My rating: 5 of 5 stars
While the history of the American Civil War is quite well known by most Americans thanks to some amazing books and documentaries, the decade-long period immediately following it known as Reconstruction is little known and little understood by most. In fact, thanks to ahistorical mythologies like the “Lost Cause” narrative, Reconstruction has been painted as a dark period when corruption was rampant and Southern state governments, run by Freedmen and Northern carpetbaggers, ran roughshod over people’s rights. The historical record shows that this couldn’t be further from the truth, yet this insidious myth persists. Fortunately, there are also plenty of books that have been written to push back against this narrative and establish the true history of Reconstruction. While many such books have been written in recent years, nearly all of them owe an enormous debt of gratitude to this book, one of the very first systematic histories of the period to tell the story truly. What makes this a must-read for anyone interested in Reconstruction is how W.E.B. Du Bois centers Black Americans in this tale. In this book, Mr. Du Bois makes the strongest case for what has been said by others before: that Black Americans, the enslaved as well as the free, were their own greatest liberators and Reconstruction’s greatest reformers.
While W.E.B Du Bois is best known today as the author of such works as The Soul of Black Folk and one of the founders of the NAACP, he was also the first Black men in America to receive a doctorate from Harvard. Published in 1935, this book is the culmination of some of Du Bois’s scholarly work, which he had been hitting upon at different times in his scholarly and popular articles decades before. Starting with an examination of the condition of both enslaved Black people and their White enslavers in the Antebellum South, Du Bois takes his reader on a journey through the 20 year period that encompassed both the Civil War and Reconstruction. At each step, he shows through critical analysis of the sources available to him at the time how Black Americans’ own actions were what drove many of the key changes of this period. For example, with so many enslaved Black Americans escaping to Union lines and many of them as well as freedmen from the North eager to join the Union Army, their actions put pressure on Pres. Lincoln and the Union to transform their Civil War objectives from solely from preserving the Union to also pursing abolition. Du Bois also shows how Black lawmakers during Reconstruction were the prime agents in the creation of the South’s public school system for both white and black kids after the war, a reform that would stay in place long after White Southerns had forcefully and violently suppressed political power.
Du Bois also addresses some of the criticism of this period, particularly the corruption that Black lawmakers were accused of partaking. While not deny that there were cases of bribery and corruption, Du Bois helps to put it in the context of the time, which was an incredibly corrupt period in American history in general, and shows how oftentimes the corrupt actions of white lawmakers was far greater than anything Black lawmakers did. Not only that, but Du Bois constantly reminds readers that Reconstruction was an extraordinarily violent time with many atrocities committed against Black Americans. Racial terror and the undermining of America’s first attempt at multiracial democracy was the goal of groups like the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups. Du Bois makes the argument that the Civil War never really stopped after Appomattox Courthouse, but morphed into a racial war of white supremacists targeting Black Americans. Indeed, thinking of the racial violence through that lens and using Du Bois’s analysis, Du Bois may not have had the words for it in 1935, but readers who are even casually versed in the history of modern warfare can recognize the resemblance of the Klan’s violent tactics as similar to the Vietcong during the Vietnam War or the Taliban during the war in Afghanistan. Sadly, as Du Bois shows, the North quickly grew weary of sustaining a military presence in the South and abandoned the project after 1876, a pattern America would follow in Vietnam and Afghanistan using similar arguments (“They got to learn to stand on their own feet eventually”) and having similarly tragic results. Du Bois analyzes the reasons for the North’s withdrawal in 1876 and shows how it opened the door not just to the end of Reconstruction and Black Americans’s political power for decades, but also how it opens the door to the segregated America that follows soon afterwards.
One weakness of this book though lies in Du Bois’s Marxist background. By the 1930s, Du Bois was firmly moving in a Marxist direction and he uses Marxist language and thought in his analysis throughout this book. While this class approach to analyzing the period provides intriguing insights, I do feel as though Du Bois could stretch his Marxist analysis at times. For example, while an alliance between Black labor and poor White labor in the South could have transformed the history of the period, I have doubts that large numbers of Americans could even conceive of society in such class conscious ways at the time. Yes, Karl Marx was alive and organizing in Europe at the time and had written The Communist Manifesto in 1848, but his magnum opus, Das Kapital, was published in 1867 and I doubt his ideas had spread quickly enough in America at the time to have any effect. I could be wrong, but to me Du Bois too often applied a class analysis that Black and White Americans would not have recognized during this period.
Overall, though this book is nearly 90 years old now, Du Bois’s strong analysis and exceptional historical writing provides a gold standard by which all other histories of Reconstruction should be judged. Library of America has once again done an enormous service to American literary history by publishing this seminal work once again. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in American history in general and Reconstruction in particular.
No comments:
Post a Comment