Historians disagree
Historians Disagree: Reconstruction
Why did historical accounts of Reconstruction change dramatically over the course of the twentieth century?
by Gregory P. Downs, University of California, Davis
No era has inspired more scholarly debates than Reconstruction. No one can study the histories of the period written over the past 150 years without thinking about the way historians are influenced by the world around them. The hopes that Reconstruction raised and the crushing disappointment of Jim Crow disenfranchisement in the 1890s South led historians to ask what exactly had happened during Reconstruction and why it did not last. The very first historians of Reconstruction were often participants: Black and white U.S. veterans who defended Reconstruction’s gains and castigated Southern resistance, and Confederate scholars who denounced Reconstruction as a catastrophic and misguided failure. As history developed as an academic field in the United States, that white Southern view took hold in the academy. From his post as a professor at Columbia University, William Archibald Dunning inspired a number of historical studies that portrayed Reconstruction as a vile effort by ambitious or fanatical white Northerners, who they disdainfully labeled “carpetbaggers,” to claim control over the country. According to this school of thought, these politicians duped unprepared Black Southerners into following along. What transpired was a festival of corruption, in which Southern governments squandered millions and had to turn to a tyrannical U.S. Army for support. These historians portrayed freedpeople in frankly racist ways and argued that white vigilantes like the Ku Klux Klan had noble intentions. In their hands, the speeches of white Southern Democrats—the very people who overthrew Reconstruction—were evidence of what Reconstruction had been. These histories, though, were products of Jim Crow and defenses of Jim Crow, and argued for the necessity of white supremacy.
In the early twentieth century, radical scholars, especially African Americans, began to develop a counternarrative. Influenced by Marxist ideas, W. E. B. Du Bois cast the enslaved people as a rural proletariat and emphasized Reconstruction’s goals to remake labor relations. Reconstruction therefore became a signal moment of American hope, when workers might have gained control over the forces of capital. But white laborers would not ally with their Black counterparts; they chose race over class, and the revolution was overthrown. Working on the margins of academia and with limited access to segregated archives, these scholars began to place African American voices at the center of the story.
By the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights movement helped inspire historians to rethink Reconstruction and to create space for more sympathetic portrayals. First scholars reversed the portrayals of the Dunning School. Reconstruction had not been tyrannical; it had hardly been ambitious enough. The Klan was not noble; it was a band of terrorists. And soon scholars began to look for evidence of freedpeople’s own voices and aspirations. By examining petitions from freedpeople, and by reading between the lines of the more skeptical reports from Northern Freedmen’s Bureau officials, historians interpreted freedpeople’s desperate desire for land, and particularly for the land where they had toiled and buried their families. Over the last decades of the century, historians at the University of Maryland examined vast caches of documents in the National Archives, especially in records of the the War Department and Freedmen’s Bureau, and edited documentary collections that showed freedpeople’s lives in unprecedentedly detailed ways in the letters they wrote, the petitions they sent, and the reports that local agents composed about them. While historians debated particular issues about Reconstruction—how radical were free urban African Americans, how close were the bonds between rural and urban African American networks, how much did the overthrow of Reconstruction depend on violence—for the most part they worked to expand the canvas of Reconstruction and provide new texture to the lives of freedpeople. Scholars reexamined the timeline of Reconstruction, finding patterns of freedpeople’s organizing that lasted from emancipation into the 1890s, and evidence of a long Reconstruction that was overthrown only by late nineteenth-century disfranchisement.
By the 1980s, feminist scholarship also began to reconfigure Reconstruction. Historians began to ask whether freedom for freedmen resembled freedom for freedwomen. Particularly they began to reexamine the thousands of marriages codified in the aftermath of emancipation, marriages once portrayed as triumphs of freedom. With a clearer eye to the patriarchal nature of nineteenth-century marriage, scholars examined Freedmen’s Bureau and local court records to show the coercions within some of these marriages. Freedom no longer seemed a stable or even uniformly positive category.
Perhaps the most significant transformation of historical thinking about Reconstruction in the twenty-first century has been the expansion of its geographical boundaries. Scholars working on Western, Native American, and Asian American history have asked whether the patterns of racial exclusion and state development in the U.S. West after the Civil War shared common features with Reconstruction. Books now increasingly compare the changes in Native American policy under President Grant, the growth of Chinese exclusion in the 1870s West, the expansion of federal control over immigration, and the crackdown on labor after the 1877 Great Strike as part of a Greater Reconstruction. And in keeping with a moment when global interconnections shape current discourse, scholars have begun the work of expanding beyond the nation’s boundaries to trace the routes of Reconstruction agents, soldiers, and missionaries in carrying a U.S. “civilizing” mission to the world.
Additional Reading
Edward L. Ayers, The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017).
Gregory P. Downs, After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur, eds., The World the Civil War Made (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (New York: Free Press, 1998).
Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990).
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (New York: Penguin Books, 2020).
Kidada E. Williams, I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023).