1877: America's Year of Living Violently

Michael A. Bellisiles. 1877: America's Year of Living Violently. New York: The New Press, 2010.

Ten years after the publication of his controversial Arming America, Michael A. Bellesiles returned to the public eye with a much less contentious account of what most historians would agree was indeed an exceptionally violent and unsettled year in American history. Eight years after its appearance, none of the controversy over sources and integrity which rightly plagued the reputation of his previous book have arisen. This is a solid, well-supported account of a very bad time in American history.

The book is organized thematically, framed by brief vignettes from the beginning and end of the year. Each chapter covers a particular issue or event--the aftermath of the contested 1876 Presidential election, which led to increased sectional and partisan tensions which many thought would lead to another civil war; the violent re-imposition of white supremacy in the former Confederacy; military actions against Western Indian tribes and Mexican-American citizens; the violent suppression of the labor movement and Women's suffrage; and the increase in homicide and the prevalence of guns in the civilian population.

Bellesiles, doesn't cover much new ground, but he does tie together many different events through extensive research of contemporary newspaper coverage, creating a convincing picture of an overarching national conversation about--and anxiety over--violence overtaking the nation and society. Each chapter is a well-written summary of an important facet of the story, but the book gathers its strength from the overall effect of a year which most Americans were happy to see the end of, but which also shaped much of the social, legal, political, and economic inequalities which marked the next several decades of American history.

The Romance of Reunion

Nina Silber. The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

The story of Reconstruction, the Redemption of white rule, and the eventual "reunion" of the Northern and Southern whites a few decades after the end of the Civil War--at the expense of African-Americans, who were pointedly "written out" of the national narrative--is frequently told from the Southern point of view. It was the defeated former Confederacy which had to reckon with the specter of defeat, the unsettling of old racial caste norms, the newly enfranchised African-American vote, the attitude of victorious Northerners, and the prospect of having to redefine their place in the very country they fought four years to dismember.

Silber looks at the story from the perspective of the white North. She finds that in many ways, this is actually a gender history--Northerners, as she points out, had their own anxieties and fears to work out, and they did so partly by casting the South as a feminine contrast to their own presumed masculine mastery and strength.

At the same time, white Northern attitudes towards freedmen would shift along with anxieties about working class agitation and concerns about increased levels of immigration--the notion that Southern whites might understand "the Negro problem" best allowed Northerners both to cease worrying about the consequences of abandoning Reconstruction and it promises, and to allow Southern whites a subsidiary but respectable role in enforcing social and political harmony in "their" section of the country.

Ben Tillman & The Reconstruction of White Supremacy

Stephen Kantrowitz. Ben Tillman & the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Ben Tillman was a key political figure in South Carolina from late Reconstruction through the early Progressive Era. Beginning as a terrorist opposing Reconstruction rule and Black political participation, he parlayed his early prominence as an unapologetic leader of the "Red Shirt" militias into a long career as a Democratic Party operative, Governor, and finally several terms in the US Senate. Well known as one of the leading figures in the campaign to restore white supremacy and create the Jim Crow state, "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman proudly and shrewdly deployed his propensity for violence both rhetorical and physical to back him his national image as a crude but determined representative of the common (white) man.

Kantrowitz approaches Tillman's career from two vantage points. On the one hand, he considers the ways in which Tillman and his supporters conceptualized "whiteness". Tillman applied both racial and gendered facets to his conception of what made a truly "White" man. Tillman based his notion of whiteness on a Jeffersonian producerist idealization of the independent white farmer.

This played into the second facet of Tillman's life--his frequent rhetorical flirtations with radicalism and agrarian populism. Many observers at the time assumed Tillman was a Populist and even a Progressive (early in his career he promoted agricultural reform and education), and many historians and biographers since have followed suit. But Kantrowitz points out that Tillman himself was actually a substantial landowner (and the son of a planter) rather than one of the simple farmers he claimed to champion. More importantly, his commitment to agrarian reform and Progressive measures was severely limited by his primary commitment--to white supremhacy as he understood it. Maintaining the latter meant often sacrificing the best interests of many common whites, for fear of empowering or allowing a political opening to African-Americans.

In the end, Tillman's brand of white supremacy could only be maintained at a heavy cost--a willingness to engage in violence against both Blacks and Whites who failed to adhere to rigidly defined social roles would be coupled with a serious undermining of democratic participation, and economic stagnation. Tillman died feeling pessimistic that his system could survive. He was right, but it would take several more decades and much more suffering before his toxic legacy of a politically and legally enforced formal caste system would be undone.

Reconstruction as a Process of Statist Freedom

Gregory P. Downs. After Apomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.

