You're Wrong About - Reconstruction with Jamelle Bouie

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

Jamelle Bouie explains to Sarah what the Reconstruction era was, why it remains relevant today, and how this history lesson is one that could get some high school teachers into legal trouble due to passage of anti-CRT laws. Jamelle at the New York TimesJamelle's podcast Unclear and Present DangerJamelle discussing the Electoral College on YWA Jamelle talking with Sarah about the Saw series on You Are Good. Support us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good[YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks:https://www.patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.nytimes.com/column/jamelle-bouiehttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/unclear-and-present-danger/id1592411580https://www.buzzsprout.com/1112270/episodes/6380692https://www.podpage.com/you-are-good/sawniverse/https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-good/http://maintenancephase.com/https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodSupport the show (http://patreon.com/yourewrongabout)Support the show

It's like TikTok, it's like the commit a hate crime challenge. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where sometimes we talk about things that happened before the Reagan administration. With me today is my wonderful guest, Jamel Buie. Hello, Jamel. Hello, Sarah. How are you? I am doing all right.

I'm doing OK. You were on a wonderful harrowing episode just over a year ago now. Last November, we talked about the electoral college. That's one of my favorites that we've done. And I feel like this one is just as topical. Yes, for this go around, we talked about reconstruction, the time after the end of the Civil War we spoke about its consequences for the country about its sort of relevance for us.

Like talked about why it's even worth discussing reconstruction 150 years after the fact. I just always want to make everything that happens in December. Somehow holiday related, it's a compulsion. So I hope that this is a good holiday gift to everyone. Because I do think that, you know, the end of the year is when we think about what we've just experienced and think about time and history and what we want to let go of and bring forward.

And this feels like a good time for talking about all of this. I think that's a great way to put it, because it is a period of American history where that forces you to sort of think and reflect very deeply about the big picture questions of this country's history and of this country's present and its future. But it's certainly the case that there remain unresolved issues and questions coming out of that war and coming out of its aftermath. And speaking of moral panics, which I always like to be only a few yards away from, are we engaging in this episode in the moral panic of our moment

critical race theory? Yes, I mean, that's when we recorded this, I think this was still just kind of bubbling up, but then it really exploded with the Virginia gubernatorial election in November. But when you look at the laws being passed in states across the country, there are laws that very straightforwardly outlaw any teaching that gets into the issues and questions posed by reconstruction, right? Like there's no way to talk about this period without talking about the ways

that racism is a fundamental part of the American story of the structuring of American society, the critical race theory laws that have been passed more or less make that impossible to teach in the classroom to kids. So while you're listening to this, keep in mind that this is a conversation. If this were played for kids in Tennessee, the teacher might find themselves in legal trouble, which is a crazy thing to think. It's totally a buck wild. And like I want a sequel to inherit the wind as much as the next person.

But is this really the way to get it? I mean, there's there's nothing more revealing than fear of the truth. It's not really an accident that this panic over critical race theory is about kids. It's about students. It's about white students, specifically, no one gets upset when they hear about black elementary schools experiencing racism, right? No one, no, no one, but the parents of those kids get upset about it. There's no national panic about kids of color experience and racism.

But there is national panic about white kids may be developing a bit more empathy for their black and Hispanic peers. That to me is very revealing about what the foundation of this panic is. Right. And I feel like the conservative or one of the conservative talking points I've seen is like, this is going to give white children bad self-esteem. It'll be terrible for them. And it's and like that position seems to me to be showing the person who says that holding the children in low esteem, because it's like kids can deal with reality.

They're pretty good at it a lot of the time, I think. No, I think that's right. But I can't imagine the kid who would personally feel ashamed because if they were guilty of something for learning any of this stuff, but they might they might feel a little bit ashamed about their country. They might feel a little bit ashamed about the extent to which the country hasn't remedied these things I can imagine for some American parents must be in existential fear. To me, the thing that hangs over this moral panic are just the George Floyd protests.

You know, obviously you had big multiracial protests and, you know, the big cities and the big metro areas. But you also had in like little rural towns and then tiny towns, like, you know, white teenagers getting their peers together to march in defense, march in honor of this middle-aged black guy killed Minneapolis. That kind of empathy, which I think is even if this isn't the intent of history education, I think that kind of empathy across space and culture that you saw with the George Floyd protests is something that you can practice

with good historical education, developing an empathy across time. I love looking at empathy as a powerful, potentially dangerous, dangerous, at least to the status quo, not just an emotion, but a practice. I can't help but search for a silver lining. I don't know. I don't know how to not do it. But what my my hope is, at least, is that this is the kind of moral panic that comes out of a sense of fear. And maybe in this case, it's that fear is the positive sign

because it means things are happening. I think that's right. On a tentative note of optimism. Sir Humel, where else can we find you once we are done with this hour and need more hours? So I have my New York Times column that's lately I've not been writing twice a week, but usually it's twice a week. And I have a new podcast, not through the New York Times, just me and a buddy of mine, John Gans, who is a freelance writer.

