American History Hit - Why Did Reconstruction Fail?

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

Over the course of this series, we've discussed the extraordinary promise of Reconstruction, as well as the relentless attacks these efforts came under. In this final episode, we're stepping back from the events themselves to ask the biggest question of all: why did Reconstruction fail?For today's episode, we welcome Prof. Aaron Sheehan-Dean of Louisiana State University back onto the show. His works include ‘Why Confederates Fought: Family and a Nation in Civil War Virginia’ and most recently ‘Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth Century History Shaped the American Civil War’.Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Produced by Tomos Delargy. Senior Producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast.History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. The Civil War ended slavery, but it did not settle the future of the United States. Over the course of this series on Reconstruction, we've seen its extraordinary promise,

four million formerly enslaved people claiming their freedom, black men entering politics in unprecedented numbers, and a genuine attempt to build a more equal self. We've also seen that promise come under attack, from white supremacist violence to the slow erosion of federal support. But was Reconstruction always destined to end this way? Or did Americans make a series of choices that allowed one of its greatest achievements to slip away? In this final episode of this Reconstruction series, we're stepping back from the intricacy of the events to assess

the era as a whole, reshuffle the deck, if you will, to understand how the hand dealt in 1865 was actually played. What did Reconstruction accomplish? Where and why did it fail? who bears responsibility for its collapse. And how should we then understand its legacy, not only in the emergence of Jim Crow, but in the constitutional amendments and civil rights protections that later generations would reclaim? Because Reconstruction was not simply an aftermath of the Civil War.

It was a second founding of the United States, and a struggle over freedom, citizenship, and federal power whose outcome continues to shape the country today. I'm Don Wildman, and this is American History Hit. Thank you for joining us. Our guest on this episode, I am proud to say, is a longtime friend of this podcast. Professor Aaron Sheean Dean is the Fred C. Frey, Professor of History at LSU, Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. As regular listeners to this podcast will surely be aware, his works include Why Confederates Fought, family and nation in Civil War, Virginia. And most recently, fighting with the past, how 17th century

history shaped the American Civil War. So it seems right and proper to turn to him in this summary episode of ours and ask the major question, why did Reconstruction really fail? Hello, Aaron. Thanks for joining us again on American History Hit. It's nice to see you. My pleasure is always to be here to talk with you. As you know, we've been doing a whole series on reconstruction, and we have talked so often in various angles of this subject matter, so it seemed natural to talk with you about this in a sort of retrospect way. So let me ask you very broadly, for any listeners who may be coming in fresh to this episode and not the others, very briefly, what was Reconstruction intended to do? The question of what Reconstruction was supposed to

accomplish varies a lot depending on who you would have asking that question of Black Southerners versus White Southerners versus White Northerners. In general, I would say there's both the initial physical reconstruction of destroyed roadways and and canals and river sides that hadn't been maintained. All of that happens reasonably quickly, the physical infrastructure. The much more difficult question is about how emancipation will be implemented in the United States. So this is the social and the political dimensions of reconstruction, which mean how do the

freed people come into citizenship in the United States and what will be the relationship between white Southerners who had been made themselves into Confederates now becoming Americans again. So how do you politically reorganize that relationship in a way that brings them into the political community? That had, of course, been Lincoln's paramount objective from the beginning, which was to reunify the nation. But the terms of how that would happen were in great dispute. And that, of course, takes years, as I think your listeners have already gotten a sense to kind of work out in it. And the goalposts change throughout this process. What I've learned on these episodes, and I'm sure I share this with some of the listeners, is the

various dynamics, which are very surprising and contribute to the often confusion around this subject matter, because you not only have, you have a defeated nation. That's usually a foreign nation in the typical war. But in a civil war, you want to bring this half of the nation or whatever back in. And you want them to be successful in that regard down the road. So this affects the way that people are punished, the way, you know, how you restore life in that regard in terms of, you know, the infrastructure, as you say, but also the, the economics of what are, what's available. But on top of it all, you have this new group of people, which is a diminutive term for when you're talking about four million people. It's an incredibly difficult

task that the, the federal government faces. And, and part of what listeners need to keep in mind, and it's hard given our current, the current way we view the Republican and the Democratic parties is not just that their ideological polarity is reversed, that the Democrats are the conservatives of the 19th century, but the Republican Party is the one in charge during reconstruction. But within that Republican Party, there's a huge spectrum of opinion. And at the beginning of the war, the moderates and the conservatives in the Republican party are really kind of one big block that envision a very quick and rapid and easy reconstruction. and partly owing to the conflict they have with Andrew Johnson,

