Reconstruction and Its Afterlife, Pt. 1

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Manisha Sinha about Reconstruction and the interconnectedness of social movements between the beginning of the Civil War in 1860 and the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920.  The interview is split into two parts.  Part two will be released in two weeks.  You can now click on the “Send us a Text Message” link at the top of the episode description to share your thoughts on the episode.  This episode's prompt: Do you think the history presented by Manisha is relevant to current political and social struggles in the U.S.? If so, how? 

Dr. Manisha Sinha is a history professor at the University of Connecticut. She is the author and co-author of several books, including The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (2016) and The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920, published this year. In part one, Manisha explains why it’s important to expand the chronology of Reconstruction to include labor struggles in the North, wars against Indigenous people, and the struggle for female suffrage; how Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens interpreted the Constitution, fought for the Reconstruct Ammenendemts, and grappled with President Johnson; and how workers in the South and North struggled for rights during the Gilded Age.

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Transcript

Luke: Hi, Manisha. Thank you for joining us. We'll launch right into the questions about Reconstruction and we'll start our conversation for today. You expand the temporal and also geographic parameters of Reconstruction, and you take it from 1860, starting it maybe about five or six years earlier than most folks start it, and then all the way up to 1920. Why do you start the history a little earlier and take it a little farther.

Manisha Sinha: Sure. Thanks for having me, Luke. So one of the reasons I sort of expanded the chronology of Reconstruction is because we normally think of Reconstruction in U. S. history textbooks as just that brief period immediately after the Civil War, right? The Civil War ends 1865. There's an attempt to establish Black citizenship and interracial democracy in the South, and by 1877, the last Reconstruction governments in the South have fallen, and that's the end of this very brief period.

So it really doesn't register in most people's historical imagination. It's like a blip in U. S. history, and I thought in order to really spell out the significance of that attempt one needed to expand the chronology of Reconstruction, look at the way it arises during the Civil War itself. The attempt to reconstruct American democracy and to really pay attention to that period after 1877 because even though Reconstruction governments are overthrown, many of the achievements of Reconstruction are not completely done away with until the 1890s and until you have the formal rise of Jim Crow and legal disenfranchisement of Black men in the South.

I really wanted to trace that broader story and once you do that, I think you have a better sense of the historical significance of Reconstruction. Not just its brief triumph, but that long unwinding of Reconstruction that shows us how American democracy can falter and can be challenged by reactionary forces that have an influence even beyond the South.

I wanted to trace that broader story. I also call this period the Second American Republic. I think 1860 is when you see the first American Republic being destroyed with the election of Lincoln and the refusal of the Deep South states to accept the results of that presidential election (sounds familiar) and to actually break up the Republic, leave the Union, and form a new slave nation rather than accept those results.

That's the reason why I have this expanded chronology of Reconstruction, to really understand its roots and its significance.

Luke: Your book introduces other new terms as well. Take, for example, Presidential Reconstruction. Well, there was a different type of Reconstruction (if one can even call Johnson's activities Reconstruction) going on. 

Manisha Sinha: I do because I don't see Johnson’s policies as Presidential Reconstruction, which is the conventional way it has been portrayed in history textbooks. I see Congressional Reconstruction as the Radical Reconstruction. And I said, if anyone had attempted a kind of Presidential Reconstruction, then it was really Abraham Lincoln, both with his wartime plans and then immediately after the war with, the passage of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that inaugurates constitutional change during this period and, with the establishment of the Freedmen's Bureau, is really the first federal government agency to even attempt what we would call today's social democracy. And so it was important for me to distinguish Lincoln's plans, his presidential and wartime Reconstruction plans, with that of Johnson's, which is really more of a restoration of the status quo ante bellum, before the war.