He's working on a book on the politics of the 1990s and we're both big fans of the political and military thrillers of the decade. You might call them dad movies of the 90s. I'm a dad. He is not. But, you know, everyone can enjoy dad movie and the podcast is called Unclear and Present Danger and they concede as we watch one of these movies and there are way more of them than I think people might realize and try to place them within the context of the politics of the 90s of sort of the concerns

of the post Cold War United States, a bit of a movie podcast, a bit of a politics podcast, but something I've had a lot of fun doing thus far. So if you are so inclined, please listen, you can find this wherever podcasts are found. Yeah, you're inclined. You know you are. By the way, I was at a bar recently with a friend who was trying to tell people that I have a podcast and telling people the name. And so that means that some number of people in the world now believe

that I host a show called Your Roundabout, which I assume is about traffic roundabouts near you. So maybe I'll do that next. And we have bonus episodes on Patreon. We just released on there an episode with Jamie Loftus talking about the Pinkerton detectives and a case of theirs involving ghosts, or did it? Coming out this month, we're going to have Eric Michael Garcia talking about the movie Music. If you are curious about what happens in that movie but don't want to watch it, I would recommend this episode for you.

Next time, I'm going to be telling our friend Jamie Loftus about the Amityville horror. I'm very excited about it. I have so much to say. And for now, we're going to stick with the haunted house that is America itself. So here we go into the past. See you on the other side. Yeah, where do you want to start us? Let's go. You tell me, did you spend any time in high school on reconstruction or in college? I feel like it would have been like a day, but my sense of it is that it seemed to fall into a crevice

and be conveniently looked over the same way that maybe a little bit similarly to how World War One often does. I know enough about World War One to suspect that it gets short shrift when we teach history to kids because it was like on the face of it and utterly pointless and a horrific loss of life. And you can't study it like World War Two where there's some kind of an ethical lesson maybe in there. This one was just like, what? This is what people are? I have plenty of memories from high school, though, of talking about the Civil War itself and kind of the lead into it. All I can say comprehensively is that I have a total lack of memories of it. The way you described how World War One gets glossed over, I think is a really good analogy to how reconstruction gets glossed over.

Because the First World War, it's very much a European war that Americans don't really play a starring role in. And so I think in teaching it to kids, it's sort of like, oh yeah, so there's this big war, it was very bloody, it was terrible. And then you kind of skip over to the Second World War because that's the big American war, right? That's the one where at least when we were in school, you would have a grandparent or a great grandparent who fought in it. You know, veterans are still very much around. The Civil War is kind of the main event of 19th century American history. It offers opportunity for kids to get really engaged in creative and fruitful ways, sometimes less so. You know, kids cosplaying, it's Confederate, it's not great.

The thing that I experienced growing up down south, but the Civil War gets all the attention. But the aftermath is very much kind of breezed through because it doesn't have the same clear dividing lines. It doesn't have the same kind of drama, at least not in a macro sense. If there's any way to teach this, it should really be the reverse. We should really think of reconstruction as being the seminal event of 19th century American history. And reconstruction being an event that begins during the Civil War and ends after 15 years of conflict and violence and reform with a new status quo, not just in the south, but in the entire country. If listeners come away from anything from this, I think it should be emphasized that the story of reconstruction is not the story solely of the south. It's the story of how the entire United States began to recover from the Civil War.

And for the brevity's sake, I think we're going to focus on events in the south, but it cannot be understated how much the entire country was a part of this process and how much the politics of the north, how much growth in the west influenced in the south. Yeah, and I think it's important to frame it as the entire country recovering, I'm sure for many reasons, but what comes to mind for me is the idea that the victorious side has to recover from a war also. It also occurs to me that we really love to frame the Civil War as a really grand, exhausting narrative. I'm just thinking of the Civil War media that I feel like is really prestigious and influential, so Ken Burns, the Civil War, and Shelby Foote's series, and even the movie Lincoln, you end any of those and you're like, I am spent. And it's like finishing the Lord of the Rings, and then I feel like you would just have the sense of like, and then things in Middle Earth were fine for a little while. I'm sure I don't have the energy for it. Right. After Appomattox, it seems like there's this big, that's the conclusion, and the rest is sort of just, the rest is the four false endings of Return of the King. Right. And you're just like, okay, yes, you're coming home to your children. Oh my God, just walk through the gate. Yeah.

I think narrative is something that human beings crave in a way that makes a well constructed narrative feel very naturally occurring to us, like a smooth stone from a river. There's always something to me very meaningful about thinking like, wait, this doesn't feel like the big story to me because it objectively is the biggest story. It's also been helped to acquire the kind of heft that it has today. First, a little bit of Civil War context. Abraham Lincoln is elected in November 1860. He wins the presidency without a single Southern state. That more or less immediately triggers what's called the Secession Crisis, beginning with South Carolina, but quickly taking up most of the what's called the Old South pretty soon by February of 1861. Most Southern states have seceded and formed a government called the Confederacy. So the war, South Carolina fires on Fort Sumter in April 1861, and that's the war. Emancipation proclamation is in January 1863.

