Eric Foner, Reconstruction, and the Limits of Academia

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By Steve Halpern

Recently I attended a lecture by Eric Foner on The Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Constitution. This event took place at the Haverford School in their Centennial Hall. My estimate is that there were about 200 people who attended this lecture. Eric Foner is an historian and Dewitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. One of several books he has authored is: Reconstruction – America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863 - 1877.

Eric Foner’s uncle was the late Philip S. Foner who authored about 100 books on labor history. He also edited a multi-volume work on the speeches and writings of Frederick Douglass. When these volumes were published, the name Frederick Douglass was not widely known.

Philip Foner was fired and blacklisted from his job at City College in New York for his suspected association with the Communist Party. Years after his termination the administration of City College apologized for his dismissal.     

The Haverford School is a school for boys and is located next to Haverford College. The school is also located just a few miles away from Villanova University, who’s basketball team just won the NCAA Championship. Tuition at the Haverford School is about $38,000. Per student funding for education in the neighboring Lower Merion School District is about $25,000. Philadelphia borders on that school district. Per student funding in Philadelphia is about $12,600.

I found Eric Foner’s talk to be informative and was glad that I attended. While I learned a few things and have a better appreciation for his subject, I found his perspective to be limited. So, in order to explain my perspective about his talk, I will give a short history of reconstruction.

The Background to Reconstruction

The revolution of the thirteen colonies was the first in the world to decisively break away from feudalism, or the rule of royal families. There were two political blocks after the revolution known as the federalists and the anti-federalists. The federalists favored a strong centralized government that would eventually favor industrialized capitalism. The anti-federalists favored slavery and a weak federal government. The anti-federalists dominated the U.S. government throughout the 1800’s until the election of Abraham Lincoln.

Throughout this period agricultural products produced by slave labor became the dominant business in this country. Human beings were viewed as commodities and slaves became the most valuable commodity. Cotton produced by slave labor marked the beginning of the industrial revolution.

While the Declaration of Independence advocated for the “pursuit of happiness,” slavery reflected uninterrupted lives of drudgery. Because slaves were not paid a wage, the routine method used to coerce slaves was torture. Frederick Douglass was born a slave, escaped, and was asked to give a talk on the significance of the Fourth of July in 1852. The following passage is an excerpt from that speech:

“There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour. Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival....”

I believe the slavery practiced in Brazil and Cuba at the time of this speech was just as horrendous as the slavery of the United States. However, I also agree with the core of the argument Douglass made in this passage.

Northern capitalists, workers, as well as small farmers also had their reasons for opposing slavery. Slave owners were taking over several of the western states and were using the federal government to apprehend escaped slaves. Had slavery continued, the United States might have emerged as an agricultural, underdeveloped, and highly dictatorial nation.  So, a coalition of forces emerged who’s goal was to remove slave owners from their positions of power by any means necessary.  

There was a horrendous price that was paid to do away with chattel slavery in this country. About 350,000 union soldiers died in the Civil War. The Union generals understood that they needed to convince those who supported the Confederacy that they had no chance of winning. To advance this perspective they destroyed many of the buildings in the confederate states.

The myths and realities of reconstruction

After the war, the federal government learned that those who had power in the defeated states worked to preserve the institution of slavery with another name. They called this the Black Codes. These laws enabled governments to apprehend Black people and force them to work in slave-like conditions.

Given the enormous costs of the war, the federal government took several measures aimed at repressing the interests of the former slave owners. First, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and then the U.S. adopted the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. These measures outlawed slavery and, in effect, liquidated the slave owners of their most valuable so-called commodity. This meant that about four million people were no longer slaves.

Then the government adopted a law called the Civil Rights Act and then the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. This amendment meant that all men (excluding Native Americans) born in the United States had full rights as citizens. Women would not have the right to vote until 1920. The soldiers who fought for the confederacy would be denied the right to vote because the government felt they had engaged in treason.

Then, there was the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution that was also about giving every man born in this country the right to vote. These measures were enforced by the Union Army that occupied the southern states until about the year 1877.

As a result of these actions, Reconstruction Governments emerged where about 2,000 black men, mostly former slaves, became government officials. Black people now had the right to own land. Northern volunteers came to the south to educate Black and caucasian students who never had an education before. During slavery the law prohibited teaching slaves to read.

Both Ida Wells and Lucy Parsons were born into slavery and received their primary education in schools that were set up during reconstruction. Wells and Parsons both became genuine working class leaders.

President Rutherford B. Hayes made the deal to withdraw the union soldiers from the former confederate states. This left the reconstruction governments at a military disadvantage to the emerging racist forces of the Ku Klux Klan. As a result, the KKK pro-segregationist forces took power through military force. Jim Crow segregation became the law and Black people effectively lost citizenship rights in this country.

