<br>(Michael Hogue/Dallas Morning News)

The era in United States history known as Reconstruction forms a sort of coda to the traumatic years of the American Civil War of 1861-1865. It also the ugly duckling of American history.

The 12 years that are the conventional designation of the Reconstruction period, from 1865 to 1877, teem with associations and developments which seem regrettable, if not simply baleful. First, it left a long legacy of bitterness, especially among Southerners who believed that they had fought an honorable war and were handed a dishonorable peace, as well as Southerners who refused to accept defeat and manufactured the myth of a glorious “Lost Cause” to justify themselves.

Second, the era aspired to be a capitalist revolution, expected to triumph as effortlessly as the capitalist notions of progress had promised. Unhappily, it also coincided with an eruption of unprecedented levels of graft, corruption and fraud in American civil governments, not the least in the ones erected by federal force in the former rebel states, so that the pouring of Northern capital into post-war Southern development became tainted as “carpetbagger” graft.

But Reconstruction is probably best-known, and least-liked, as the bobbling away of the greatest opportunity Americans ever had to erase the treacherous impact of slavery and race in a reconstructed and unified nation.

That Reconstruction fell short of fully implementing most of its aims is an American tragedy, and that tragedy can be laid briefly and bluntly to the account of six factors: the sheer unpreparedness of the victorious Union to undertake something as unprecedented as a political reconstruction of a third of its territory, the insurgent resistance of the defeated South, the unwillingness to prolong a military occupation to deal with that insurgency, the deaths and removal of the Radical Republican leadership (starting with Lincoln), the resurgence of the Northern Democrats, and, finally, the short-sighted decisions of the federal courts.

It is easy, however, to overlook four important ways in which Reconstruction actually succeeded:

1.      Reconstruction restored a federal Union, for which the North had been fighting from the start, and corrected the centrifugal forces of American politics that had brought on the war in the first place. It achieved the political reunion of the rebellious South with the rest of the nation, and did so with the basic shape of constitutional federalism reasonably intact and the chief object of the war — the elimination of legalized slavery — put beyond challenge.

2.      Reconstruction followed the route of generosity. It created no conquered provinces, no mass executions for treason. All this was accomplished without resorting to the grimmer, retaliatory strategies of treason trials or military tribunals, and even more to the point, without triggering a renewed civil war.

As Walt Whitman wrote, almost in self-congratulation, Reconstruction “has been paralleled nowhere in the world — in any other country on the globe the whole batch of the Confederate leaders would have had their heads cut off.” Ironically, most of the violence that pockmarked Reconstruction was inflicted on the victors, not the vanquished, by insurgent militias like the Ku Klux Klan.

3.      The freedpeople made only modest economic gains in moving out of the shadow of slavery into freedom and self-ownership. Nevertheless, black landownership not only became a reality, but increased from just 2.2 percent of Southern blacks in 1870 to 24 percent by 1910. Literacy rates rose over the same years from 20 percent to 69 percent.

None of this was spread evenly: in the coastal plains and the mountains, 45 percent of Southern blacks owned their own land; in the Mississippi Valley and the so-called Black Belt of northern Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas, only 8 percent of blacks owned their own land. In South Carolina, more than 75 percent of the lower Piedmont’s 24,000 tenant farmers were black, fully half of them sharecroppers by 1900.

But it was still not slavery, and it actually outstripped the condition of freed slaves and serfs in Brazil, Jamaica and Russia. There were beachheads for black Southerners all across the South in terms of property ownership which would form the soil out of which the Civil Rights movement would flourish 80 years later.

4.      In the same fashion, Reconstruction established beyond recall the legal equality of all Americans under the banner of citizenship. Much of that equality was compromised by racial  prejudice, vigilante violence and the twisting of law. The tidal return of white Democratic rule to the South by 1877 allowed the disfranchisement of black Southerners through the imposition of literacy tests, poll taxes, physical segregation, property requirements and sheer intimidation.