who takes over after Lincoln's assassination and is technically a Republican, though historically he had spent his life as a Democrat, Johnson alienates the moderates, and they actually move left and join the radicals in the Republican Party to then promulgate a much more ambitious reconstruction. And so it's not just that binary dynamic, as you laid out, which we sort of typically think in the post-war, defeated and a victor,

but among the victor, there's great disagreement about the terms under which this should happen. And that's in a way the story of reconstruction is how to how to kind of mainstream Republicans wind up endorsing not just a 13th amendment, but a 14th amendment and a 15th amendment and the enforcement acts, you know, and some of the legal apparatus that I think listeners have already heard about that will enable what will be a much more ambitious reconstruction than most white northerner, certainly than the average white northerner was envisioning in 1865. That was my very next question, which is, did the North, the citizens of the North have any clue what we were getting into once we had won this war? Had they been briefed on this?

Were there newspaper articles that were explaining what will happen as a result? Certainly people are thinking about reconstruction from a very early point in the war. I mean, some historians now date reconstruction itself as a process to 1861 in November of that year, islands along the coast of Charleston and Georgia and Jacksonville were captured by the U.S. Navy. Hilton Head is probably the most famous of these spots for contemporary listeners. And the planters on those islands, they were enormously lucrative places growing as something called Long Island or Sea Island cotton. It's a very long staple cotton. They immediately fled to the interior and they left behind both enslaved people and all of these plantations and wealth.

And almost immediately, the U.S. government, mostly through the army, began trying to figure out how to recreate a social order in this place with tens of thousands of now freed people living on this very valuable land. So during the course of the war, Northerners are thinking about this, but there is also, I think, by the end of the war, a sense that Confederates were both fatigued and also willing to rejoin the union. And there is a widespread assumption that reconstruction will not be difficult because southerners have been beaten so thoroughly and the U.S. that is American victory is so clear that they will return and sort of make themselves into good citizens. And instead, what they confront is a very truculent and angry white South. And this is already visible in the middle of 1865. And Andrew Johnson is quite generous with those mostly ex-Confederates who are angry and disaffected. And by no. means eager to endorse a genuine social equality or political equality of the sort that certainly the radicals in the North were already imagining by the middle of 1865. So it's not really until 1866, and it's really the riots in Memphis and in New Orleans in that year. These are white on black riots.

These are mobilizations of white, usually ex-confederate soldiers against the political mobilization of black people. riots, murdered, massacres, really, in both Memphis and New Orleans, very high profile that lead white northerners to kind of shockingly realize this process is not going to be easy, and it's going to require a very active role for the federal government to manage this process. It's an interesting counterfactual. If they had behaved as northerners expected them to, as the vanquished ones, would we even

have the 14th and 15th amendments? You know, like, was it necessary to instate these things as a result? but it is that resistance that pushes this whole dynamic towards a much more complex reconciliation in quotation marks because it never really happens that way. I mean, it's true, and it's one of the many ironies of the Civil War era, the first and most paramount being that white southerners secede to protect slavery and in doing so ensure its destruction, that is they produce the exact opposite outcome. and if the goal was always maintaining white supremacy in a kind of white dominated social order in the South, accepting the kind of modest terms of reconstruction that white northerners are promulgating in 1865 would have been a much wiser course. And this is part of the unpredictability of history and certainly of reconstruction, which is white southerners think they can kind of

buffalo through this or kind of make their way through and doing so produces this dramatic and unexpected response from white northerners, mostly reacting to the efforts of black southerners to achieve something like, you know, a political voice, economic opportunity in the South. And so, you know, I mean, one of the things that I really emphasize to my students is how unpredictable and uncertain this process is. And that's not just us looking back. At the time, people sort of week to week aren't sure at all about and even very astute observers are continually surprised by the direction that that events take. Yeah, exactly. It's a huge expansion for newly black American citizens, expansion of schools, churches, education really importantly

here, the civic institutions that result all from these Reconstruction Acts and the efforts to protect them. It really results in the first experiment of a multiracial democracy in America. It is. And it's important for readers to remember that the percentage of black Americans living in the north is tiny. In most communities, less than 1%. And really, it's concentrated in the big cities of the Northeast, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, had very large and active black communities. But 90% or more of the black Americans live in the South. And so it's not just, you know, an experiment in biracial democracy in the South. It's really the first American experiment. as you put it. And there is great apprehension. White Southerners, certainly those elites who had led the South into the Confederacy are deeply suspicious of poor white Southerners, never mind black Southerners. I mean, they don't, you know, for the most part, these are men who are not very keen on democracy in general. And there are great efforts during the secession conventions and in the life of the

Confederacy to kind of restore power to the elite in a more South Carolina model. That is more of aristocracy than a democracy. So the idea of of now sharing political power with black southerners absolutely anathema to white southerners. Yes. And among most of them, there are a handful, you know, some prominent ones. And most prominently, of course, James Longstreet, the former Confederate General Lee's right hand in the war, John Mosby up in Virginia, who find ways to make peace with both the Republican Party and black Southerners and think about a future collectively. But most white Southerners do not. It is that measure of navet, you know, that comes from the fact that these people have never lived together.

