RECONSTRUCTION RECONSIDERED: A HISTORIOGRAPHY OF RECONSTRUCTION, FROM THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY TO THE 1960S. Claire Parfait Klincksieck | « Études anglaises » 2009/4 Vol. 62 | pages 440 à 454 ISSN 0014-195X ISBN 9782252036969 Article disponible en ligne à l'adresse : Document téléchargé depuis www.cairn.info - 152.254.171.112 02/05/2018 15h03. © Klincksieck -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://www.cairn.info/revue-etudes-anglaises-2009-4-page-440.htm -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Pour citer cet article : -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Claire Parfait, « Reconstruction Reconsidered: A Historiography of Reconstruction, From the Late Nineteenth Century to the 1960s. », Études anglaises 2009/4 (Vol. 62), p. 440-454. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Klincksieck. © Klincksieck. 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Document téléchargé depuis www.cairn.info - 152.254.171.112 02/05/2018 15h03. © Klincksieck The withdrawal of the last federal troops from the South in 1877 marked the end of Reconstruction. Redemption, namely the return of Democrats to power in Southern States, was already well under way by then. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, economic exploitation, segregation, and racial violence, reduced many African Americans to near slavery while gradual disfranchisement made them second-class citizens. The North had lost interest in the plight of former slaves and acquiesced in this policy for the sake of national reconciliation. The history of Reconstruction was rewritten from a Southern point of view as a tragic episode in which whites had been the victims of incompetent blacks and their corrupt white allies. In spite of a few dissenting voices, this interpretation, which justified the inferior status of African Americans, was to prevail until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and the “Second Reconstruction.” La période de la Reconstruction, qui suivit la guerre de Sécession, s’acheva en 1877, lorsque les dernières troupes fédérales quittèrent le Sud. Ce que les Sudistes appelèrent la « Rédemption » avait déjà commencé avec le retour au pouvoir du parti Démocrate dans la majorité des États du Sud. Elle se poursuivit avec une politique de ségrégation, où la violence raciale, l’exploitation économique et la perte de pouvoir politique renvoyèrent les nouveaux citoyens à un statut proche de l’esclavage. Le Nord s’était largement désintéressé de la situation des anciens esclaves, et la réconciliation Nord-Sud de la fin du XIXe siècle passa par une écri- ture de la Reconstruction qui adoptait le point de vue du Sud. Dans cette inter- prétation, la Reconstruction avait représenté une période tragique pour les blancs du Sud, soumis à la domination de noirs ignorants alliés à des blancs corrompus. Malgré quelques voix dissonantes, cette écriture de la Reconstruction, qui permet- tait de justifier le traitement des Africains Américains, allait perdurer jusqu’à ce que l’on a appelé la « seconde Reconstruction », le mouvement pour les droits civiques des années 1950 et 1960. Claire PARFAIT, Reconstruction Reconsidered: A Historiography of Reconstruction, From the Late Nineteenth Century to the 1960s., ÉA 62-4 (2009): 440-454. © Klinck- sieck. Document téléchargé depuis www.cairn.info - 152.254.171.112 02/05/2018 15h03. © Klincksieck EEAA 44-2009.indb-2009.indb 440440 117/12/097/12/09 112:54:332:54:33 Reconstruction Reconsidered 441 Like the history of the Civil War and slavery itself, the history of Reconstruction (1865-1877),1 that brief period when “the country experi- mented with genuine interracial democracy” (Foner Forever Free XX), proved a contested terrain from the first. The mainstream narrative which gradually emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries held that Reconstruction had been a time of chaos and corruption, when igno- rant newly-freed men, supported by the bayonets of the federal govern- ment, had been allowed to rule over the South. Redemption restored society to its presumed natural order and put an end to the unholy alliance of freed slaves, adventurers from the North (“carpetbaggers”) and Southern white traitors (“scalawags”). The elaboration and continuation of the overarch- ing narrative of Reconstruction served to justify, among a host of other acts, the removal of the recently-won rights of African Americans. This Document téléchargé depuis www.cairn.info - 152.254.171.112 02/05/2018 15h03. © Klincksieck totalizing discourse—and the treatment of blacks in the South—did not go unchallenged. Dissenting voices remained largely unheard, however, before the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This article aims to retrace and contextualize “The Dark and Bloody Ground of Reconstruction Historiography” (Weisberger) until the beginning of what C. Vann Woodward called the “Second Reconstruction” (Woodward 8). The fight over the writing of Reconstruction arguably began during Reconstruction itself, and the contentious debates over the various laws and amendments which turned freedmen into full citizens and allowed them to play an active role in the political life of the South. Contemporary peri- odicals, which both echoed and tried to influence those debates, provide today’s reader with the seeds of two very different interpretations of the Reconstruction then underway. Thus Harper’s Weekly staunchly defended radical Reconstruction and the enfranchisement of freedmen as the only means to protect them from their former masters. The New York-based weekly provided its readers with positive pictures of African Americans tak- ing on their new responsibilities as citizens, lawmakers and the like. It also exposed, in word and image, the violence of the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups, in order to emphasize the continued need for the federal government—and the Republican Party—to keep close watch on events in the South. On the other hand, Southern magazines such as DeBow’s Review warned that the South was falling victim to “negro domination,” a conten- 1. I am adopting here the periodization used by most of the historians of Reconstruction. However, Foner sees Reconstruction as having begun in 1863 with the Emancipation Proclamation (Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877), while Du Bois includes the Civil War and the years immediately following the withdrawal of the last federal troops from the South in his Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880. Today, many historians tend to enlarge the periodization to include at least part of the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century, sometimes extending as far as World War I. (See Thomas J. Brown 7.) Document téléchargé depuis www.cairn.info - 152.254.171.112 02/05/2018 15h03. © Klincksieck EEAA 44-2009.indb-2009.indb 441441 117/12/097/12/09 112:54:342:54:34 442 Études Anglaises — 62-4 (2009) tion supported by some accounts of conditions in the South by Northerners, perhaps most notably James S. Pike. Pike, a journalist, was dispatched to South Carolina by the New York Tribune in 1873 and charged with assess- ing the results of Reconstruction.2 The series of articles that he produced was published in book format the following year, and the title of the work, The Prostrate State: South Carolina under Negro Government (1874), left little doubt as to his interpretation of events. The Prostrate State posits blacks as an “inferior race” (69) and tells the tragic story of a Southern aristocracy ruined by war and trampled upon by its former servants. Pike denounced the “Africanization” of South Carolina (4), the “spectacle of a society sud- denly turned bottom-side up,” (12) in which corruption ruled (the headings of at least 8 of the 34 chapters include the word “fraud”). In respect to the State government, he declared, “It is barbarism overwhelming civilization Document téléchargé depuis www.cairn.info - 152.254.171.112 02/05/2018 15h03. © Klincksieck by physical force. It is the slave rioting in the halls of his master, and putting that master under his feet” (12). Pike’s reading of Reconstruction was far from unique. By the early 1870s, a certain lassitude on the part of Northerners could be detected in even the most vigorous proponents of radical Reconstruction, and Harper’s Weekly