Later that year, Lincoln issues another proclamation, which pardoned and restores the property of all Confederates who swear allegiance to the Union and agree to accept emancipation. This is important. As far as states reentering the Union, it requires only 10 percent of a former Confederate states voters to pledge this oath before they can be entered back on the Union. So relatively lenient to all things considered. In 1865, somewhere around 180,000 black Americans, either freed slaves or free blacks are serving in the Union Army. I think comprising some double digit percentage of the entire armed forces. This is sort of unprecedented in world history of formerly enslaved people taking up arms on behalf of a government that enslaved. It's this major event that happens that really does fundamentally shape the course of the war, but then also the course of the aftermath. In March, the US government forms the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, which becomes known as the Freedmen's Bureau, tasked with dealing with kind of the refugee crisis following emancipation of enslaved people. In April, Robert E. Lee surrenders of Appomattox. Lincoln gives his last speech where he mentions black suffrage for soldiers.

John Wilkes Booth is famously in the audience for this speech and pledges to run Lincoln through and carries out that pledge. This is one of those events in history which feels like it feels fake, you know, like someone wrote it. The president's assassin is present for his last speech and then like actually declares his intention to assassinate the president. And then does. And then doesn't. Yeah, and I didn't know that before. I'll restrain myself from remarking that there are parallels to the present day every five minutes. It'll get annoying. I should just have like a bell that I get to ring. Lincoln's assassinated in April. Andrew Johnson, who is a Tennessee Unionist, does not secede. Johnson's now president having taken over after Lincoln's assassination.

By the summer, the war is basically over, but somewhere around 650,000 to 850,000 Americans were killed on the battlefield somewhere in the two million or so, two and a half million or so were wounded. So if the American population in 1860 was about 31 million people, this is equivalent to like 10% of the adult population or 10% of the total population, a larger percentage of the adult population, having been killed or wounded over the last four and a half years, which in today's numbers would be something like 35 million people. I mean, then the fact that medicine was such that you hear about someone injured in a war, like I feel like that would be like very visible for the rest of a lot of people's lives and you're kind of living with that shadow. That's exactly right. There would not be a single community in the country that did not know of someone who died fighting. You'd have many men with missing limbs. This was a very common thing as a result of battle for injuries. And so you just have basically a generation of amputees. The aftermath of the war is very, very visible. To kind of begin to define time periods, reconstruction, I like to say it begins in those last few years of the war as President Lincoln is beginning to try out different policies for bringing the southern states back into the union. Andrew Johnson takes us up as well. And the period during which Andrew Johnson is driving reconstruction policies as President for Reconstruction.

President for Reconstruction ends more or less with Johnson impeachment in 1868. Congress takes over, especially when Ulysses as Grant, who was the head of armed forces in the last years of the war, was elected president in 1868. And so under him, a faction of the Republican Party called the Radical Republicans are the driving force in Reconstruction policy more or less until the middle of the 1870s when a whole confluence of events diminished their influence and then kind of pushes to the end of the period. Naturally, to talk about any period of American political history, you have to talk about the parties in the party system. And it's worth saying that the Democratic Party and Republican parties of the 1860s and 1870s and 1880s are very different things than they are today. It's difficult to even put them on a familiar right-left spectrum. The Democratic Party represents whites in the former Confederacy, sympathetic northern whites. The Republican Party is the party at this point of northern capital. It's the party of a smaller class of kind of radical, you know, pro civil rights, pro what they call free labor lawmakers and figures. And then, of course, this new African American electorate and, you know, the positions each of these groups hold the trajectories of the parties. You can't necessarily cleanly figure them out just based off of like an ideological label. So that's just something to keep in mind. The party system at this period is very, very fluid. And the parties are very different, despite having, you know, this the same name, sort of the big trouble of American political history that we've had the same two parties for for almost 200 years now. But the composition of the parties changes all the time. It feels like they're like manudo. It's like gradually they become something completely different. But there's like not a sudden switch. It just are like the cast of one order.

A part of the problem of talking about reconstruction is that it looks different in different places. It ends in different places at different times. And so when we say, right, the reconstruction ends in 1877 with the election of Hayes and the compromise of 1877, that's like a nice bookend for sort of like a formerly defining the boundaries of the period. But in some places reconstruction is basically over in 1872. In some places, reconstruction or the kinds of politics that we emerge in reconstruction wouldn't fully collapse until the 1880s, even a bit longer than that. So especially in the states of the old South, the interior states, the coastal states, not so much Arkansas and not so much Kentucky, but in South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, black populations range from a low end of like 20, 29% to a high end of close to 50%. So in Mississippi, most people who live in the state in 1866 are black. Somewhere between 45 and 50% of people living in South Carolina at the end of the Civil War are black. That means in practice that there are going to be regions, counties, localities where most of the population is black and where whites are the distinct minority. And this very much shapes how reconstruction plays out in different places because in places where there are black populations are more sparsely populated or more sparsely distributed or there aren't any big concentrations where there weren't big plantations. For example, reconstruction is going to take a very different path than places where the opposite was true.