You know, that's going to resonate throughout the coming century. You know, it's not going to stop as people start to get realizing that this is a multiracial democracy as a result. And that was never really intended to be the case for many of these northerners. So interesting. Let's take a short break. When we come back, we'll weigh up the different reasons as to why it all came crumbling down. Welcome back. we're speaking with Professor Aaron Sheandine of LSU about why reconstruction collapsed.

Aaron, it's widely agreed that there are two main causes. Let's work through these, starting with the North's loss of control over the political events in the South and Southerners eventually regaining control. How so? How did they regain that control? So there are really two mechanisms within the South that white Southerners are pursuing, one political and nonviolent and one violent and extra political or, extra legal. The first one is more easily dealt with. When the constitutional conventions that

happen under the auspices of the Reconstruction Acts in the South occur, this is 1867 mostly, those are rebuilding, as we talked about a minute ago, genuine biracial democracies in the South. The first instinct of white Southerners is to basically boycott that altogether. So in those first elections in 1868, even in 1870, many white Southerners aren't voting. As it turns out, Northerners regard those elections as legitimate. So white southerners are entirely left out of the political order. They then realize they need to come back in. And so there's great effort to recruit white voters, to mobilize white voters. And the easiest way to do this is with the threat of black domination, as they say. And this is, of course, never a reality in the sense that

there are only two states that are even close to having a black majority population, South Carolina. Louisiana has some parishes like that. But the mere specter of black political activism is then sort of inflamed to this idea of black domination. So what we would view today as the most grossly kind of racist and race-baiting political campaigns is going on, that's the kind of nonviolent side of this. There is also the active use of violence by the Ku Klux Klan and by allied, allied terrorist organizations beginning in 1867 and then escalating.

really to 1871, when the federal government finally begins to intervene. And this is most especially violence targeted at black leaders or Republican leaders, sometimes whites and blacks as well. So it could include teachers, ministers, locally elected officials, as economically successful black businessmen. Anyone that is sort of a visible black leader is targeted for violence. and this happens across all the southern states, and it involves everything from beatings and warnings and torture and arson to outright murder. And that strategy is designed to deter both black social and political mobilization and especially voting. So white militias often target polling places on election days to deter people from turning out. There's actually a new book.

It was a dissertation last year in award-winning dissertation that's coming out that actually looks at black militias as the response to this white violence. There's a surprising mobilization, at least in Louisiana, which is where this study is concerned, though there's some complementary mobilization happening in South Carolina and other places, where black citizens are organizing at the polls to protect their access. It turns out that fighting over voter qualifications and voter intimidation are old problems in American political life, not recent ones. We've heard a lot about it in the last couple of years in the United States, but this is a central problem in reconstruction, and that violence escalates. It is, to some respects, curtailed by the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871

and the prosecution of the clan. But many of those violent terrorists go underground and reorganize, and the violence continues in 1873, 74, 75. So I would say those are the sort of two prongs of the attack on reconstruction from within the South. There's also the North to talk. about. Well, the North loses the control over it. That's the thing. I mean, again, perhaps not prepared for that level of resistance. Maybe there was more of a fracture between in their base as to how to deal with this, as it will prove out a lot of Northerners just want to leave this behind as soon as possible. Yeah. I mean, one way to say it is that they lost control, and that's certainly an aspect of this, that they aren't prepared for the commitment, basically, the

tenacity with which white southerners are willing to use violence. And, you know, in Louisiana, at one point, there is a genuine coup and there are two rival state governments that are sort of put up as though that's a possible thing. There is also just simple disinterest and then also fatigue. That is, there are a lot of white northerners, certainly the conservatives that didn't believe in a long expensive reconstruction from the beginning. So it's not so much that they lost controls that they were never invested to begin with. The Democrats, the white conservatives and the the North, who don't see this as a problem that the federal government either should or kind of constitutionally can be capable of managing. And so they are committed. There are also,

of course, very legitimate other policy problems like the settlement of the West, the white settlement of the West, the increasing urbanization. This is right at the advent of the Gilded Age. By the 1770s, we have the creation of a real industrial order that's going to eventually culminate in the great strike of 1877, the problem of monopolies, which is emerging. So there are a whole lot of very important issues that white northerners are eager to turn to. And reconstruction, certainly by its second decade, because it lasts longer, the three times as long as the war itself, genuinely erodes white northerner's capacity for a commitment to a social change that many of them are not prepared to make, even in their own limited fashion in their communities, where, as I said,