He was a unionist, and that's how he wins a place on the ticket in1864 on the Republican presidential ticket. But he was always opposed to emancipation and Black rights. That was something pretty consistent with Johnson. He's always seen as a poor white, but actually he was a slaveholder and he had owned at least five enslaved people. There are a lot of misconceptions about Johnson, and I think his plans that encouraged the rise of Black Codes in the South and sought to put free people to as close a state to slavery as possible, were really a repudiation of the results of the War. In that sense I call his policies restoration. That’s not original to me; the person who first said it actually was Thaddeus Stevens. He said this to include many of Johnson's policies including his return of lands that had been redistributed amongst freed people during the war by the Freedmen's Bureau. The distribution of abandoned lands and confiscated lands for non-payment of taxes - all that he gives back, to the planters, to former enslavers. In many respects, his policies were a real attempt to restore the South's old order.

Luke: Thaddeus Stevens is a really fascinating character. A lot of the Radical Republicans are fascinating. I've always been curious about how the U.S. Constitution fits into this particular period. It's newer in time, you know, to the folks living in 1860 than it is to us now, and I suppose it sets rules for what this relatively new country can do, if folks are even really thinking of it. Folks are saying a lot of things, a lot of powerful things that involve the Constitution. William Lloyd Garrison famously calls it a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. In1854, Frederick Douglass sees some redeeming qualities within the Constitution. Thaddeus Stevens says that “the whole of sovereignty, should rest with the people, and it should be exercised through their representatives and Congress assembled. No other branch of the government possesses one single particle of the sovereignty of the nation.” And then of course Eric Foner brings in some other things, as does W. B. Du Bois. How do you see the Constitution in this period?

Manisha Sinha: That's a great question. One of the reasons why I call Reconstruction the period of the Second American Republic is because of these vast constitutional changes that take place during Reconstruction. I mean, it really unleashes the forces of progressive constitutionalism. I model it after the history of French republicanism.

Now, the French had many different constitutions. The United States hasn't had different constitutions, but it did pass rapidly during Reconstruction the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments that really remade it and reimagined it. I think it's important to recognize that.

As you said, earlier before the Civil War, there were many abolitionists. I wrote a book on abolition before I wrote this book, and one of the reasons I wrote this book was to really see what happens to the abolitionist project with Civil War and emancipation. The debate amongst the Garrisonians whose policy was no union with slaveholders did not necessarily make them disunionists and secessionists the way southern slaveholders were. They were really asking for a fundamental remaking of the American Republic. 

Garrison gets his “covenant with death, agreement with hell” from the book of Isaiah. He was not particularly biblical in his religiosity, even though he was pretty spiritual. He gets that actually from Black abolitionists who had used those terms, people like James W. C. Pennington, a minister who had used those terms to describe the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution. Garrison just kind of expands it to the entire Constitution.

What's interesting is that even though Douglas is a Garrisonian and then becomes a political abolitionist, he argues rightfully that if the Constitution is interpreted differently it could be used for abolition purposes. And in a way, they were both right, because what was the Civil War if not a covenant with death? Douglas is right because the only way to have emancipation is through state action, which is the 13th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. Garrison kind of changes his position once the slaveholders leave because his slogan of no union with slaveholders has finally come to pass, and that is what actually gives us room for the passage of some of the most progressive legislation and constitutional amendments in U. S. history. Once this reactionary body of people leave the Union and literally leave Congress, you can pass these amendments to the U.S. Constitution. During Reconstruction, you could make it a condition for souther states to accept the 14th Amendment before being allowed back into the Union. 

By that time, Garrison is far more supportive of the Republican party of Lincoln and of the U.S. Constitution than many of the erstwhile political abolitionists who sometimes flirt with more radical options. Garrison is like, no, if you do that, then we are playing into the hands of southern slaveholders and their democratic allies. I think it's really important to look at those constitutional changes. Eric Foner, whom you mentioned and who of course was my mentor in graduate school, calls it the Second Founding of the American Republic. I call it the Second American Republic. 