I mean, that seems like it would create a situation where if you have an area that had a large plantation previously that then it might be easier for reconstruction to have attraction in meaningful ways because suddenly you have a large free black population because of the intensity of the subjugation before. That's right. The places where you have the most dramatic changes but also kind of the fiercest backlash are these places where black Americans could really seize and contest political power in a way that they couldn't necessarily in places where there were smaller black population, they were less concentrated. So, rewind back to 1865, Lincoln's been assassinated and Andrew Johnson is president. Johnson, who at the start of his tenure, some radicals and some black activists like Frederick Douglass think he might be a real ally. He comes from a impoverished background as a politician in Tennessee demonstrated kind of fierce hostility towards the planter class, the people more or less responsible for the Civil War and seemed to show no love for slaveholding. This was a Democrat who seems to really despise the Southern elites and that alone might be useful for trying to impose discipline and reconstruct the South into a different kind of society. But unfortunately for the radical Republicans, unfortunately for many Southerners, Johnson was also a virulent racist even for the period people commented on just how much this guy did not like black people. It was sort of, it was noteworthy even then. Noteworthy for the period has to be extreme.

Yes, lots of white Americans were racially prejudiced, but ideological racism of that kind wasn't necessarily widespread, right? Like this is in Simpson's Lincoln story, a guy who is racially prejudiced, but isn't like an ideological racist, right? Isn't someone who's like, this is a white man's government. Right. Like he doesn't sit around thinking about like why he's racist necessarily or like writing treatises. That's about right. And in Lincoln's case, the fact that he wasn't necessarily an ideological racist, he wasn't a white supremacist necessarily meant that he could, he was actually pretty open to changing his mind and changing his views and beginning to sort of like wreck in with his own prejudices. Johnson, not like that at all. Johnson would at multiple occasions call the United States a white man's government and was very much of the view that black Americans had a place and their place was to be subjects and not citizens. And so when he begins presidential reconstruction, and he's also very, I don't want to draw too many parallels to the president, but he's very Trump-like in that he is desperate for the approval of his social betters. Both hates the planter class, but like wants them to think well of him. When former Confederates begin to flatter him, begin to sort of try to get him on their side, he's very susceptible to that. And so all of this, his racism, his sort of like pathological neediness, all helps produce Johnson's presidential reconstruction policy, which is defined by its leniency to former Confederate and Confederate leaders.

He restores land to former owners. He calls for general amnesty of all Confederate combatants, restoration of property, not including slaves, but definitely including land. So planters could have their land back. And they're like, thanks, we have no idea what to do with this. Well, to jump ahead a little bit, the fact that the planter class retained control of its land meant that it could sort of force the formerly enslaved back into economic and social relations, which resembled slavery. So in a sense, not returning their slaves or returning their land was like, you might as well just give them back slaves as well. There have to be many situations where the difference is essentially in name only. Yes, that's right. Part of this is ex-former Confederates can still run for office. I mean, they're completely reinstated as citizens of the United States. So it's like punishing white collar crime. It's like, you know, go play tennis for a couple years and then you can come back to the PTA. Right. And so southern states with a bunch of former Confederates back in office begin passing what are called black codes.

Black codes are basically attempts to control black labor for the sake of these landowners who now can't legally coerce the formerly enslaved through the institution of slavery, but are using now state power to do it for them. An example of the black codes are freed men are prohibited from work except as field hands. Blacks who refuse to sign labor contracts can be punished. Unemployed black men can be seized in auction to planters as laborers themselves. So, you know, basically just re-enslaved. Yeah. Black children can be taken from their families and made to work. Okay. So they're like, but we're not calling it slavery. We're calling it something else. It's called something else. Don't worry. So under Johnson, the southern states are the former Confederates trying to kind of get back up to speed.

I'm trying to distinguish between southern states and Confederacy because the Confederacy was not the entire south, right? It was most of the white population. But of course, again, many people in these states were black. Most states had unionist factions that resisted. The Confederacy represented maybe the majority of white Southerners, but I don't think you should generalize that to save the south as an entire entity. So Johnson's presidential reconstruction really is pissing off radical Republicans who basically like, listen, this whole war was fought to crush the planter class, restore the union, and we're kind of just like giving everything back to them. The radical Republicans are getting angry in Washington with Johnson's presidential policies. Part of this is that the Republicans in Congress pass a civil rights bill. Johnson vetoes it. The veto message is kind of funny in that Johnson's like, we freed these people. What more do they want from the government? Kind of presaging the next 150 years of rhetoric and that regards. I don't know. Yeah, of course, it makes sense that we like to end the story where like Lincoln's assassinated in the war ends and everyone's like, well, it certainly was a civil war and curtain because then it's like that. It kind of dampens the great celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation and everything where you're like, and then everyone was like, slavery's over.

This metaphysical state in which people existed is gone. Like legally, everything's different and functionally, let's make everything exactly the same. It undermines that comforting sense of history as a steady upward trajectory maybe that we all really would really like to believe. During this period as former Confederates restarting themselves in the South, you have two of the first big instances of kind of racialized violence in Memphis, Tennessee. There's a riot that kills 48 people. Most of them black burned down hundreds of homes and churches. That's in May and then a few months later in July in New Orleans, there is a white mob which attacks a group of black Unionists and radical Republicans attending a black suffrage convention and this kills 40 people. And they very much reflect what's going to be an ongoing story in Reconstruction, which is organized vigilante violence against blacks, attempts to use violent force to reimpose the social status associated with slavery. If you can't enslave people, you can at least push them to the bottom of the social hierarchy as much as possible. Congress sends the 14th Amendment to the States in 1866. The 14th Amendment extends the protections of the Bill of Rights to citizens.

