The World the Civil War Made

Gregory P. Downs, Kate Masur, Gregory P. Downs, Kate Masur

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781469624181
• eBook ISBN: 9781469624198
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

At the close of the Civil War, it was clear that the military conflict that began in South Carolina and was fought largely east of the Mississippi River had changed the politics, policy, and daily life of the entire nation. In an expansive reimagining of post–Civil War America, the essays in this volume explore these profound changes not only in the South but also in the Southwest, in the Great Plains, and abroad. Resisting the tendency to use Reconstruction as a catchall, the contributors instead present diverse histories of a postwar nation that stubbornly refused to adopt a unified ideology and remained violently in flux. Portraying the social and political landscape of postbellum America writ large, this volume demonstrates that by breaking the boundaries of region and race and moving past existing critical frameworks, we can appreciate more fully the competing and often contradictory ideas about freedom and equality that continued to define the United States and its place in the nineteenth-century world.

Contributors include Amanda Claybaugh, Laura F. Edwards, Crystal N. Feimster, C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, Steven Hahn, Luke E. Harlow, Stephen Kantrowitz, Barbara Krauthamer, K. Stephen Prince, Stacey L. Smith, Amy Dru Stanley, Kidada E. Williams, and Andrew Zimmerman.

Chapter 1: Reconstruction and the History of Governance

Laura F. Edwards

When historians write about Reconstruction, their attention is usually engaged elsewhere. For better or worse, studies of the period also serve as a way to evaluate the nation’s core values: What does the United States stand for? Who are we, as Americans? How do we define our ideals? How do we realize them? Of course, the present always becomes entangled in the past in the discipline of history. Even so, we ask far more of Reconstruction than of other historical moments. The historians of the Dunning School—named for their intellectual mentor, William A. Dunning, a professor at Columbia University—established the precedent, characterizing Reconstruction as a repudiation of national ideals that required a violent “redemption,” a term that they took uncritically from southern Democrats who used it to describe the overthrow of democratically elected governments in the region. Recently, the literature has taken a more optimistic tone, with scholars approaching Reconstruction in terms of its possibilities. Optimism, however, also explains the notes of despair that punctuate current scholarship, with analyses highlighting the nation’s failure to achieve the very principles that the Dunning School saw as problematic: instead of going too far, the nation did not go—and still has not gone—far enough. Although the conclusions are different than they were in the early twentieth century, the conceptual frame that ties Reconstruction to questions of national development is not. It is as if Reconstruction is the crystal ball in which historians can divine the nation’s true character.

The problem with this historiographical frame is that it confuses the history of governance within the United States with the history of the state. I use the term “governance” to refer to the wide range of institutions and practices that exercised legal authority and on which nineteenth-century Americans relied to resolve their conflicts and maintain order. Governance obviously included the state—that is, state governments and the federal government, the institutions that comprise the state and that share governing authority within it, according to the U.S. Constitution. But governance was not limited to the state, particularly in the early nineteenth century. Local government, which included local courts where a great deal of daily business was done, shared authority with governing institutions at the state and federal levels. Governing authority, moreover, also resided in institutions that were relatively private, such as households, churches, and communities. To complicate matters, the line between the categories of private and public forms of governance often blurred.

Historians’ tendency to conflate governance with the state is understandable, since the Civil War and Reconstruction rank among the most dramatic events in the history of state formation. It is widely assumed that change in this period concentrated more legal authority at the federal level, creating a government with a truly national reach for the first time in American history and initiating a process that turned the United States into a nation-state. Secession challenged the traditional balance of power between the federal government and the state governments. The exigencies of war then forced the United States and even the Confederacy to locate more power at the federal level. Although many wartime measures proved temporary, the policies of Reconstruction—particularly the three new constitutional amendments—permanently enhanced the power of the federal government in the reconstituted United States. It was a bloody ordeal that extended into the twentieth century. The histories produced by the Dunning School, which emerged from that highly charged context, were so focused on those conflicts over state formation that they subsumed the history of governance within that narrative. The conflation still persists in the historiography, although its presence can be difficult to detect. At first glance, such a perspective might appear entirely at odds with current literature, which no longer confines itself to the business of the nation’s statehouses or its political leaders. Nonetheless, much of the literature, particularly that focused on demands for and protection of individual rights, tends to construe questions of law and governance rather narrowly, as matters that lie only (or mainly) in the purview of state and federal jurisdictions.