The reason we do is because the Reconstruction Amendments, especially the 14th amendment, really do breathe a new conception of citizenship and national government into the constitution it's broad egalitarian language. Indeed, in our times it has been used to establish the right to privacy in Roe v. Wade, which of course has now been overturned by a Supreme Court (which is behaving a lot like the Supreme Court did in the late 19th century in emasculating the federal civil rights laws and constitutional amendments). There are a whole lot of other rights that stem from the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution in the 14th Amendment. If the Reconstruction Amendments were actually implemented, I think American democracy would be a lot safer now.

For instance, any state that indulges in voter suppression should suffer a reduction in representation in Congress - that was never implemented for the Jim Crow South, and it is not being implemented today. Or, the federal debt and the full faith and credit of the United States must be respected so that people can't hold the government hostage over debt ceilings. Or, if you have sworn an oath of office to the United States government and the Constitution, and then indulged in, participated in, or incited an insurrection against the government of the United States, you’re not eligible to stand for office unless you are pardoned by two-thirds of Congress. All those, sections of the 14th amendment, I think if we implement them today, our democracy would be a lot safer than it is.

These three amendments really introduce introduced the idea that you could use the Constitution and constitutional amendments to expand rights. This idea is a central tenet of American democracy. We didn't think until recently that rights can go backwards. Clearly that happened in the aftermath of Reconstruction. We see that happening again today with a very right wing Supreme Court and very partisan judges who don't make a pretense of hiding their partisanship.

The Reconstruction constitutional amendments are really important and they are a gift that keeps giving if we choose to accept them, as one of the main writers of the 14th amendment, John Bingham, said. We tend to poo poo these things as kind of bourgeois political and civil rights, but look at how contested these are even today.

Luke: Two things popped into my head. First, I’m used to SCOTUS playing. Big role in politics. It seems like they review every big legislative decision. The Supreme Court, though, is largely absent for many years while Stevens and the Radical Reconstructions are duking it out. Then, SCOTUS comes in and starts to turn things back. Second, it seems strange to have a strong federal government. The carving up of states into military districts, legislators deciding what's going to happen and then doing it - all those things stand out.

Manisha Sinha: That's a great question again. You're right during Reconstruction, Roger Taney, he's kind of a hobble Chief Justice after Dred Scott; people just ignore him, and then he dies, and Stephen says he's gone to everlasting fire. The new Chief Justice is Solomon Chase, who was a radical Republican and a Secretary of Treasury under Lincoln.

Chase becomes a compromised figure in the end because of his overbearing ambition, and he doesn't play a very good role in the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. But as a whole, you're right, the Supreme Court under Chase is not, you know, interfering in the process of Reconstruction. This idea of judicial review - that the Supreme Court has the right to review laws, especially federal laws and see whether they're constitutional or not - it's not really there in the Constitution, but it's a precedent that is established by Marshall.

In the 19th century, the Supreme Court was not very independent. You had judges, you know, like Chase himself and others who wanted to run for the presidency. Today we have the concept of an independent judiciary as an independent branch of the federal government.

But if you look at U. S. history, The Supreme Court as a whole has played a pretty reactionary role in interpreting the Constitution in the narrowest way possible, or in trying to stymie changes, even when it has come in the form of constitutional amendments like the Reconstruction amendments. As a whole, the judiciary in the United States has not played a very progressive role in the history of American democracy, and it seems they're back in form today. There was a complaint that the Court was very “activist” in the Civil Rights era with Brown v. Board of Education and the passage of all the Civil Rights laws, but actually those laws were simply implementing the constitutional changes that had happened nearly a hundred years ago during Reconstruction, so they were hardly being activists as such.

The activism that we see is really from these right wing judges. You see this in the unraveling of Reconstruction. From 1873 onwards with the Slaughterhouse Cases, the Supreme Court is trying to literally turn back the constitutional changes that have taken place under Reconstruction, the expansion of parts of the federal government. The 14th amendment in message, and other federal civil rights laws and enforcement acts, are supposed to protect against domestic terrorism in the South.