There's, you know, a relatively small number of African Americans. I've learned a lot just through these few episodes, never mind the other ones talking to you about it. But one of the events that really surprised me was the intensity of the Colfax massacre. I'd heard about it, but it's very early on. So I think of it as something that would happen later. But indeed, it was right then and there, 1873. Yeah, it's Easter Sunday, 1873. This happens in northern Louisiana in a place called Grant Parish.

and it's a good embodiment of the ways that violence is used. So in Grant Parish, it's a black majority district, and they had elected a handful of black office holders. And there were white terrorists in neighboring parishes who had driven black office holders from the parish altogether. In Louisiana, we used parish instead of county, but think county if you're outside Louisiana, I'm listening. And so locally elected office holders,

and on that Easter morning, the black office holders and their supporters, that is black men and women from that community came out and forced to defend at the courthouse at Colfax to defend there, the people who had been legally elected. And there's a white militia of nearly 400 members that rides into town, attacks these men. They're woefully outgunned in terms of the kind of resources they need. The defenders are driven back into the courthouse, which is then set on fire. People are shot as they are trying to escape. And then later they execute another close to four.

on the courthouse and bodies are sort of buried or left unexposed. It's over 100 fatalities. It's just a horrific episode. There is eventually a kind of federal attempt to prosecute, although that actually fails in the long run, the ringleaders of the massacre. What other white southerners in Mississippi and in South Carolina learned was that violence is, in fact, an effective tool.

Yeah, right. By 1873, 74, especially by 75, even the Grant administration, and Grant, of course, had won the Civil War for the North. They are unwilling to commit the federal troops that are going to be required because the states themselves don't have the manpower and the resources or in some cases actively resist having state militias and force the fair use of electoral laws. So it becomes, Colfax becomes a kind of model pursued never at that degree of specificity,

but the rifle clubs of Mississippi in 1874 and 75 are key to deterring enough black voters that Democrats return to power there. Right. I mean, this goes all the way to the Supreme Court, doesn't it? Yeah, I mean, the end of the Colfax massacre is quite tragic. The case is called Crookshank,

and it goes to the Supreme Court. It's actually decided, not until 1876 or 77, but one of the things that happens that gives us some indication of that Northern White resolve is that the court dramatically narrows

the reading of the 14th Amendment to prohibit only state actions which infringe on the constitutional rights of people. So if you, the Constitution protects your right to go vote. And what the justices say is only if the state of Louisiana had organized a state militia that then drove you from the polls, would there be a constitutional infringement? If everyday citizens organize themselves as a militia and deny you your constitutional rights,

the 14th Amendment provides no relief. And it is a, for modern Americans, it's a just totally bizarre and counterintuitive reading, both of the intent and of the letter of the 14th Amendment, which are to absolutely protect the rights of citizens without regard to race or color in their exercise of constitutionally protected rights, the vote being arguably the most important of these. And so that decision has ramifications for a long time because it reduces the scope of what the federal government is responsible for protecting long into the 20th century. What I have found in the complexity of all this subject matter.

You can pull on one thread, and let's say Colfax Massacre, all the way through, you will see a kind of microcosm of reconstruction. And one of this being a fantastic way to do it because the Colfax Massacre energizes so much activity

by the North to react to this, you know, down to the enforcement acts and all the rest of that, pushing back on the Southern resistance. But in the end is an example of the northern fatigue and the end of judicial, you know, attempts to correct the situation.

They just sort of give up on it. They do. I think it's also important. There's a reason that happens in Louisiana, which is that Louisiana, unlike a lot of other southern states, had a very old and well-established mixed race community, what was, what we would regard as a black elite in New Orleans primarily. And this is an important point for listeners is that the vigor of the white reaction, the counter reaction to reconstruction

is in some ways a demonstration or evidence of the black success in reconstruction. That is, if black Southerners had not built schools and had not gained some modest home ownership and had not taken political office, there would have been nothing for white Southerners to object to. And so at the same time that we acknowledge

sort of all of the violence and the horror, it's important that the kind of prequel to that is the fact that black people, particularly formally enslaved people who are now building their communities on their own. I mean, Southern states are not providing much support in this are successful enough

that they develop the political capacity and, as I say, some modest economic success that it then engenders this very vigorous white reaction. And that these two things are sort of two sides of the same coin. And, you know, one of the difficult things for students really to hold in mind because it's easy to just tell the story of the violence,

but the precursor to that, violence is that in some respects, reconstruction works, that black southerners are able to build their communities and the fact that they could persevere through those long years of the Jim Crow era, beginning, you know, in the late 1870s,

certainly in the 1880s with the imposition of Jim Crow laws, until you get finally by 1964 a Civil Rights Act, that is possible because of the institutions they built in reconstruction. The civic, the familial, the social institutions, as you said, the schools and the schools and the churches are the anchor and the bedrock for this.

