Reconstruction governments. This view of events remained embedded well into the 1940s. My own first introduction to it was a selection from The Tragic Era by Claude G. Bowers, published in 1929. In it, he described a South where "Southern people literally were put to the torture."
Most of the work of the next school, the revisionists (I like to call them "the borings"), took place during the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s. The borings explained the Reconstruction through an examination of the economic forces that shaped it. They framed the conflict as a struggle between agrarian values and industrialization. Racial tensions, they maintained, were merely a surface issue at most. This explanation of events, of course, isn't even remotely as appealing or captivating as the theories of the Dunning school. That school continued to dominate the public imagination throughout the peak of the revisionists' influence.
Finally, the neo-revisionists school began to emerge during the Civil Rights Movement following World War II. The neorevisionists acknowledged the economic factors which were in play during Reconstruction, but returned scholarship to the central issue of race (seen in a much different light than the Dunning historians). The struggles of Reconstruction became a question of whether whites were ready to accept equality with blacks. Although the push for equality failed at that time, Reconstruction left behind a lasting legacy in the form of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments. The promise of these amendments would lie dormant for the next several decades until the Civil Rights Movement finally moved to hold the entire nation to their standard.
That, in a nutshell, is a sort of oversimplification of the history of how historians have viewed Reconstruction since it ended. So what was Reconstruction really all about? Well, without going into too much detail (lest this become overlong), I never paid a great deal of attention to Reconstruction until I came to college. It was part of that ultra-boring transitional period between the Civil War and World War I.
Further study has revealed that, particularly in the South, this is one of the most fascinating and important periods of history in the United States in terms of shaping attitudes and beliefs. Reconstruction and the period immediately following it produced virtually every idea and perspective we have about what what defines the stereotypical South, both past and present. Rather than go into too great of detail about why I think that, however, I will refer the reader to some of my previous writing about the period, particularly from the "Myth and Myopia" series.
Posted by Jared at April 21, 2006 12:11 PM | TrackBack