Reconstruction wasn’t military rule. It was overthrowing southern law. It was trying to establish literally the rule of law in the South because there was open season on freed people and their white allies whether they were identified with the Union or the Republican Party or the federal government in any way.

The reason why those military districts are established under the Reconstruction Acts is to make sure you have fair and peaceful elections that allow Black men to vote, and that you have no political violence in the process of voting. The Southerners went crazy, especially elite Southerners went crazy with this idea of bayonet rule and military rule.

Really that period is fairly easy. By 1870, nearly all the southern states have reconstructed state governments with interracial democracy and with Black citizenship and office holding, which is a remarkable thing to happen immediately in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery. 

The Supreme Court roles this back. There are some exceptions in between where they sort of uphold certain Reconstruction rights. But on the whole, the trajectory is downwards and they are constantly overturning and emasculating Civil Rights laws and Reconstruction Amendments. Then by the 1890s, they green light Jim Crow and legal segregation. They green light the legal disenfranchisement of Black men through various political tricks and legal chicanery to get around the 15th amendment.

The horrifying thing is that SCOUTS uses the 14th amendment which was meant to protect the rights of Black people. The use the Amendment to protect the rights of railroads and corporations, and against workers or any regulation state regulation of the economy and these corporations. SCOTUS plays a very sorry role in the history of the unwinding of Reconstruction.

The Supreme Court seems to be very much aware of that history and instead of repudiating Dred Scott or Plessy versus Ferguson, they seem to be going backwards with decisions emasculating the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in Shelby versus Holder or Citizens United that allows a flood of money as Speech.

The judiciary has turned out to be not independent. It has turned out not to uphold the Constitution. It has ended up (at least today) taking reactionary positions very much out of the mainstream of American democracy and our notions of citizenship and rights. Just as FDR stood up to a very reactionary court during the New Deal, we need other branches of government to review, investigate, and open cases of wrongdoing. Justices of the highest court of the land should not be involved in plots to overthrow the United States government. Stevens was right: the sovereignty of the people does reside in Congress.

The one charge that the United States Constitution gives to Congress is to assure a Republican form of government in each state; that is the constitutional reasoning that was used for Reconstruction and for establishing the Reconstruction governments in the South. There are many sleeping giants in the United States constitution that have not been used because the Supreme Court has (in bad faith) simply interpreted them away.

Luke: Your discussion of Reconstruction is expansive and goes up to 1920. It includes three particularly important periods in U.S. history: the wars on Native American, labor struggles, and female suffrage struggles. The former Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard, who was the person who ordered the first shot of of the Civil War at Fort Sumter, later led the Louisiana State Militia against striking sugar cane cutters in 1887 who had joined the Knights of Labor. You also quote a radical Republican, Wendell Phillips, who about 10 years earlier said that “equally out of place and absurd is the argument that capital will pay only what it pleases and labor must submit.” How did Radical Republicans support a burgeoning labor movement? How did the counter revolution against Reconstruction harm the labor movement? How did this labor movement, especially in the North, came into the picture.

Manisha Sinha: The books aims to show how the unwinding of Reconstruction results in this kind of reaction, a kind of Thermidor, that affects the entire country. I really did want to look at the takeoff of industrial capitalism in the United States after 1870.

It's roughly the period 1870 to 1920 when the United States replaces Britain as the leading industrial capitalist country in the world. You have this enormous influx of immigrant labor from Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia and from Latin America and Mexico in the West. Many of them are contract laborers and and work in very dismal conditions. Labor itself suffers deskilling in the North with the rise of the war factory system and the rise of railroads. You think of some of the worst abusers of capitalism. All this is connected with the retreat of Reconstruction.