The federal government just abandons them. And so it's really within those communities that they have to persevere. And they do so because that wartime generation comes out emboldened to make a new order for themselves. It's a fascinating aspect of it, isn't it? The other thing that happens that you've got to take into account, not an excuse, but a major factor is the economic realities of life in the North. Things have changed an enormous amount. And in the midst of all of this, there is a huge economic depression. The panic of 1873 comes along.

Just like we go through this these days, you can imagine people's attention is drawn away from this urgent matter down in the South and how to fix all this stuff to how am I going to even buy the food and take care of business here. Yeah, the 1873 Depression is the worst one of the 19th century. There had been basically every 20-year depressions and there will be another terrible one in 1893. but that one both distracts and disorient people in the north. It, of course, reduces federal revenue so that you have fewer resources with which you can implement the policies that might be needed to protect and expand reconstruction.

I think the other important sort of economic dimension of this to think about is actually ideological, which is that the creation of the Republican Party was predicated on the idea of free labor. And in the 1850s, that was juxtaposed with slave labor. And as we move into an industrial order in the 1860s and 1870s and 1880s, free labor comes to be, honestly, just a very hollow ideology. That is, if all you are promised is the right to sign a contract without being compelled to do it, it doesn't mean that most workers really have a fair shake in this emerging industrial economy. And for white northerners looking at the South who are committed to free labor, the idea is, well, Black Sonders now have the right to negotiate a contract or they can do something else. That's up to them. But of course, they don't have other options because as enslaved people, they legally couldn't own property and they enter the post-war era without the resources to manage on their own. And white Southerners are very reluctant to sell them land. So free labor, which the Republican Party commits itself to, in a very narrow way, Eric Foner's brilliant book, Free Labor, Free Soil Free Men chronicles this,

it becomes increasingly really irrelevant in that post-war order where you have monopolies, where you have economies of scale that, you know, some corporations employ thousands of people. And turning that sort of ideology or that approach to labor in the market to the South leaves black southerners exposed to a very, very difficult way to make enough money to actually feed your family and hopefully improve your condition. And so the rise of sharecropping is an inevitable result and a kind of economic exploitation that is so damaging, not just to black southerners, but to the whole southern economy and social order for decades. That's all borne out of this sort of encounter. I guess the temptation of that work is the main cause of one of the first

migrations that happens, you know, as far as blacks moving from the south to the north, as a result of the negatives that they're facing, but also looking for jobs. Yeah, the lack of opportunity. I mean, there's a famous early movement of that called the exodusters, which are 20 or 30,000 black southerners who moved to Kansas, the kind of middle of the country, come to be called exodusters. And they're very clearly reacting to the fact that there is simply no economic opportunities for them in the way that there are for white Southerners. And this is always the perpetual fear among white elites is what happens if the black population, who we regard as the workforce of the South leaves. And this is a fear that continues all the way into

the 1920s and 1930s. It's the reason there's no mechanization in Southern agriculture, because you can continue to pay someone a dollar a day to hoe cotton. It gives you social control over them. It would be much more efficient to invent a machine. Those are available to do that harvesting work. But if you do that, you now have unemployed people or you have people who are skilled enough to run machines. And it changes that social order in a way that white, who really choose social control rather than economic profit. It's one of the theorist examples of the ways that capitalism fails to kind of modify human behavior.

We expect that capitalism and the kind of profit motive will win out across anything. But that story is profoundly rebutted, you know, from 1870, really, until the post-World War II era. It's only after World War II that there's any mechanization of southern agriculture. And by that point, of course, as you note, you've got the great migration that comes in the 20s. I mean, the teens and 20s of African Americans to northern cities by then. Oh, my God.