It establishes birthright citizenship if you're born in American soil, then you are an American citizen, thus sort of invalidating the judgment of Dred Scott v. Sanford in 1856, which held that black Americans could not be citizens. It also provides measures for the Congress to disenfranchise states that deny voting rights to their populations. A mechanism has never been actually used, but it's like right there in the amendment. So zoom out a little bit. This entire year is basically in Washington at a tug of war between Congress and President Johnson, who is running full steam ahead with his leniency strategy. And Johnson's grand vision is that he'll get elected in his own right in 1868 and be kind of this leader of the white smallholder of the small farmer north and south. He ends up in the midterm elections doing his own kind of campaign called the swing around the circle, which becomes notorious for how he ends up haranguing audiences. He's drunk and belligerent. And it ends up being a big disaster for him and the Republicans win a ton of seats in Congress and they basically win enough seats to override any presidential veto. The next two years are Congress really beginning to assert itself against the president. This is when we can see the beginning of congressional reconstruction. Where's our Johnson biopic? Where is it?

There's been a great book that came out last year about his impeachment and there's a new book this year about him. And there's been a lot of good material, I think precisely because of the echoes with the present. A lot of good Johnson material. So a Johnson movie would be tough because you'd have to have someone willing to play a bastard. We're much too close to the events of our current existences to mine them for soapy melodrama, but maybe that would be a fun way to undermine Johnson from beyond the grave. So this back and forth between Congress and Johnson escalates into 1867. Johnson tries to fire the Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who is a Lincoln guy. Stanton refuses to leave. Congress passes the tenure of office act, which requires the consent of Congress to remove a cabinet official. Johnson, rightfully, I think, believes this is unconstitutional and tries to force out Stanton by ordering Grant to take over the War Department temporarily. Grant resigns his position as interim secretary of war when Congress tries to reinstate Stanton. And this whole thing is what culminates in Johnson's impeachment. He's impeached for violating the tenure of office act. Now, because that act is probably unconstitutional, it's not clear Congress really has that much of a like to stand on.

But the reason Johnson's being impeached, his violation of the tenure of office act is a pretext. The reason he's being impeached is because he's been an obstacle to Republican reconstruction policies, which the Republican Party in the Congress wants reconstruction to be much more aggressive than Johnson is willing to ascend to. And so the impeachment is basically an attempt to remove Johnson and put in someone who will be more amenable to the kinds of policies Congress wants. Johnson is impeached. He's not removed. He's saved by a single vote. Wow. But he doesn't get the Democratic nomination for the upcoming presidential election. His career is over at this point. Grant gets the Republican nomination and goes on to a very easy victory against Horatio Seymour. Now that the Congress has taken over reconstruction, it has sent federal troops back into the south.

It has removed Confederates from office and has made ratification of the 14th Amendment a precondition for re-entering the Union. This means that in many of these states, formerly enslaved people are winning suffrage rights. They are the ones who are taking over legislatures or winning office and winning substantial numbers of seats in state legislatures. And they're the ones who are beginning to write new constitutions for Southern states. So in South Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi and Louisiana in particular, black lawmakers are sort of at the forefront of restructuring the states. And are doing so in ways that we would recognize today as being very progressive, establishing the first public school systems, establishing public hospitals and orphanages, liberalizing property rights with regards to women. So I believe it's in the South Carolina Constitution that's constructed by these coalitions of white Unionists and freed blacks who are serving in office. Allow women to retain more property, to have more rights and divorce proceedings.

So these constitutions are being written, including suffrage rights for all men in the states and end up becoming some of the most progressive constitutions the South would see into the 20th century. Grant is elected president in 1868 and then the next phase of reconstruction begins. This is really when stuff begins to get very dicey. So Friedman's Bureau continues to grow, establishing schools serving tens of thousands, I think at somewhere around 150,000 students in the South. Former Confederate states are tasked with ratifying the 15th Amendment. This states that the right to vote cannot be denied on the basis of race and establishes black manhood suffrage as sort of a constitutionally protected. With kind of the rise of black political power in southern states, there comes a pretty strong backlash in the former, at the moment, mostly unorganized violence from former Confederates leaders rank and file who are trying to undermine not just state officials but local officials, local sheriffs, black and white Republicans who are working with them and on behalf of the Republican Party and of the Reconstruction governments.

It's out of all of this that you get the Ku Klux Klan, which emerges in these last years of the 1860s. The Klan emerges first as kind of like a lark, a bunch of young guys put on costumes. The white hoods that we know of as Klan regalia today didn't exist yet. Like so much stuff in American life, that is a creation of pop culture, birth of a nation. It's the pro-Klan propaganda of the 1910s, which ends up providing the template for the resurgence of the Klan in the 20th century. But the OG Klan in 1860s and 70s, they wore costumes, you know, like they grab your wife's silk and lace, put on curtains, cut some holes in them. This is so strange. And go terrorize local blacks.