It has been several decades since historians began the long process of redeeming the memory of Reconstruction from the dustbin the era had been consigned to by the Dunning school and subsequent scholars. It is no longer unthinkable, perhaps not even all that controversial, to argue that the era was marked by a noble, if ultimately limited and in many ways failed, experiment in expanding freedom. Reconstruction is no longer seen as a period of corruption and misrule imposed upon a defeated white Southern population, but rather as the first Civil Rights movement in American history.

But according to Downs, an important aspect of Reconstruction has been left out of the picture--the role of the military. While most historians of the period recognize there was such as thing as "military reconstruction" that understanding largely focuses on the role of the army in specific policing actions,and as the byproduct of a period in which the Federal government struggled to create new civic institutions and to populate political positions in the former Confederacy. Downs argues that the army played a much more central and proactive role in the period. This was made possible by an important fact that most histories get wrong--the Civil War did not end at Appomattox; in fact, it did not for several years after Lee surrendered to Grant. The lack of open warfare between formal armies, and the vanquishing of the Confederacy as a functioning polity meant the end of large-scale combat, but a formal, legal state of war existed until 1868 in most former CSA states, and until 1871 in a few others, finishing in Georgia. Until States were readmitted into the Union--under conditions imposed on them--and their elected representatives were seated in Congress, Republicans would insist that a state of war existed.

This didn't merely give the army an increased role in the enforcement of civil law--it some cases it meant that the army created law, and acted as the final arbiter of legal and judicial authority. In essence, the fact of martial law created the space for Republicans--both Radical and moderates, and even many conservatives--to rally together and take steps which in peacetime would have been impossible. The conditions of war allowed Republicans intent on stamping out white Southern insurgency and defending African-American (and white Republican) lives to go beyond the limits of the Constitution. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were passed under circumstances which would not have passed Constitutional muster in normal times.

But Republicans and many in the army argued that as Reconstruction was not a normal time, they had both the opportunity and the obligation to go beyond the legal powers of the Constitution in order to save their conception of how it should work. In the Introduction, Downs writes "Constitutional protections that we still take for granted--due process, equal protection, birthright citizenship, the vote--were by-products of martial law." (2) The state of war gave Republicans the extra-legal space in which to expand the definition of citizenship and rights beyond all Antebellum norms. The presence of the army gave force to these experiments--it also gave physical, tangible support to freedmen's collective aspirations and bold experiments in building civic institutions and political organizations in the shadows of their former masters and the white society which had kept them enslaved prior to the arrival of liberating soldiers.

The experience of relying on the army to defend and support efforts and asserting political and economic freedom in the face of stiff and violent resistance meant that African-Americans in the South came to understand the role of government as being a defender of freedom and the basis of its implementation. This statist conception of liberty was completely at odds with the libertarian notion of the importance of freedom from government which was the ideological basis of the Democratic Party which would lead the assault on the political, social, and economic gains created during Reconstruction.

Downs admits that there are hard questions to consider in this story. The gains of Reconstruction were made through a temporary cession of full Constitutional supremacy. At the same time, recognizing that those gains were significant (if often tenuous and ephemeral) forces the reader to consider the degree to which rights are the product not just of abstract law, but of the plain fact of force and the willingness to use it.

The Democratic Party and the Negro

Lawrence Grossman. The Democratic Party and the Negro: Northern and National Politics, 1868-1892. University of Illinois Press, 1976.

The years between the end of the Johnson Administration and the second election of Grover Cleveland was a time of experimentation and attempted realignment by African-Americans within the two party electoral system. The Republican Party began the era with the solid support of the Black electorate, while the Democratic Party was largely defined by the unabashed white supremacy of the southern wing. However, important shifts in policy and regional party affiliations. For awhile, some Black political leaders were able to advocate a more independent stance by African-American voters as a significant minority--largely in north--were willing to consider switching parties to the Democratic column.

This was possible in the wake of the "new departure", a Democratic policy of explicit acceptance of the new constitutional order imposed by Reconstruction, backed by the implicit understanding that a staunch commitment to state's rights meant that enforcement of formal legal protections could be quietly dropped. Yet, as cynical as this policy was (and ultimately successful), for much of the period covered by this book it allowed for both African-American voters to rethink political alliances, and for Northern Democrats to opt to reject, and sometimes even overtly challenge, racist political rhetoric and policies.

While never more than a minority movement in the North, and proportionately even less important in the South, black political leaders found that they had real leverage within the northern Democracy, possibly peaking during the first Cleveland administration.

However, the corollary of the "new departure"--that northern Democrats would prioritize state's rights over civil rights--eventually triumphed. The political strength that African-Americans had seemingly discovered proved largely ephemeral; the end result of splitting the black vote allowed racists within the Democratic Party to reassert their hegemony over northern Democrats as fading Republican commitment to civil rights acceded to the developing social Darwinist ideology of racial hierarchy, as well as as a bipartisan agreement to leave Southern race relations in the hands of state authorities.