Un-Reconstructed

In 1930 I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition was written for "the cause of civilized society, as we have known it in the Western World, against the new barbarism of science and technology controlled and directed by the modern power state." As a social document, I'll Take My Stand was flawed by a shaky grasp of the practical matters of farming and by notable inaccuracies and omissions concerning the way life in the Old South was actually lived.

John Crowe Ransom described the "unreconstructed Southerner" clinging persistently to a group of principles that he associated with the South. Robert Penn Warren, in the "Briar Patch" essay that he later repudiated, made a commentary on the racial situation in the South that was based on old, old stereotypes; he wrote that the "Southern negro has always been a creature of the small town and farm" and that he should stay there since he would be more "likely to find in agricultural and domestic pursuits the happiness that his good nature and easy ways incline him to as an ordinary function of his being".

The Civil War settled two questions: it abolished chattel slavery, and it preserved the Union in the sense that it established the doctrine that this is "an indestructible union of indestructible states." These questions the war settled permanently. Two other questions, which grew out of the war, were left for the future: the reconciliation of the Southern people, and the status of the liberated colored race.

It was to be expected that four years of civil war, carried on to the bitter end, would leave their heritage of sectional rancor and animosity. Under the circumstances, the task of reconstructing the political union on just principles, and in a manner likely to reconcile the Southern people to their defeat as quickly as possible and to enable them to resume their political functions without undue humiliation, was an exceedingly difficult one. It might have been accomplished had President Lincoln been spared to shape the policy of reconstruction in the humane and enlightened spirit of the second Inaugural Address-"With malice toward none, with charity for all." But such a spirit was not to prevail. At the moment of victory the President was shot down in cold blood by John Wilkes Booth, a self-constituted avenger of the South. It was the most senseless crime recorded in political history, for it deprived the South of its best friend and the North of its wisest leader - the one indispensable reconciler of a disunited and embittered nation.

President Lincoln's just and humane policy of reconstruction was adopted by his successor; but Andrew Johnson, although an able and well-meaning man, was in origin and by temperament wholly unfitted for the high responsibility which was thus thrust upon him. He assumed all the authority of his office, although it was a mere accident and no popular mandate that placed him in it. No man ever needed a reasonable and conciliatory temper so much who possessed so little of either. An irreconcilable misunderstanding at once developed between the President and the Congress, in which the latter gained the upper hand, and a disastrous policy of reconstruction was finally carried out in a futile spirit of punishment and revenge under the leadership of embittered fanatics such as Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens.

The Southern people accepted their defeat, but they were unwilling to confer immediately upon all the freedmen those civil and political rights which would have given to what tehy viewed as a densely ignorant and hopelessly incompetent race an ascendancy in many Southern states. The North in turn refused to admit the Southern States into the Union on any other terms. To attain these ends, the South was accordingly subjected for some years to military occupation; the Southern whites were practically excluded from all political functions; and under the protection of the Northern army, the negroes, unscrupulously led and exploited by Northern political adventurers called "Carpet-baggers," organized the new state governments which accepted the Northern terms, in the form of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and were then admitted to the Union.

The Carpet-bag regime, in which the whites took practically no part, precipitated a condition of confusion, of political corruption, and of social anarchy such as the war itself never produced; and although it forced the South to accept the Northern terms, it failed to accomplish the object which those terms were designed to accomplish-it failed to confer permanently upon the colored race an equality of civil and political rights. As soon as the Northern army was removed the Southern whites resumed control, and the negroes were immediately, and have since remained, practically disfranchised. In form the Union was restored, but in spirit it remained divided; and the aftermath of bitterness and rancor which divided the sections for a generation was due not so much to the war itself as it was to the experience of the reconstruction era.

The Southern people accepted defeat, they accepted the abolition of slavery, and they were in the way of recognizing that they fought not only a losing cause, but a bad one; but the ruthless, undemocratic, and humiliating domination forced upon them during the Carpet-bag regime, and the economic exploitation which accompanied it, they could not forget and did not forgive. The result was a "Solid South," which remained unreconciled for forty years, and which voted as a unit, first against the Republican party, which sought in vain to confer political privileges and to reconstitute national unity at the point of the bayonet [and much later against the Democrat Party]. The good results of "unconditional surrender" in the military sense of General Lee at Appomattox - were half lost by the "unconditional surrender" in the political and moral sense which the North imposed upon the South after it had admitted defeat and laid down its arms.

It has been well said that slavery was only the worst solution of the negro problem, and that while the war abolished slavery as a bad solution of the problem, it did nothing to abolish the problem itself. This is profoundly true; and it was in large part because the Northern leaders failed to recognize this truth that the reconstruction policy proved a fiasco. The Negro could be freed by force of arms; by force of arms civil and political rights could be conferred upon him in a formal and legal sense; but force of arms was helpless to make these rights a reality because neither force of arms nor legal decrees could bring about an assimilation of the two races or compel the ancient masters to recognize their former slaves as equals. Thus it is that although the war abolished slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment conferred civil and political rights upon the freedmen, the problem of the colored race, and the problem of making our democracy work in respect to the colored race, remains still unsolved.

By 1920 there were about ten million people of African or of mixed African and Caucasian descent in the United States-mainly in the South; and they remained as they were before the war, an inferior class. It could not, of course, be otherwise than that a people so long enslaved and so recently emancipated should still be, on the whole, poorer, more ignorant, and more debased than the white descendants of people who for centuries have been among the most civilized in the world. This in itself would not make the problem of the colored race a special and particularly difficult one.

There were perhaps as many poor, ignorant, and debased people among the white inhabitants of the United States. What made the problem of the colored race a serious one is the fact that they were a class apart. The inferiority of the colored man is not an individual, but a racial matter; however prosperous, intelligent, or cultivated a black man becomes, he was still, in virtue of being a black man, in a position of inferiority as compared with white men of similar attainments and capacities.

What the whites objected to was intermarriage with Negroes, and to associating on equal terms with them; and one reason for this was the indelible stigma which the tradition of slavery had placed upon them. The Southern people very frankly maintained the pre-war attitude of mind in respect to their relations with the colored race. They liked the Negro well enough in a condescending way; they had for him less instinctive physical repulsion than the Northerner has, and they were even more disposed to treat him kindly - as long as he "keeps his place."

But his "place" was still one of inferiority; in every respect, except in legal status, the colored race was still regarded in the South as a servile and an outcast class. The attitude of the Northerner toward the Negro was much the same, although the Northerner was less frank in admitting it. On the whole, the Northerner disliked the Negro more than the Southerner, understood them less well, had less patience with his habits and idiosyncrasies; and however much he may say that this repulsion is a mere prejudice, that the colored man is "as good as any one else" and ought to be treated as an equal, the Northener did not commonly treat him as an equal; in spite of theories and good intentions, some subtle repulsion [and clear economic interests] kept the two races apart, in the North no less than in the South.

The Negro was not only in a position of social inferiority; in the economic field he labored at a great disadvantage. Carefully prepared statistics showed that as of 1920 the per capita wealth of the Negroes throughout the country was $34, while that of the whites was $885 in the South and $1,320 in the North. That a people so recently emancipated should be poor is natural enough, but the economic backwardness of the negroes was accentuated by the social prejudice which virtually closed many occupations to them, or restricts their advancement in such occupations as they may enter. Apart from all natural or racial handicaps, it was still true that the negro in the United States does not enjoy an equal economic opportunity with the white man of similar intelligence and industry.