We find it revealing maybe that it's a combination of doing something so sinister and so kind of laughable and silly. We're doing fancy dress-up and then we're going to go, you know, maybe commit some murders. Who knows? I think people have a hard time understanding that something can be both a bit and deadly serious. Gathering around in costumes, terrorize people to scare them begins as a bit, right? It begins as sort of like a way to pass time, but the recognition that it actually scares people ends up turning it into something more, even as it retains some of the qualities of being a performance. I'm going to quote here from a great book. It's called Ku Klux, The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction by Elaine France Parsons.

She writes, the first Ku Klux was likely not founded for the direct purpose of racial conflict. The Ku Klux was designed purely for amusement and for some time after its founding, it had no ulterior motive or effect. But this changes pretty soon after its founding as a result of both the desire to want to control black political activity and black agency, as something that almost grows out of the performance that is part of being the Klan. Parsons also notes, although in the early days of the Klan, some members were probably committing violence and probably against freed people and probably in a collective manner, the kind of excessively performative quality of the violence, as well as the claims that these attackers were part of a larger movement, but it's not present in those early days, but would become part of it. One way to think of how the Ku Klux Klan develops in these years from 1860 to 1872 is almost like a meme.

The Klan has been committing this extravagant, carnival-esque violence in costumes. They scare people. Newspapers write about it. Other people read about it and they say, that sounds like a good idea. That sounds fun. We'll do it too. It's like TikTok or something. It's like the commit a hate crime challenge.

Yes. During Grant's first four years in office, what you have in the South are the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and other organized vigilante violence that is destabilizing reconstruction governments. You have the creation of new constitutions as reconstruction governments begin really to move forward and try to establish themselves as the legitimate governments of these states. And these two dynamics produce endemic violence throughout the South during the period. This leads Congress to pass the first of its enforcement acts, the enforcement acts being legislation meant to curtail the Klan. The Justice Department of the United States is actually formed basically to fight the Klan. These enforcement acts, although they don't result in mass arrests of Klan's men, do result in basically sending the Klan underground for a time, suppressing at least this form of collective racial violence and individual activity. It doesn't last and that is in large part because the end of slavery has more or less turned social relations in the South completely upside down.

Even when you have many blacks still in the land in which they were enslaved, maybe working under a planter who still owns their land. You also have blacks who are purchasing land themselves, developing land themselves, accumulating political power and beginning to assert themselves against former Confederate leaders against a white elite class in the region or in the locality or in the state that finds this not just offensive on kind of a racial prejudice level, but existentially offensive, right? Something that kind of cuts to the very core of their being. Those white elites begin to organize in order to kind of push back against the Reconstruction governments against this assertion of black political power and black political agency. The pushback made by elites doesn't occur in a vacuum. It occurs underneath the auspices of the Democratic Party, which still exists. It's still competing in elections in the South, but it's turning into some in some places in almost quasi military organization where you have Democratic politicians operating out in the open and then maybe sometimes the very same men donning costumes, putting on mask and hoods and committing violence at night.

And so even as there's this federal crackdown on anti-black violence and clan violence, there's not enough federal troops in the area. There are not enough people present to really begin to stop this. It feels like they're treating it as like a minor moral hypocrisy. You tell your kids, like, don't smoke, and then you actually, you do have the occasional cigarette, but you're like, it's my business. The consistency with which I feel like you're describing people acting like, oh no, I would never put on a costume and terrorize and hunt people. Does that suggest to you the idea of this is not an immoral act, basically? Well, it's interesting. Democratic leaders, political leaders operate out in the open, but often condemn the violence. Well, they would condemn it and also say, you know, well, you have to expect that people will behave this way when their face with such, you know, travesties as black people in power.

And so there's a recognition that this was all distasteful, but also it was sort of tacitly approved of. But also once you start getting in sort of the western edges of the south, like East Texas, like Louisiana, like Mississippi, where white populations are exceptionally hostile towards reconstruction governments, where the remoteness relative to federal government makes it easier to sort of organize opposition, it becomes difficult to counter this stuff. It's worth moving to the next four years, 1872 to 1876, which is when the forces that would begin to unravel reconstruction really begin to pick up steam. In Washington, Grant is still executing reconstruction policies. There's also policies out in the west where Grant is one of the architects of basically Indian removal in the west. The US government was in addition to trying to reconfigure the south along sort of the lines of free labor and northern capital, the government is trying to tame the west and turn it into a place for settlers for markets. And so this is part of this as well.

But it's been close to a decade of reconstruction. If we begin our date in 1865, the Republican Party is no longer as unified as it once was, and there's beginning to be discontent within the party over the extent to which the government is investing so many resources in reconstructing the south. Now, there's a faction of Republicans called liberal Republicans who are more conservative, who begin organizing against Grant, organizing against reconstruction, and they attempt to sort of deny Grant a renomination for the 1872 presidential election. They fail, but their standard bearer Horace Greeley, who is a newspaper man, one of the great heel turns in American history. He goes from being a staunchly anti-slavery pro-labor Republican in the 1850s and early 1860s to being this proto-conservative in the 1870s. He gets the Democratic nomination and loses to Grant, again, Grant elected by a landslide. The large part because of the votes of formerly enslaved people in the south, Greeley dies shortly after losing the election. His newspaper, The Tribune, carries on the liberal Republican message and begins to accuse black lawmakers in South Carolina, particularly of corruption.

