I was recently doing some reading on Reconstruction and I happened upon a book review by Jean Edward Smith of Eric Foner's Forever Free in the CRB. The review had some real zingers, which I thought I would share:The Civil War was not a war between the states and certainly not a war between sovereign nations. It was a treasonous rebellion mounted by the governments in eleven Southern states for the primary purpose of protecting slavery. It was suppressed by the United States Army after four years of bloody conflict. The bravery of those Confederate soldiers who fought to perpetuate the cause of slavery should not be disparaged. But it is for good reason that the rebel dead are not interred in cemeteries maintained by the United States.
Ouch! But I'm inclined to agree. Works like Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens' Cornerstone Speech demonstrate rather unambiguously that the war was about slavery from day one. Indeed, Smith notes that "today, to reject slavery as the Civil War's root cause is akin to denying the Holocaust." He's right; no serious historian would do either.
In an eloquent epilogue titled "the Unfinished Revolution," Foner charts the progress made during the civil rights era, which he calls the Second Reconstruction, and in the half-century since. He pays just tribute to Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and alludes to John Kennedy's use of federal power to enforce integration at Ole Miss in 1962. He neglects President Eisenhower's more decisive action five years earlier when he ordered the 101st Airborne Division into Little Rock, Arkansas, to compel compliance with a court order desegregating Central High. Although Eisenhower believed that the Supreme Court's original decision in Brown v. Board of Education was wrong, he took his Article II responsibility to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" at face value. No focus groups were convened and no opinion polls were taken even though it was a presidential election year. Eisenhower responded instantly with overwhelming force to prevent mob rule. Had he not done so, desegregation in the South would have been set back at least a decade.
Eisenhower is one of the more underrated presidents and one I am increasingly coming to admire.
Among other things, [Foner's] ideological preconceptions keep him from recognizing the role of athletics and the large national chains in breaking down segregationist attitudes in the South. Wal-Mart is a favorite whipping boy for liberal activists, but it is also an equal-opportunity employer in which African-American shoppers no longer are required to step aside for a white customer. Sam Walton put thousands of small merchants out of business in county seats throughout the rural South and he advanced the cause of racial justice in the process, just as McDonald's, another equal-opportunity employer, drove hundreds of segregated Mom and Pop greasy spoons to the wall.
But it has been athletics that has changed the face of the South. When Bear Bryant desegregated the Crimson Tide in 1971, every team in the Southeastern Conference followed suit. When the colleges and universities integrated their squads, the high schools did the same. It is sometimes difficult for ivory-towered academics like myself to appreciate the role of high school athletics in shaping the South's community values. But Friday night football and basketball are major social events. And it is almost impossible to retain the racial hostility that once came instinctively while cheering on the local team with young black men and women playing prominent roles.
3 comments:
Here are my two cents on Aaron's thoughts on Reconstruction, and on Smith's thoughts.
First, I agree that slavery was the root cause of the Civil War, but states rights played a very important role too. There were important figures in the South who fought for their home states, not for slavery. Robert E. Lee immediately comes to mind.
Second, this does not mean that the Northerners were completely virtuous. At the outset of the war, many Northerners, like Southerners, framed the dispute in terms of states' rights and not in terms of slavery. Only later in the war, after the Emancipation Proclamation, did most in the North see the war as a struggle to end slavery. Until then, Lincoln was willing to allow the South back in and maintain slavery (correct me if I'm wrong). And only after the war, under the Radical Republicans, did it become clear that the North viewed Reconstruction as a moral crusade to eradicate all effects of slavery in the South.
In short, if states rights were merely a pretext, they were no flimsy pretext, but actually had plenty of factual support. Smith, then, goes too far when he declares that anybody who argues that states rights were the root cause of the Civil War is akin to a Holocaust-denier. There is simply too much evidence in support of the states right theory (even if it is ultimately wrong) for Smith to condemn that all those people as neo-Nazis. Smith can't allow for mixed motives in history.
I am concerned not just for factual accuracy but also for the potential effect on contemporary politics. Many people today, especially those with ideological axes to grind, dismiss the states right argument simply because they associate it with slave owners. Indeed, in most people's eyes the most damning argument--if it can be called an argument--against states' right is their historical association with slavery.
OK, there are my two cents.
In spite of having read a few book reviews on the topic, I'm not expert, either on the Civil War nor Reconstruction. However, from what I have read, I think Foner and others in his school have convincingly shown that Reconstruction enjoyed broad support, both in Congress and across the North, refuting the earlier Dunning school's claim that it was the work of a cabal of Radical Republicans.
With regards to the question of states rights (of which, for the record, I am generally a fan), it seems to me that while states rights were an issue, they were inextricably bound up with the question of slavery. True, there had been the earlier Nullification Crisis, but by the 1860s, the "right" in question was that of owning slaves. (And even the Nullification Crisis was about trade issues tied to the slave economy of the South.) Some people have tried to suggest that a state's right to seceded from the Union was at stake, and so it was. But this was not an academic question. "I believe, in principle, that a state should have a right to secede, and if you deny that right I'll exercise it, just to prove that I can." Rather, the question of secession was only raised after Southerners feared for the abolition of slavery. So, yes, there were other questions in play besides slavery, but none of them would have been issues if slavery had not.
It is indeed a shame that the good name of states rights has thus been sullied.
Discussing the role of integrated sports with a friend from Mississippi, I came to realize something interesting: it's an example of taking something near and dear to a very traditional society and using that as a vehicle for change, rather than concluding that the society as a whole was a problem and trying to start over from the ground up. A very conservative way of affecting change... (In this regard, it is quite different from the equal-opportunity chains simply driving the racist Mom & Pop joints out of business.)
Post a Comment