In late spring 1862 former Alexandria resident Robert E. Lee accepted command of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. Three years later Union soldiers bloodily defeated his troops. Given the Civil War, I ask: how well did America reconstruct? Colleague and George Mason University history professor D. Michael Bottoms joins me for a Q&A.  

Q1. Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809 the first year of James Madison’s Presidency. Madison is known as the Father of the Constitution including the three fifths persons’ compromise. To what extent did slavery promote Civil War?
     
A1. The controversy over slavery was the chief cause of the Civil War; on this there is near-universal agreement. Certainly there were other important issues such as states' rights, the tariff, national expansion and a host of cultural differences. Historians have produced exhaustive studies of each. Ultimately, all of these conflicts were rooted in that one fundamental division between North and South. While many white southerners did not own slaves, and many white northerners cared little for the suffering of southern blacks, Americans on both sides were deeply invested in the political, economic, and cultural values that defined free labor in the North and the slave institution in the South.

Q2. How is the Reconstruction period dated? Does Reconstruction begin with West Virginia’s statehood or Lee’s 1865 surrender at Appomatox? End with the Compromise of 1877 or Brown v. Topeka in 1954?

A2. The dates used to define historical periods can profoundly influence the stories we tell. The choices historians make tell us a lot about what they think is important about a given moment. For instance, if we say Reconstruction began with Lee's 1865 surrender at Appomattox and ended with the removal of Federal troops in 1877, the story tends to cast Reconstruction as a military occupation; it emphasizes military and political affairs. Historians who use these dates tend to focus on conflicts between the President and Congress, controversies over states' rights and the proper reach of federal power.  Historians who date the start of Reconstruction in 1863 focus on early experiments with free black labor in Union-occupied Louisiana and the Sea Islands of South Carolina and, as a result, tend to write histories that emphasize the social, economic, and cultural reorganization of southern society. Likewise, those historians who push the end-date beyond 1877 tend to see the presence of Federal troops as secondary to the more important story of black freedom. Defining a historical period depends on what you think is most important about that period.

Q3. Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865 and Vice President Andrew Johnson, a southerner and Unionist Democrat, succeeded to the Presidency. Was Johnson lenient regarding the South's re-admittance, states constitutional conventions, and why did he oppose the 14th Amendment?  

A3. There is no doubting Johnson's leniency, but one might legitimately argue that his policy hewed closely to Lincoln's. As Union victory drew near, Lincoln came to believe, and publicly argued that a vengeful peace would never bind the nation's wounds.  His “10 Percent Plan” offered remarkably gentle terms for southern rehabilitation. Radicals in Congress disagreed, and they fought first Lincoln and then Johnson in an effort to implement a more punitive Reconstruction policy. Also like Lincoln, Johnson believed that Reconstruction properly fell under the jurisdiction of the executive branch and in this sense his rejection of both the Freedman's Bureau Bill and the Civil Rights Bill in 1866 might be read as a defense of executive power. Nonetheless, Johnson was also much more hostile to the notion of black equality than was Lincoln and his actions as president should also be read as a vigorous defense of white privilege.

Q4. Amendment 14 Sec. 4 addresses public debt. To what extent did the nation’s debt, Black Friday (1869) and the Panic of 1873 shape Reconstruction and the later free-silver debate?

A4. After the Civil War, some northern members of Congress were apprehensive about what might happen should southern politicians ever return to power. They included that section to ensure that Union debts would be paid with federal tax dollars, and that Confederate debts would not be, regardless of who controlled Congress. Some of the Union debt was in the form of paper currency issued by the Union during the Civil War and the expectation that “greenbacks” would be exchanged for gold at face value encouraged reckless speculation in commodities markets. This volatility and the move to place the United States on a gold standard in 1873 led to a financial panic and deep depression. The move toward the gold standard tightened the money supply, raising interest rates and placing Americans who relied on credit, particularly farmers, in desperate straits. What followed was a decades-long fight over the coinage of silver that finally ended with the Gold Standard Act of 1900.

Q5. In 1870, despite a constitutional process, Virginia segregated its schools. To what extent did Confederate states retain the right to bias educational outcomes?

A5. Virginia was able to segregate its schools in 1870 for two reasons.  First, public education in the nineteenth century was left firmly in the hands of state governments. Second and more importantly, Virginia was merely following a pattern of school segregation pioneered in the North, and northerners stood ready to defend that pattern. In fact, the “separate but equal” concept was first applied in relation to school segregation in the city of Boston in 1849, 47 years before Plessy v. Ferguson made that concept law. During the 1870s Ohio, California, and Nevada all joined Virginia in the creation of racially segregated school systems. In response, abolitionist and Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner attempted to include provisions for federal control of public schools in the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Because his bill would have affected school systems in both northern and southern states, Sumner's efforts were met with overwhelming opposition.

Q6. Planning is underway for the Civil War Sesquicentennial. Given the short-lived Civil Rights Act of 1875, how should race be interpreted?

A6. The Civil Rights Act of 1875, which sought to guarantee equal access to public accommodations, was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883. The Court determined that while the Fourteenth Amendment secured equality before the law, it applied only in cases of state action, and could not be used to regulate private behavior or the use of private property. The Civil Rights Cases revealed the limits of Reconstruction's power to reshape American race relations, and it seems to me that any discussion of race during that era would have to wrestle with the tension between Americans' commitment to racial equality on the one hand, and their devotion to the sanctity of private property on the other. Nineteenth-century Americans cherished a number of values that often conflicted with each other, and we can draw valuable lessons by learning about how they dealt with those conflicts, successfully or otherwise.
         
“As the war for the Union recedes into the misty shadows of the past, and the Negro is no longer needed to assault forts and stop rebel bullets, he is in some sense of less importance,” said Frederick Douglass in April 1883. “In whatever else the Negro may have been a failure, he has, in one respect, been a marked and brilliant success.  He has managed to make himself one of the most interesting figures that now attract and hold the attention of the world.”

    “The Negro must plead his own cause with eloquence and fervor,” continued Douglass in April 1888. “Can the Negro do it? Such a colored man as will be a Gladstone for his race is coming.”

     The Jim Crow era lasted from 1896 until 1954-1964. 

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