This becomes one of the big claims against black governments or black influence governments in the south. They are corrupt. They do not deserve the support of the federal government any longer. I don't know. I'm sure this is a very human thing to think that things are worse. They used to be better. And really, as a student of American history, I feel like you have to accept, like, no, we've always been flinging wild and unsubstantiated allegations at people out of sheer feeling like it. Yeah, pretty much. Part of the story of Reconstruction is Reconstruction historiography and the ways in which Reconstruction has been remembered in American memory. I think most of your listeners will probably know something called the Lost Cause, the idea that the Civil War was this tragic fight between brothers and that the Confederacy was fighting for, you know, it's liberty and it's honorable in its own way. Part of the Lost Cause was sort of a historiography of Reconstruction, which held it as being this horrible mistake, right, that we let these basically savage people take over governments and they oppressed the south.

This was kind of like just the mainstream understanding of Reconstruction, especially beginning in the early 20th century. By the end of the 19th century, the white north and the white south had largely reconciled and part of that reconciliation was accepting this narrative of the period as kind of just a terrible mistake. Pop culture tropes that we still have like the noble Confederate going out west, which is present in John Ford movies. It's present in, you know, Firefly and Serenity. It's a enduring trope of American pop culture has their origins in all of this back against Lost Cause historiography of Reconstruction was in 1932, 1933, with a book by the famous probably the greatest American public intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, whose Black Reconstruction really is the foundation, I think, for modern understanding of Reconstruction. Not only is its impact still felt today, but there are research has research happening now that is more or less confirming observations that Du Bois made in the 1930s. But he makes this point about the opposition to black led governments in the south and how opponents of Reconstruction had a strong interest in discrediting him. He quotes a black lawmaker who goes through the list of accomplishments. We had built school houses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system, provided for the education of the deaf and dumb, rebuilt the jails and courthouses, rebuilt the bridges and reestablished the fairies.

In short, we had reconstructed the state and places upon the road to prosperity. And at the same time, by our extra financial reform, a government indebtedness not greater by more than two and a half million dollars than was the bond debt of the state of 1868. So basically, this should have put the state on stronger fiscal terms. And so after quoting this, Du Bois notes what South Carolina, what South Carolina whites wanted was not reform in a narrow sense, and it wasn't even really attacking corruption. If there was one thing that South Carolina feared more than bad Negro government, it was good Negro government. A successful government by black lawmakers and their white allies would undermine the racial order profoundly. In addition to everything else, there was this sort of existential conflict happening in these states over trying to reestablish something like the old racial order and recognizing that the way to do it is to undermine black governments and kind of scare black senators into submission. Again, sorry with the references to timeliness, but I feel like this seems like just a very American trend of sort of seeing something that undermines your belief in white supremacy and then feeling not like you're incorrect, but that like you have to adjust reality to confirm your belief system. Yes. That's very much what is happening. The conflict over race hierarchy was also a conflict over labor and over who could control it and how would it be organized. And part of what is turning more conservative Republicans in the north against grants and against the reconstruction policies is this desire to be done with trying to create equal citizens and just sort of give northern capital a steady supply of low-wage labor.

And so what Du Bois argues in his book is that what emerges during this period is sort of an alliance of northern capital with the former planter class, which also is seeking to control labor. The process of trying to enforce race hierarchy through violence ends up being the means through which there's an attempt to co-op this group, not just by punishing whites who work with blacks, but also trying to establish privileges for all whites above all blacks once reactionaries get their hands back on the levers of power. This is why I think the significance of this is national in reconstruction. You get the beginnings of what would become the American racial order for as much as there is right like a deliberate effort to try to recreate white solidarity. It is also true that like there are people who just like they grew up in a society of white solidarity and never let go of it. When conditions emerged that made that kind of the path of least resistance, people took it. Even if the final impact was to empower basically the wealthiest landowners and owners of capital and kind of send the south on kind of a backwards trajectory for the next several decades. Then it becomes a way to identify with the people who are actively screwing you. Right. There's the panic of 1873, big depression, which sort of tanks the Republican Party in midterm elections the following year and also just really debilitates the ability to sustain a troop presence in the south. You sure seem the big kind of massacres again. So in 1873 in April, there's the Colfax massacre in Louisiana, the White League, a paramilitary group clashes with Louisiana's all black state militia.

The state militia is trying to protect the elected government of Colfax Parish. They fail. They do not see the White League massacres hundreds of people and essentially executes a coup d'etat and the government taking control of it. In 1874, that same white league in Louisiana basically seizes control of the state house in New Orleans, seizes control of the city hall, takes the arsenal. Wow. I don't think we had any concept of terrorism at the time, but like that sounds like a terrorist group, right? Yeah, pretty much. It's pretty much just a terrorist group. It's a terrorist group that is understood also to be sort of the paramilitary arm of the Louisiana Democratic Party. We say reconstruction ended. It's probably a better verb to say it was like toppled and it was toppled through this combination of intense partisan competition backed by vigilante violence, that the violence would help create the conditions for partisan victory. You terrorize your opponents, you kill their elected officials, and then when they don't come out to the ballot box, you claim victory. The Democratic Party kind of fractures into one group willing to kind of compromise with the Republicans and another group that call themselves white line Democrats, whose primary objective is the re-establishment of white supremacy and the state and will use violence to achieve their aims. And so the white league is like associated with the white line Democrats.