The federal government and state governments did not have a monopoly on governance in the early nineteenth century, but they did control matters relating to the protection of individual rights, with states handling a much wider variety of such cases than the federal government. Rights were necessary to access and mobilize the power of these jurisdictions, and their denial left people without the means to defend their interests within them. Even so, the operation of rights within these legal jurisdictions did not match the outsized ideals of liberty, freedom, and equality so often attached to them in the popular discourse of the time and in the later historiography. In the Civil War era, Americans routinely used the term “rights” in regards to a wide range of claims on government at all levels. But more often than not, their use of the term referred to their sense of what law and government ought to support—what was right, in their minds—and not a specific right recognized in state or federal law, where rights were few and legal officials tended to define them in narrow, formalized ways that limited their usefulness in the resolution of fluid social conflicts. That was one reason why individual rights played a smaller role in local jurisdictions, which settled disputes and defined justice in different ways, using principles that subordinated individuals to the social order, that resolved discrete wrongs without providing precedent for other cases, and that elevated the maintenance of concrete social relations over the protection of legal abstractions. In these venues the protection of what was right took precedence over the protection of individual rights, which were not the only means of accessing the legal system or the mechanisms of governance. Together, these various jurisdictions constituted a governing system that captured and contained the contradictory impulses of American life: they maintained existing inequalities, while also adjudicating conflicts generated by those inequalities.

As this essay argues, the focus on the state and federal levels has artificially elevated those jurisdictions’ focus on rights over other legal practices, extending that framework to explain questions about law and governance that were actually much more complicated. Following popular rhetoric of the Civil War era, historians tend to fall back on the term “rights” to describe all claims on law and government, without stopping to ask whether such claims had any relationship to the actual array of individual rights available in state or federal law. In so doing, we miss the fact that popular conceptions of law, even when expressed in terms of rights, relied on legal principles and governing practices, operative at the local level, which emphasized deeply contextual forms of social justice and active government involvement in the people’s daily lives. During and after the Civil War, Americans who had been subordinated at all levels of government picked up legal principles available at the local level and put them to use there and in other jurisdictions. In this sense, this essay builds on one of the most important insights of recent literature: the active participation of ordinary Americans, particularly African Americans, in the conflicts of the Civil War era. But, as this essay argues, the implications were far more profound than the current historiography suggests. Reconstruction-era policy changes drew local, state, and federal jurisdictions into a closer relationship, allowing legal principles operative at the local level to migrate and acquire new meanings at the state and federal levels. In those jurisdictions, local conceptions of law and governance brought questions about what was right into conversation with a legal framework that protected the rights of individuals. The results significantly extended the reach and meaning of individual rights at both the state and federal levels, elevated expectations of federal involvement in the daily business of governance, and introduced new conceptions of social order into the national arena. In this way, Americans built localism into the nation-state, where the principles of local law combined with other legal currents to fuel expansive expectations about what the nation could be and do.

THE FOCUS ON STATE and federal authority reaches back to the turn of the twentieth century and the scholarship associated with the Dunning School. The school’s intellectual mentor, William A. Dunning, produced two national studies, Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction and Related Topics and Reconstruction, Political, and Economic, 1865–1877, which generated a small fleet of state studies, one for each state of the former Confederacy. Each of those studies followed a similar script, featuring depictions of the misguided policies of congressional Republicans, the resulting inversion of the social order, and the ultimate redemption of the South with the reunion of white southerners and northerners in a shared commitment to white supremacy.¹ Racism permeates the work to the point that it can now be hard to see anything else.² Yet for Dunning School historians, the overriding issue was the use—and, for most, the abuse—of federal power. The results not only destroyed the South but also jeopardized the nation’s future by undermining the traditional balance of power between states and the federal government. Fortunately, at least as most Dunning School historians saw it, southern redeemers and their northern allies pulled the nation back from the precipice by overthrowing the policies of Reconstruction and returning legal authority to the states, where it belonged.

Although Progressive-era historians placed the emphasis on economic, rather than ideological or political differences between the sections, they still told the history of governance in terms of government at the state and federal levels. Perhaps the most famous rendering of this argument is Charles A. and Mary Beard’s The History of American Civilization. Reconstruction plays a pivotal role in the narrative as the “second American Revolution,” the moment when northern Republicans’ economic interests emerged triumphant. Reflecting the goals of the Progressive movement, which hoped to harness federal as well as state authority to resolve the nation’s problems, Progressives took a more positive view of the federal government’s potential. Yet like historians of the Dunning School, they also tended to take a critical view of the period, blending a healthy respect for what federal authority could accomplish with a deep skepticism of the resulting policies, particularly when it came to racial and economic equality.³

By the mid-twentieth century, the New Deal, World War II, and the emerging civil rights movement cast an even more favorable light on federal authority and, ultimately, on Reconstruction policies at both the state and federal levels.⁴ Reflecting that viewpoint, a new body of literature emphasized the accomplishments of the era, faulting state and, particularly, federal officials for failing to accomplish their goals. Many revisionists combined optimism with deep disappointment and a note of doubt: optimism in the idealism of America; disappointment that those ideals went unrealized; and sometimes doubt about the success of social change imposed from above, through the federal government.⁵