It's such a fertile field, the reconstruction subject matter to really look at from various angles that you can really talk about things. One particular, not to digress, but whenever there's major technology changes in any society, but certainly in America, it is always faced, followed by huge disruption and in some case, enormous violence. and that last half of the 19th century after the Civil War is just rife with that. And you can track all the disruptions, you know, to the emergence of new technologies, factories and such, and then the labor problems that come from that all the way back. You know, it's amazing. Yeah, I often remind my students today that, you know, we're at the hinge of not just a digital revolution, but now an AI revolution, whatever that looks like, that will dramatically

transform. and they're the generation that we'll have to reckon with how to reshape the policies to maintain a stable and peaceful social order, you know, and the ease of chat GPT might make it seem as though it's sort of inconsequential. It all happens in cyberspace somewhere. But as you note, historically, these are the things that really can tear societies apart, which, you know, is, of course, my argument for going slower on things than we presently are. Right. But that rarely happens.

The failure of reconstruction caused more by Southern resistance or by Northern retreat, would you say? Southern resistance, I would say. It's multi-pronged and it is tenacious. They're willing to fight much harder against Reconstruction than Confederates were able to fight in the Civil War. And I'm not reflecting on sort of the Southern Will or Confederate Will thesis here necessarily. But it is kind of surprising because 12 years later, Southerners are still kind of tenacious. and often violently resisting reconstruction. They're reciprocal and they're related. And so at the end of the day, of course, it's both and rather than either or. But if we're sort of sequencing them in terms of significance, I would put white resistance at the top of that list. And you have all the normal shifts that happen because of electoral politics and so forth

and the changes from one Congress to the next, which happens back then, just as it does now, which affect a lot of this down the road. historians continue to debate which factors are more decisive. After the break, Aaron and I are going to return and look at the bigger picture of Reconstruction and where it all lands in the end. Welcome back. Aaron, was there ever a chance for Reconstruction to succeed? Was there a sweet spot where you think, oh, the pivot could have happened right there, and boy, we could have done a better job with this?

So Reconstruction is one of the great moments of possibility, as American historians tell it. That's partly because American historians, historians don't agree on what reconstruction should be, just as people at the time didn't. So to challenge the form of your question a little bit, our ability to say it was a failure or it might have succeeded presupposes a very particular kind of outcome. That is that there were clear goals articulated. Through the civil war, Lincoln says, I want the white southerners to return to their normal national allegiance. That's a small part of post-war reconstruction. radicals by the end of the war want black Americans now to have full citizenship.

Does that include the right to vote? It doesn't until the 14th Amendment is passed in 1868 and then the 15th Amendment finally in 1870. That is the terms of what reconstruction are shift over time. The question of whether there could have been a just to kind of go as broad as we can, a biracial democracy in the South, I'm genuinely pretty skeptical about whether that was possible. And I'm also skeptical that most white northerners actually wanted that. So most white northerners, or I would say all white northerners, have been absorbing the same racial science that underlay slavery through the 1830s and 40s and 50s. And while the willingness of black men

in the U.S. colored troops to participate in the northern armies and fight for union victory helped convince them that black men were both more capable and should be given fairer terms in the post-war period, this didn't extend to social equality, and only among a handful does it extend to real political equality or political representation. So it's hard for me to imagine that there is actually a majority that supports this, a majority of those voting, which means white people in the middle of the 19th century. You know, I think that historians, and it's useful to have these so that we can see sort of where other choices could have been made. I mean, you and I did a whole show on Lincoln, I, you know, on sort of if Lincoln had lived.

And, you know, my, not to, I want people to go back and listen to it if they haven't, but I was skeptical that things might have turned out substantially differently. I said Lincoln would have been much less esteemed today if he had to deal with the mess that became reconstruction. You know, luckily for him, got martyred. And so it is useful. I mean, the most famous example of this is Edmund Morgan has a famous book from the 1970s called American Slavery, American Freedom, in which he describes the initial impulse

among British settlers to adopt slaves, which they do in the 17th century. And he argues really as a consequence of the Bacon's Rebellion in 1676. And that book remains the most popular book for high school teachers to teach, 50 years after its release, because it helped students see, here was a moment when people made a decision and you can see this sharp fork. We could have pursued a society based on free labor, and instead we pursued one based on slave labor. and I would like to be able to say that there was at least the popular will in 1865 to produce a genuine biracial democracy.