It was a surprisingly slow, incremental process. There were nine black legislators in South Carolina in 1882, and 11 in Mississippi; as late as 1890, there were 18 blacks in the Louisiana legislature. And Republicans in Virginia and North Carolina staged brief resurgences through alliances with poor white farmers in the 1880s and 1890s. But after the turn of the century, only 1,300 blacks in Louisiana were managing to vote, and only 3,000 in Alabama and 5,000 in Texas.

But black politics was not extinguished, and the Reconstruction-era amendments to the Constitution (13th, 14th and 15th) have together formed the last on which injustice, racial prejudice, and inequality have repeatedly been hammered down.

Not everything that should have been gained was gained in Reconstruction; but not everything was lost, either.

(Michael Hogue/Dallas Morning News)

The end of Reconstruction is often spoken of in monolithic terms, as a collapse of white Americans’ nerve, or as a failure of Republican political will, when in cold truth, Reconstruction did not fail so much as it was overthrown. Southern whites played the most obvious role in this overthrow, but they would never have succeeded without the consent of the Northern Democrats, who had never been in favor of an equitable Reconstruction, much less a capitalist one. The ability of the Democratic party to rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of near self-destruction in 1860 to reconquer the House of Representatives in 1874, the Senate in 1878, and the presidency in 1884, is one of the least considered aspects of Reconstruction’s demise.

It particular, Democrats made it impossible to sustain the military force which an extended and successful Reconstruction would have required. As it was, the actual strength of the U.S. Army had decreased dramatically since the last shots of the war were fired. The combined strength of the regular and volunteer forces had fallen between April 1865 and January 1866, from over 1 million men to just 90,000. Those who did remain were unenthusiastic about occupation duties.

By July, 1871, the Army’s strength stood at only 30,000, with most of those posted to the Western frontier; only 4,300 soldiers were on duty in posts in the South, and even then, mostly in major port or railroad cities. Even that minuscule deployment did nothing to quell paranoia about “military rule,” and in 1878, House Democrats would ban the use of  “any part of the Army of the United States, as a posse comitatus” in most domestic cases.

But the good fight of Reconstruction was not overthrown entirely. Post-reconstruction Republican presidents continued to appoint attorneys general who prosecuted voting rights violations, and for another generation after 1877, the struggles for black civil rights continued, albeit sporadically. Union army veterans organized the first racially integrated national society, the Grand Army of the Republic, and criticized the government’s failure to give what was “promised to our colored brethren, ‘forty acres and a mule.'”

Republican administrations used the patronage they possessed for appointments of black Republicans to federal postmasterships and customs houses (especially along the long line of Southern coastal cities). Senate Republicans made valiant attempts to absorb equal funding for schools into the federal budget, only to have them beaten back by House Democrats, and in 1890, Massachusetts Republican Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge’s elections bill (to provide federal oversight for mostly Southern elections) died a slow death, this time in the Senate.

Merely to call Reconstruction a failure is a judgment which is easy to make from an easy chair. Many of the same hesitations over costs, internecine politics, and xenophobia led to dreary repetitions of these mistakes after the first World War and after the two Gulf Wars. In neither of those cases would anything but lengthy and expensive occupations have sufficed to reinvent regimes that began conspiring to reverse battlefield defeat before the guns were hardly cool; in neither case was enough of the country willing to use the force necessary to accompany liberation.

“Looking back over the whole policy of reconstruction, it seems to me that the wisest thing would have been to have continued for some time the military rule,” said Ulysses S. Grant. He was surely right, but right will not stand as right if realizing it comes too late.

“I wonder if our white fellow-men realize the true sense or meaning of brotherhood?” demanded Susie King Taylor, a slave-born teacher and military nurse, “Was the war in vain? Has it brought freedom, in the full sense of the word, or has it not made our condition more hopeless.” A century and a half later, her question still echoes horribly.

Allen C. Guelzo is a professor and Director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College. This column is an excerpt from his new book, Reconstruction: A Concise History, published in 2018 by Oxford University Press and prepared for The Dallas Morning News.