More recent scholarship contains similar elements of doubt and optimism about the potential of state and federal authority. Much of the work that deals with federal enforcement, for instance, still tends toward pessimism. After the passage of the major legislation and constitutional amendments, a combination of political maneuvering and judicial foot-dragging turned back the clock nearly to where it had been before the war. Not only did white southerners regain control of their state governments, but they were also allowed—even encouraged—to ignore new federal laws and to resurrect a racial system that closely resembled slavery.⁶ Other historians who focus on state and federal law and politics wring optimism from this otherwise tragic narrative by taking the long view and emphasizing the enduring legacy of Reconstruction. For them, it was not just the idealism of the moment but also the institutional changes, particularly the Reconstruction amendments, that created a “second American revolution,” although one of a very different order than that of the Beards, because it provided the institutional basis for fulfilling the promises of the first: not just racial equality, but also a rights revolution that extended to all Americans and folded them into one nation. Progress came slowly, culminating in the mid-twentieth century with the civil rights movement. Still, those changes never would have been realized at all had it not been for the policies of the Reconstruction era. At times, the scholarship reads like an inverted version of the Dunning School, with a similar take on the collapse of federal power, but a very different interpretation of the implications.⁷ In these various assessments, it is often law and government at the state and federal levels that hold the potential to make the promises of the period a reality.

Scholarship since the civil rights movement also has shifted the analytical perspective away from the federal level to explore efforts on the ground to reconstruct southern society and, in a broader sense, the nation. Influenced by W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in an Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880, the work blends social history with political history, considering the implications of government policy in people’s lives, as well as the role of ordinary people in the creation and implementation of policy.⁸ In such studies African Americans assume central roles in the major events of the time rather than appearing as inert subjects to whom federal lawmakers gave freedom and rights. Enslaved African Americans’ abandonment of the plantations, for instance, created facts on the ground that made the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment possible. Similarly, African Americans’ claims to full civil and political rights during and immediately after the Civil War set the stage for the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Not all of this scholarship is concerned with African Americans’ interactions with local, state, or federal government.⁹ But, as this work shows, African Americans made every effort to claim control over their lives, efforts that often entailed claims to civil and political rights that already existed within the legal system and also efforts to expand rights in ways that implied significant changes to social and economic relationships in the nation as a whole.¹⁰

Yet even as this scholarship has moved further away from the nation’s capital, it still continues to define law and governance through the issues that lay within state and federal jurisdictions, particularly the protection of individual rights. Much of recent scholarship is based in the assumption that the actions and ideas of ordinary Americans, particularly African Americans, should be considered central to the conflicts over Reconstruction policies. Yet such work tends to funnel all claims on government into the framework of rights: when African Americans made claims of any kind, the historiography tends to treat them as claims to rights. One result is to extend rights beyond their actual reach in the first half of the nineteenth century. Recent histories, for instance, often assume that African Americans were claiming “rights” that already existed for white people, thus missing the fact that no such rights existed for anyone. Another unintended result is the creation of a conceptual divide between “law” and “society,” which locates legal authority in those bodies of law that protect rights—the statutes, case law, and the policies of the state and federal governments. Even scholarship that emphasizes African Americans’ efforts to redefine rights falls into this set of assumptions, by positing a dynamic in which those jurisdictions made aspirations into law, often by recognizing them as rights. Although the analytical focus has moved away from state and federal government, they still play a significant role as the entities that enforced law at local level.¹¹

Yet neither the federal government nor even state governments controlled law and governance within the United States in the nineteenth century. To be sure, their presence increased after the Civil War. Before the war, however, Americans who lived in states usually encountered federal authority through the postal service or the rituals of electioneering, if they did at all.¹² The federal government figured more prominently in the territories, which lacked the institutional apparatus of state government. But existing states had jurisdiction over the actual work of governance—protecting individual rights, keeping the peace, and looking after the public health and welfare. Even so, the role of state governments was also limited, at least by current standards, because they delegated so much authority to local areas. State law reigned supreme in matters involving property...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The World the Civil War Made
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures and Map
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Reconstruction and the History of Governance
• Chapter 2: Emancipating Peons, Excluding Coolies: Reconstructing Coercion in the American West
• Chapter 3: “Not Quite Constitutionalized”: The Meanings of “Civilization” and the Limits of Native American Citizenship
• Chapter 4: The Burnt District: Making Sense of Ruins in the Postwar South
• Chapter 5: The Long Life of Proslavery Religion
• Chapter 6: The Wounds That Cried Out: Reckoning with African Americans’ Testimonies of Trauma and Suffering from Night Riding
• Chapter 7: Ely S. Parker and the Paradox of Reconstruction Politics in Indian Country
• Chapter 8: Washington Novels and the Machinery of Government
• Chapter 9: Indian Territory and the Treaties of 1866: A Long History of Emancipation
• Chapter 10: “What If I Am a Woman”: Black Women’s Campaigns for Sexual Justice and Citizenship
• Chapter 11: Slave Emancipation and the Revolutionizing of Human Rights
• Chapter 12: From the Second American Revolution to the First International and Back Again: Marxism, the Popular Front, and the American Civil War
• Afterword: What Sort of World Did the Civil War Make?
• Contributors
• Index