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Reconstructing reconstruction: options and limitations to federal policies on land distribution in 1866-67.

Article Excerpt
On April 11, 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses Grant and the Army of Potomac. While sporadic fighting continued for a few weeks, Lee's surrender effectively ended the Civil War. The demise of the rebellion ushered in a period of"Reconstruction" that has remained at the center of historical debates from the end of the war up to the present.

For almost a century, the interpretation favored by most historians was one of a mismanaged military occupation of the South by Northerners bent on vengeance against a "prostrate" South. State governments in the South were alleged to be rife with corruption and engaged in irresponsible spending that brought their treasuries close to bankruptcy. Only the reinstatement of "redeemer" governments, controlled by conservative white southerners in the mid-1870s, finally restored order. To underscore their dissatisfaction with what went on in the South during the decade following the war, historians adopted the loaded terminology of the times in their writings. Northerners who traveled to the South to take part in the reconstruction of the defeated states were described as "carpetbaggers"; Southern whites who cooperated with federal authorities were termed "scalawags"; and "negroes" were uniformly depicted as uneducated and unprepared for freedom. Only after the "compromise" allowing Republican president Rutherford B. Hayes to with draw federal troops from the Southern states in 1876 could the country finally take steps toward the eventual reunion of a nation torn apart by war. (1)

With the appearance of the civil rights movement in the middle of the twentieth century, this interpretation was challenged by a group of revisionist historians who portrayed the period as a time of lost opportunities. Historians such as Kenneth Stampp insisted that the Reconstruction governments represented a bold effort to create an integrated society in the wake of slavery. (2) It was the stubborn resistance of whites who refused to accept racial equality and the lack of support for freedmen's rights on the part of the federal government that undermined the efforts to "reconstruct" the South. According to the revisionists, Reconstruction offered a brief window of opportunity for Americans to effect a social revolution in the South, and the Compromise of 1876 was a tragic betrayal of nearly five million African American "freedmen" who were abandoned to the racist policies of Southern whites. As W. E. B. Du Bois, the African American historian who anticipated the revisionist interpretation by several decades, put it: "The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then went back again toward slavery." (3)

By the end of the 1970s a new consensus had emerged among historians who staked out a position between the earlier interpretations. Conceding the revolutionary nature of the Republican efforts to reconstruct the South, the neo-revisionists pointed out that these efforts were nonetheless doomed to failure. Reconstruction, as Eric Foner put it, was at best an "unfinished revolution." Yet, Foner pointed out, the effort had not been completely in vain. "The magnitude of the Redeemer counter-revolution," he argued, "underscored both the scope of the transformation Reconstruction had assayed and the consequences of its failure.... The tide of change rose and then receded, but left behind an altered landscape." (4)

Although they paint very different views of the events between 1865 and 1876, these three interpretations of Reconstruction share a common thread: they all suggest that the policies of the federal government toward the South after Appomattox were seriously flawed. The "failure" of Reconstruction was in each case due to a series of costly mistakes. The question we are addressing in these essays is: "Could it have been different?" In other words, could the United States government have done something that might have dramatically changed Reconstruction?

Counterfactual analysis is tricky business. Obviously there exist a wide range of counterfactual possibilities that could have produced different outcomes. Our challenge is to identify those situations where a change of events could plausibly change the course of history. Two caveats must be kept in mind in shaping our counterfactual scenario of Reconstruction. First, when selecting specific events that might be "changed," it is important to bear in mind that some things will not change simply because we devise a new counterfactual scenario for the postbellum South. In the language of those who deal with economic or social "models," there are always a set of "constants" or "givens" that will govern the effects of any policy. The counterfactual scenarios of Reconstruction must stay within the limits imposed by these external historical conditions. The second caveat is that in a situation as complex as the aftermath of a major war, postulating some change of a single event or policy would probably not materially affect the course of Reconstruction.

With this in mind, we turn to a brief discussion of "givens" that would affect any policy of Reconstruction. The most obvious of these would be the impact of the war itself. The war had ended slavery abruptly and violently, with no compensation paid to the former slaveholders and no tangible means of support for the freed slaves and their families. While the human and physical capital of slave labor remained in the form of able-bodied African Americans, emancipation had wiped out one-half the financial capital of the cotton South. The effects of the war also included destruction of the financial and transportation infrastructure of the South. Only one commercial bank survived the war, and four years of war and neglect had left the transportation system in ruins throughout much of the region. In addition to these effects, there was a significant deterioration of real property in many parts of the South. All of this...