I'm not convinced that there was. Certainly, we could have, with a federal government that committed to protecting the lives of black southerners and was willing to use force to suppress the clan much earlier and to invalidate the political participation of people who used violence, that is, you don't get the opportunity to lead the clan and then take, a seat in Congress. And this is another interesting post-war question in a comparative one in terms of other civil and national rebellions and conflicts in the middle of the 19th century. There's some ex-Confederates that end up serving in Congress in the post-war years, which is just kind of astonishing. I know. In compares in other places. Well, exactly. That's the lack of punishment, lack of penalties, right up to Jefferson Davis. I just relistened to that Ty Sedgely episode that we did at the beginning of this thing, it's just astonishing to listen to a military man. Talk about the lack of

consequence for many of these people, you know, from the political through the military. They never had to answer for that crime of treason, which is the only crime that's mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. It's amazing. And, you know, there is a sort of anguished debate in the North about this that is among white northerners. And even people, I mean, most famously, Henry Ward Beecher is probably the most powerful and popular minister in the North or in the United States. States, he almost immediately, by the summer of 1865, is talking about forgiveness and about welcoming Southerners back and reuniting as a people. I mean, it's nothing like the French commune, for instance, and this is the sort of easy to offer, but still shocking counterpoint, which happens in 1871,

where a kind of, you know, renegade group is trying to make Paris autonomous and the National Army, the French National Army comes in. They kill 25,000 communards. They kill so many. They don't have wood for the coffins. That's the sort of holdup is building coffins. And in the United States, less than a dozen executions follow the war, almost all of them former guerrillas, who certainly deserve the death penalty. And then Henry Wirtz is the sort of highest ranking civilian commander, the head of the Andersonville prison. And I would argue part of the reason he's killed is he's actually a foreigner. And it sort of feels more acceptable in this instance. Interesting. But Lee Davis, you know, Davis serves time in prison and claims himself a martyr. But

There's no physical punishment that's lasting. And there's no serious effort, as happened even in, say, I mean, certainly post-war Germany and post-war Japan after World War II, when the United States, I mean, the successful reconstruction of Japan was predicated on breaking up the landholding patterns that had prevailed there for centuries at that point, and certainly the empire's holdings, and redistributing that and kind of force-making a democracy. Sure. In economic terms.

And that was tremendously difficult to do and in its own way violent. But it, of course, produced a stable and durable and democratic Japan. Well, that's 40 acres and a mule, right? Yeah. So there were people in, you know, and Sherman most famously issues that special field order number 15, which promises that. And Johnson then allows that order to basically be overturned. So it's awfully hard to predict the downstream consequences, but a more genuine commitment to enfranchising and offering. formerly enslaved people

an opportunity to economically succeed could have transformed things. Yeah. But that would have required, as we've learned, a longer military occupation would have tested all the limits of people's patience in the North. Politically, it just wasn't really probably feasible when you see what was happening in the world at the time

with the West opening and so forth. No, it would have required, as you say, a sort of level of commitment and foresight from white northerners that's hard to imagine and also kind of generosity towards, again, a community that is formally enslaved people towards whom they didn't feel particularly generous to begin with. Exactly. And so in that sense, there's a degree to which we set up reconstruction as a success or failure

is a kind of false framing of what was actually happening at the time. Much as we might like there to have been the opportunity for this, I'm not sure it's 100% it's reasonable to assume. Exactly. But it's a good practice to go through to sort of. of study it from above, even though it was inevitable that it would be complicated down in the weeds there. It was reconciliation over punishment, I think, is a fair way of looking at the whole. Alternative paths, as we said, are so difficult that you can't even really imagine them.

That's just a counterfactual at that point. But I'm curious, as we conclude here, Aaron, what is your feeling about the lasting legacy of this? You do so much of this in your work. do you feel a positive, I think you've already referred to some positives that have happened as a result, but in general, is this still a groan to you? Or do you feel like we've learned the right lessons from it? Well, I think, I mean, in a way, you know, we talk a lot about the lost cause and the difficulties of kind of getting a clear view of the civil war, given the predominance of the lost cause, this false narrative. Reconstruction still suffers under that in ways that he sort of have cleared the cobwebs out of the Civil War memory problem.

the memory of reconstruction itself is in some ways more contested still in the white South than the Civil War is. And, you know, I mean, I run into people, certainly older people, if you're in your 70s or 80s, who had gone to high school and college in the South that were taught a vision of reconstruction that, you know, could have been written in 1900, 1890 about, you know, quote, Negro misrule. The good example of this is the marker, the historic marker in Fairfax. I mean, it's Eric Colfax in Louisiana. that was put up in the 1950s that said, on this spot, 150 black men and three white men died in an event marking the end of carpet bag misrule in the South. Wow. And that marker stood until 2021. I was actually there when they removed it.

