Racial Implications of the Reconstruction Era
Around 1620, the first African slaves arrived in Virginia. Along with sugar cane, coffee, and smallpox, the colonists brought with them the institution of slavery from the Old World. To be sure, while the natives in the New World had never tasted sugar or coffee or been exposed to Old World illnesses prior to the arrival of the settlers from across the ocean, the institution of compelled servitude was common among the natives in the New World. With the introduction of almost exclusively African slaves to the New World by the colonists, however, the institution of slavery in colonial America began to take on a racial character. For nearly 250 years, slavery and racism in colonial America, and later the United States, were inextricably linked in the public eye, and blacks, in general, were relegated to the lowest class in society.
Following the brutal Civil War in which over 600,000 people died in the 1860s, America finally and legally abolished slavery with the ratification of the 13th Amendment and, with the 14th and 15th Amendments, affirmed that all men, white or black, free or recently freed, enjoy the very same unalienable rights and the right to vote. While abolition and affirmation of rights is a legal issue that can be done formally with the stroke of pen, changing the racial ethos of whites and blacks after the Civil War would prove to take much more time. In addition, the immediate change in the organization of labor from slave to free rippled through every facet of American economic, political, and social life from North to South and from East to West. It is this very scope and period of reorganization of American institutions about which Eric Foner writes in his book, Reconstruction Updated Edition: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-18. Foner explores the period of Reconstruction from almost every angle and provides the reader with a fundamental understanding of the successes and failures of Reconstruction.
Eric Foner is a professor at Columbia University and a scholar of American history ranging from the Civil War through the late 19th century. In addition to his work Reconstruction, Foner also authored The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery for which he earned both a Pulitzer and Bancroft award. Foner’s deep knowledge of this period is evident as he tells the story of Reconstruction from a multitude of viewpoints including perspectives of freedmen, black freemen, women, Republicans, Democrats, plantation owners, Northerners, Southerners, and those in power across America.
Foner concludes that Reconstruction was both a success and a failure. To the extent that slavery was abolished, and the basic natural rights espoused in the Declaration of Independence applied to all men, including freedmen, and affirmed by amendment to the Constitution, Foner contends that Reconstruction achieved a positive end. That said, Foner opines that Reconstruction was a disappointment in connection with those newly acknowledged unalienable rights of freedmen being adequately protected. Foner is critical of the 1920’s orthodox “Dunning School” of thought related to Reconstruction, in particular, which sought to justify this lack of protection of rights as necessary, because as many horrifically believed at the time including President Woodrow Wilson, blacks could not comprehend liberty and that they should be removed from the political sphere. These first historians of Reconstruction opined that, once order in the South was restored during Reconstruction, the Darwinian natural order resumed.
In reality and contrary to the paternalistic interpretation by orthodox historians, Foner concludes that freedmen would have been entirely able to care for themselves if they had been given land. Foner rationalizes that nobody can be truly free without land and the ability to care for oneself. Foner finds that this failure of Reconstruction led to the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and the final acquisition of the rights of blacks by enforcement of these rights by the federal government and contends that the failure of Reconstruction reverberates through our present-day social movements.
Still today, certain factions in American society and politics stereotype minorities and claim, for instance, that voter identification laws disproportionately affect minorities presumably because minorities are somehow less likely than white people to possess valid picture identification in America. While we have come a long way regarding the racial ethos of America, the color-blind society about which Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed is still a ways off.