I like how unsettled their naming is. They're like, why? Because now they would be like America first. There's no attempt to kind of hide what this is all about. This is what I mean when I say that reconstruction ends in different places, because what you're seeing as a decade goes on is Republican power wanes in Congress. The Democratic Party and their paramilitary allies really beginning to make headway in toppling, putting so much pressure on Republicans in the states that they can win elections basically through like fraud. South Carolina is another state where anti-reconstruction forces, by this point, they're calling themselves redeemers. They're redeeming the states from the reconstruction governments. By the time we get to the presidential election of 1876, Grant has served his last term, for all intents and purposes, a lot of reconstruction has ended in many places in the south where redeemers have taken power, where Republican officials have been driven from office or have been killed outright. And although there are still black lawmakers serving in the south, the larger picture is of retrenchment happening across the south. Whenever people talk about after January 6th or after Trump, Republican shouldn't be able to win elections for a long time, I always have to remind people that 10 years after the Civil War, Democrats were like winning elections, no problem. So I mean, short memories.

So the next decade is kind of a decade of a lot of change and consolidation in the south as Democrats really win back power for good. That's reconstruction as quickly as I can summarize it. That's pretty fast. Yeah, it kind of impresses, able to pack that much into it. There's a lot skipped over, obviously, but part of the challenge of reconstruction is even as the Constitution now says all Americans, all people born in American soil are American citizens. What is the content of that citizenship? What does it include? But does it entail?

Can the United States be a multiracial democracy? Can it be a society shaped by racial hierarchy that can have people of different races exist as political equals? This is the, I think, the paramount question of reconstruction. And to an extent, the kind of big question of American history. The emergence of kind of the rigid southern racial hierarchy, which would kind of spread throughout the entire United States, isn't a guarantee. It's not a given. It doesn't have to happen. It happens because of particular conditions.

It happens, I think, in large part because it kind of reflects the pressures of capitalist labor relations. This is, again, Du Bois's thesis here, and I very much agree with it. It is the need to establish control over labor that ends up producing the kind of rigid race hierarchy that emerges out of this period. But if the U.S. government were more committed to, say, land redistribution, taking a firmer stance in defense of black voting rights, you might have had a different kind of social and economic order emerge. Reconstruction also is profoundly influential on American institutions. The federal government emerges out of this larger and stronger than it was before. The Supreme Court, after kind of being diminished during the Civil War years and the early Reconstruction years, comes back with a vengeance. All of these things have huge impact going forward.

And here we are today. Yeah, here we are today. The way we tend to teach history, or at least I have tended to learn history, is this idea that we have these big moments where big things happen. Like you fight a war, you give people rights, and then it's handled. I think it's very humbling to think of history not as this grand scope of major events, but as sort of human beings doing the same thing generation after generation. Yes, and it's not a linear progression. It's been over 150 years and we're still dealing with the fallout from the Civil War and the end of Reconstruction. We have a more fruitful relationship to history if we don't think of ourselves as like on this continuum from the past to the future.

And we're going to write the wrongs of the past to build a beautiful future. But just the kind of every day you have to build something, every you have to kind of be constantly attempting to create those moments or like those opportunities for equality. I don't know, just this idea of like doing something as a country and then being done with it as opposed to the whole work of granting freedoms and running a government as like housework. We're like everything you do, you're just doing it constantly. Yeah, I think that's a great analogy for it. Americans love to talk about their freedom and their liberty, but we have these obligations too. We have these obligations to each other. We have these obligations to this democracy.

Like we are stewards and we have to do the housework to make sure that the people who follow us have something that they can improve on. The story of reconstruction I think can serve as an inspiration for those of us who are doing that housework for both inspiration and kind of a cautionary tale, right? Nothing is guaranteed. It's not written in stone that we'll all enjoy the kinds of political freedoms we take for granted. And maybe you lose them and you get them back, but you won't necessarily get them back. The time between the last black person to serve in Congress leaves in 1902. There's not another black representative of Congress for a generation. If you turned 21 in 1876, you'd be long dead before black Americans in the south attained anything like the level of autonomy they had during reconstruction.

I think now quite like tired phrase, the arc of history been towards justice, but it could take a very long time to bend. Yeah, it's a big arc. It's like when you're on a plane and you see the curvature of the earth a little bit and you're like, wow, I can just barely see it. I really appreciated taking this trip through history with you. I feel like more and more lately I'm realizing that like the answers to the questions that I have about the present are usually there in the past. Where can we find your work? Where can we get more of your insights? All of my serious writing is for the New York Times.

I have a column that runs Tuesdays and Fridays and there's also a Saturday newsletter and I also do various, you know, show up on various New York Times podcasts. And also other political podcasts like the Slate Political Gap, that's where I show up every so often. And then other than that, I'm on Twitter, I'm on Instagram and I do, I review breakfast cereal for serious eats. I didn't know that. That's so great. It's both a very fun thing, but also I don't quite understand how it happened.