Eric Foner explained how historians before the civil rights movement routinely portrayed the reconstruction governments as a horror story. In my high school so-called education, the period of reconstruction was portrayed as a bunch of northern carpetbaggers and scalawags who took advantage of the south for their own personal benefit. Most of the northerners who came to the south after the Civil War were teachers who taught the illiterate people of that region to read for the first time.

This slander of the reconstruction era had profound consequences. Black people were portrayed as the ones who destroyed the south in reconstruction and didn’t deserve the right to vote. Thousands of Black people were lynched because of false accusations that they had raped white women.

Ida Wells exposed this lie and investigated hundreds of lynchings. She found that oftentimes white women had consensual relations with Black men. She also encouraged Black people to leave the south because they wouldn’t receive justice in that part of the country. Ida Wells as well as Lucy Parsons advocated for Black people to be armed, so they would be better able to defend themselves from lynch mobs.  For her actions Ida Wells’ newspaper was destroyed and her life was threatened.

The Supreme Court supported Jim Crow segregation in their decision Plessey v. Ferguson. Eric Foner gave examples of other Supreme Court decisions that also supported Jim Crow. He argued that until the decision Brown v. Board of Education the Supreme Court had, in effect, decided that it would not enforce the Fourteenth Amendment. In other words, laws are worthless words on paper when the government refuses to enforce those laws.

Eric Foner argued that there were loopholes in the Fifteenth Amendment. This gave the Jim Crow governments legal ways of denying Black people the right to vote through poll taxes and literacy tests.

Foner called the Civil Rights movement a “revolution” because it in some ways was effective in reversing what had been lost in Jim Crow segregation. However, the government chose to adopt new civil rights and voting rights laws in order to outlaw Jim Crow. The government could have acknowledged that it had refused to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment in the past, and now it would enforce that amendment. Had the government used this argument, today we would be in a better legal position to battle against the racial discrimination that continues to exist.

Capitalism and the persistence of racial discrimination

I was fortunate to be chosen to ask Eric Foner a question after his presentation. I asked him why he felt that racial discrimination was so persistent in this country after the Civil War and the civil rights movement. I pointed to both mass incarceration as well as the increasing segregation of public schools to underscore my point. I suggested that the answer might have something to do with the drive to maximize profits in the capitalist system. I also argued that this drive for profits targets the least affluent people and also effects immigrant workers.

Foner agreed that mass incarceration is a persistent problem and that historians in the future would also have this opinion. He also argued that capitalism is a flexible system that can support racism, but it can also be anti-racist.

Clearly capitalism does have flexibility in that it continues to exist in the United States and South Africa even after Jim Crow and apartheid have been outlawed. However, that doesn’t explain why racial discrimination continues to exist in both countries.

My argument is that capitalism has it’s own laws and capitalist governments routinely adapt to those laws. The government outlawed slavery because of the Civil War. The government outlawed Jim Crow because of the civil rights movement. The South African government outlawed apartheid because of an international movement to do away with that institution.

However, as long as capitalism exists there will be a drive to cut costs. This has been done by racial and sexual discrimination. We have also seen manufacturing enterprises move their businesses out of this country, to nations where workers are paid about two dollars per day. All of the recent Presidents of this country have made it a priority to deport increasing numbers of immigrants. While entire industries rely on immigrant labor, these deportations make life for immigrant workers more insecure, so they might be less inclined to make the justifiable demand for better wages as well as improved working conditions.         

Eric Foner gave the accurate history of how the academic community, as well as the government gave a false view of reconstruction. However, today this same academic community consistently defends the capitalist system in spite of the obvious horrors that we have all seen.

The facts are the United States government has ordered the military to murder literally millions of people in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. The United States not only has more people in prison than any other nation, one out of every six citizens in this country doesn’t have enough food to eat.

I don’t know of anyone in the academic community who will argue that it is possible to put in place a workers government that would declare, without compromise, that human needs are more important than profits. This kind of government could eliminate poverty as well as racial and sexual discrimination. In fact the only visions of the future that Hollywood choses to portray are virtual nightmares like the stories of Avatar and The Hunger Games.

So, learning about our history only makes us stronger in dealing with our current problems. Most of the available history books are written by college professors. While these books are useful, rarely have I read any book coming out of academia arguing that capitalism is an obstacle to humanity all over the world.

So, while I found it useful to attend the talk by Eric Foner and have found his book on reconstruction to be informative, my opinion is that working people need to develop our own point of view.