You see this in the transformation of the Republican Party itself from the party of anti-slavery to the party of big business. There was a faction within the Republican Party called the liberal Republicans (not liberal as we understand it). They were classical laissez-faire liberals who opposed government intervention in the economy or society anyway. They formed a separate party and even put up a separate candidate to challenge Grant for his second term. They faded out as a party. But ironically, they take over the Republican Party and their idea that somehow any government intervention is wrong - whether it is for former slaves, labor, immigrants, women - becomes kind of sacrosanct. It's what we call political conservatism. The Union Army troops, instead of being used to enforce Black rights, are being used to fire at strikers and break up labor movements.

I really do think that the unwinding of Reconstruction is linked to this. Sometimes the characters are the same. However, even some of the radicals like Wendell Phillips, who was an abolitionist, become supporters of the labor movement. you know, it's, it's really important to see those connections, and that's why I think It's not enough to say, oh, you had Reconstruction, and you have the Gilded Age. A sort of reactionary atmosphere, anti big government rhetoric comes to dominate the United States. Sometimes, Northern capitalists and elites are even learning to disfranchise immigrant workers with some of these new literacy clauses, et cetera. So, all these things are connected in my view. 

I also look at the Indian wars - better known as wars against Indians in the West, which is the last stronghold of native sovereignty, in North America. Many Western and Native American historians have seen this as the Reconstruction of the West, which is the same as the Reconstruction of the South in a greater Reconstruction.

But I disagree with that premise. I argue that really we should look at the conquest of the West not as an extension of the Civil War. In fact, I see them as colonial wars; that is, they subjugated and denied sovereignty to native nations and dispossessed them of their land. They forcibly assimilate them. There was immense brutality: massacres of villages, women and children. No code is being implemented in the wars against Native Americans.

This sort of conquest - this colonial conquest - of these nations in the West is a springboard for the rise of a formal overseas American empire. So you can see the rise of American imperialism, in the Pacific. The U.S. annexes Hawaii, colonizes the Philippines, and exercises the right to intervene in Cuba to protect its own economic and strategic interests. All this is based on the Southern notion that certain people, and certainly people of color, are not fit to rule. They're not fit for self government. They're not fit for citizenship. The Supreme court also declares that these territories - Puerto Rico, the Philippines - do not have to follow the 14th amendment. They lie outside the protections of the U.S. Constitution, the same way Native nations have citizenship nor sovereignty. They're kind of a no man's land of colonial plenary power ruled by the United States government. I end the book with the rise of empire of American imperialism. 

Lastly, I did want to tell the story of women's suffrage, because I see the history of Reconstruction also as women's history. It's not normally seen in that manner, but really the suffrage movement takes off during Reconstruction in debates over the 14th and 15th Amendments, and the fact that the suffrage movement gets divided over the issue of race. This is one of the unfortunate legacies of American feminism, and it's not until you have the rise of social feminists later on that the momentum for the 19th Amendment. 

The 19th Amendment is normally seen as a progressive era constitutional amendment. I call it the last Reconstruction amendment because it's wording is very similar to the 15th amendment that gave Black men the right to vote. It's based on this notion that you can use constitutional amendments to expand rights and to expand the franchise, which is a very Reconstruction idea.

 Of course, suffrage comes in the aftermath and in the downfall of Reconstruction. So Black women, for instance, in the South, even though they try to vote after the passage of the 19th Amendment, are still denied the right to vote. It's not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that all women have the right to vote in this country. The suffragette movement makes its own expedient compromises with Southern white women, with segregationist locals, with racism, with sidelining Black women's concerns about racial violence and segregation. That is also a burden for the feminist movement of the United F

For me, it's never entirely one thing or the other. It's never just like glass half full or glass half empty. I think we really need to look at both. So I wouldn't poo poo the passage of the 19th Amendment. I still think it was an important moment in the expansion of American democracy, but because it comes about in the fall of Reconstruction, like many other progressive movements, the labor movement, populism, the the, other, other movements at this time that are progressive, are all really handicapped by the fall of Reconstruction because racism remains an Achilles heel for American democracy. It also remains a weakness for the left, and so I think we need to be mindful of some of those pitfalls today.