When Did Reconstruction End-- Jesse Kass, reply by James Oakes New York Review of Books 03/12/2020 issue. Oakes is addressing a point that Heather Cox Richardson has also recently emphasized. It had become conventional to talk about the end of Reconstruction as involving the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, where they had been tasked with supporting democracy in face of massive attempts, often violent ones, to undermine democracy there.
All that happened in 1877 was the shift of a small number of federal troops from the statehouse in South Carolina to their nearby barracks, but the absolute number of troops in the Southern states remained unchanged and quite small. This fact became especially clear in 2015 with the publication of the “Mapping Occupation” website to which Kass refers. He is also right that nearly all historians of Reconstruction, as well as the PBS documentary Reconstruction: America After the Civil War, make this mistake.
The insignificance of the troop numbers raises a concern I’ve long felt about the conventional use of 1877 as the year Reconstruction ended; 1875, the year Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives to the Democrats, strikes me as a better date for the effective end of federal Reconstruction policy. But in the Southern states, Reconstruction in many ways continued as long as blacks could vote and hold office, which is why another reasonable date for the end of Reconstruction might be 1890, when the Mississippi Plan inaugurated the sweeping policy of disfranchisement that eventually engulfed most of the South. With good reason William Archibald Dunning described disfranchisement as “the undoing of Reconstruction.” Either date - 1875 or 1890 - would probably be better than 1877, when, as Kass indicates, not much of anything actually happened. [my emphasis]This podcast segment has a good discussion with historian Matt Karp about different ways that left-leaning historians look at the American past, particularly the antebellum past, Left-Wing History, Fake Radical History, and Antislavery Jacobin 04/26/2021.
The discussion has to do with the work of Howard Zinn in particular. It involves some consideration of the approach that New Left historians in the 1960s and 1970s took. They don't use this phrase, but they talk about the approach that is also called fundamental criticism. An advantage to that approach is that it rejects any facile celebration of of particular leaders or accomplishments. But it can also give an impression that outcomes, mostly bad or inadequate outcomes, were predestined. A better approach is one that recognizes that good things and bad things happen, and that there are cycles in political and economic developments, but those don't fit an easy narrative of continuing and inevitable progress. And, in particular, a history from a left perspective in particular needs to recognize the successes as well as shortcomings and failures of popular social and political movements.
Conor Friedersdorf face-plants once again in this column which tries to find a way to promote a version of a "1776" outlook on American history, 1776 Honors America’s Diversity in a Way 1619 Does Not The Atlantic 01/06/2020. (His article doesn't seem to be endorsing the particular Rpublican project that became the "1776 Project". Trump's 1776 Commission to promote "patriotic history" was established months later, in September 2020.)
When it comes to the New York Times' 1619 project about the role of slavery in American history, he does have some valid criticisms to draw upon. For instance, he cites the historian Gordon Wood:
... who was irked most by the Times Magazine’s doubling down on the claim that a primary reason American colonists favored independence was to protect slavery. “I don’t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves,” he wrote. “No colonist expressed alarm that the mother country was out to abolish slavery in 1776.”That is the kind of misguided conclusion coming from the "fundamental criticism" approach.
But the obsessively moderate Friedersdorf in this case positions himself as the sensible middle between "Trotskyist[s] and movement conservatives." There's seems to be a bit of old-fashioned redbaiting in that he goes out of the way to associate several historians with a Trotskyist magazine to which they gave interviews, including Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, James Oakes, Adolph Reed Jr., and James McPherson. All of whom are well-establishd, prominent academic historians. In fact, he spends a large part of the article griping about the World Socialist Web Site, his main Trotsyist bogeyman.
Friedersdorf's middle way, if you make through his rambling comments on Trotskyists, seems to be, gee, I just prefer to celebrate how the Unitd States sprang to life from the text of the Declaration of Independence and began an continuous march of progress in freedom and virtue ever since then. "To assert such ideals as our exalted beginning is to intensify the pressure to live up to them." Fine, but that's not reasons to avoid a serious study of history. Hegel believed in an Enlightment view of historical progress. But he also observed, ""history is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history." You don't have to be quite that pessimistic to realize that history composed of happy talk is not worth a lot.
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