And today, there's now a much bigger marker that actually explains Colfax. But that is only literally in the last handful of years that we have managed to kind of retell that story. I do think there are significant positives, certainly as I discussed in terms of the mobilization and the ability of the black community to begin building permanent family structures and out of that church networks and educational networks and business communities. These are the institutions that allow them to survive the horrors of Jim Crow. From the distance, it's also, in fact, a very useful episode for people to think about social reform to study to understand exactly how. where the sort of unpredictability really manifests itself, how to imagine and how much foresight we need to have to sort of game out all of the various scenarios. The 14th Amendment is, of course,

crucial to most of modern American commercial and legal life. The promise of due process is what eventually ensures that the 1964 Civil Rights Act can stick and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. So the legal consequences, even as sort of constrained as they become by the end of reconstruction, thanks to a conservative court, nonetheless have profound ramifications. I mean, one of the other things that listeners should, of course, observe is that the first 10 amendments to the bill of right, to the constitution known as the Bill of Rights, are all restrictions on the freedom of government to do certain things. It's what's called negative liberty.

His philosophers frame this. The government can't search and siege, seize. They can't make you testify against. yourself, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments mark a profound shift towards what's called positive liberty. They are instead of restrictions on the state, they are grants to the state of authority to go do something. In this case, in the case of the 14th Amendment, what it says is the right of due process shall not be abridged, the equal enforcement of laws. Congress, the sections two of most of those amendments are, Congress shall have the authority to enforce

this legislation. That's a positive grant to go out and ensure now that people are existing in a world that is the United States where the laws are equally enforced. It's a very different framing of federal authority and of how we conceptualize what liberty is. And so those have enormous ramifications, you know, all the way up through today. And listeners who aren't experts in legal history may not sort of remember or be aware of that distinction. And there are later amendments that use negative liberty as well. But that shift is an important one. Obviously, the political mobilization of the Republican Party

has dramatic consequences for the creation of the transcontinental railroad, for the Homestead Act, for the land grant colleges for all of the huge white settlement of the West in the post-war decades. So all of those things they're able to accomplish, we tend to focus on the obvious failures, and these are significant and merit attention. At the same time, though,

there are some sort of bona fide, clear lines of productivity and sort of result that come out of this. Both of us were young kids at the time, but was, I don't remember or I haven't heard enough about this, were the 60s and the laws passed, the Civil Rights Act and the voting right, were they framed as a correction to what was lost because of Reconstructions collapse? At the time, I don't remember. Some people talked explicitly about a second Reconstruction, that what's needed now is to, in fact, take those laws. the 1866 Civil Rights Act.

There's another Civil Rights Act passed in the 1870s that became dead letters, thanks to the circumscribed Supreme Court opinions, and to reinterpret those in ways that provided actual protection and actual fair enforcement of the laws without regard to race. Famously, one of the histories of Reconstruction or of the post-war era, the strange career of Jim Crow, Martin Luther King, that book came out in 1954 by C. Van Woodward, and Martin Luther King, Jr., at one point, held this up and said,

this is our historical map here. This is for the civil rights movement because one of the things that Woodward does in the book is he says, Jim Crow is an invented past. And it's predicated on this idea that white and black people lived apart, which they never did. They always lived deeply intertwined lives

and that it was created. And if you can create a legal order that's restrictive as white southerners do, you can also create a more expansive legal order. And this finally only comes in the 1950s and 60s. But no, there are certainly people at the time that are talking about a second reconstruction in very explicit terms because the black historians, people like W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter Woodson and others had already

mapped out what sort of reconstruction might have looked like had those been enforced in the right way. And so it gives the major reinterpretation of reconstruction happens in the 1960s when historians start looking back and saying, wait, this wasn't a failure because it went too far. That was. what white Southerners said. It was a failure because it didn't go far enough. Wow. It didn't actually provide fair protection of, you know, for all people. Well, perspective is everything, and we may never learn the true impact of reconstruction or its consequences for many years to come. But I think that that's the importance of this era is that

it will continue to resonate, won't it? To be sure, to be sure. And I think, you know, it's one of the, I mean, as a civil war historian primarily, though I'm now working on a post-war project, I do want people and Americans generally to pay attention to reconstruction, you know, and to think about what it means to have moments of political opportunity and of rapid social and economic change and how these things intersect. That's the world that we're in right now, as you noted, rapid technological development, unpredictable economic and social change, and political upheaval. And as those sort of three forces collide, this is a very useful moment to be able to kind of put under the microscope and see the decisions that were made and what effects they produce so that

in our own time we make the wisest possible choices, knowing that, of course, there will be unintended consequences to what we do that, you know, we can't avoid. Aaron Shee and Dean is the Fred C. Freyer, Professor of History at LSU in Baton Rouge. He is the author of a number of books, but especially pertinent, fighting with the past, how 17th century history shaped the American Civil War. Get that, look into this man's good work, and we will hopefully see him again. Aaron, enjoy your vacation. Thank you so much for joining us. We'll do. Thank you, Don. Appreciate it. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes,

two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great. but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support.