>>It wasn't the Constitution and the Supreme Court that destroyed
>>Black Reconstruction. Abraham Lincoln didn't let the Constitution
>>or the Supreme Court or anything else stop him from waging the war
>>as he wanted. Had the North had the political will to do so, it
>>would have refused to demobilize the Union Army placed the South
>>under the Union Army's military dictatorship for a decade or so,
>>confiscated all land of the big Confederate land owners, and
>>redistributed it to Blacks and poorer whites in the South to break
>>the economic base of white terror that would later culminate in the
>>Colfax massacre and other atrocities.
>
>Yoshie, this is typical analysis by you. Unless the government does
>the maximalist possible, they did nothing.
Nathan, far from a maximalist approach, prevention and suppression of white terror was a _minimum_ goal, and breaking the economic base of white terror -- i.e., confiscating lands of big Confederate landlords and redistributing it to Blacks and poorer whites -- was a _necessary_ condition for achieving it.
Some Radical Republicans knew that's what it would take:
<blockquote>The idea of remaking Southern society led a few Radicals to propose that the federal government overturn the plantation system and provide the former slaves with homesteads. In a speech to Pennsylvania's Republican convention in September 1865, [Thaddeus] Stevens called for the seizure of the 400 million acres belonging to the wealthiest ten percent of Southerners:
The whole fabric of southern society _must_ be changed, and never can it be done if this opportunity is lost. . . . How can republican institutions, free schools, free churches, free social intercourse exist in a mingled community of nabobs and serfs? If the South is ever to be made a safe republic let her lands be cultivated by the toil of the owners.
Confiscation, Stevens believed, would break the power of the South's traditional ruling class, transform the Southern social structure, and create a triumphant Southern Republican party composed of black and white yeomen and Northern purchasers of planter land.
Even among the Radicals, however, only a handful stressed the land question as uncompromisingly as did Stevens. Most deemed land for the freedmen, though commendable, not nearly as crucial to Reconstruction as black suffrage. (Eric Foner, _A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1877_, Harper Perennial, 1990, p. 107)</blockquote>
Besides, land is exactly what freedmen and women wanted, believing that's the condition for their freedom and autonomy:
<blockquote>As A. Warren Kelsey, a representative of Northern cotton manufacturer shrewdly observed:
The sole ambition of the freedman at the present time appears to be to become the owner of a little piece of land, there to erect a humble home, and to dwell in peace and security at his own free will and pleasure. If he wishes, to cultivate the ground in cotton on his own account, to be able to do so without anyone to dictate to him hours or system of labor, if he wishes instead to plant corn or sweet potatoes -- to be able to do _that_ free from any outside control. . . . That is their idea, their desire and their hope.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Blacks' quest for economic independence not only threatened the foundations of the Southern political economy, it put the freedmen at odds with both former owners seeking to restore plantation labor discipline and Northerners committed to reinvigorating staple crop production. But as part of the broad quest for individual and collective autonomy, it remained central to the black community's effort to define the meaning of freedom. Indeed, the fulfillment of other aspirations, from family autonomy to the creation of schools and churches, all greatly depended on success in winning control of their working lives and gaining access to the economic resources of the South.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Most of the land occupied by blacks in the summer and fall of 1865 lay within the "Sherman reservation." To [Freedmen's Bureau Commissioner Oliver Otis] Howard fell the melancholy task of informing the freedmen that the land would be restored to their former owners and that they must either agree to work for the planters or be evicted. . . .
Howard requested the assembled freedmen to appoint a three-man committee to consider the fairest way of restoring the planters to ownership. The committee's eloquent response did not augur well for a tranquil settlement:
General, we want Homesteads, we were promised Homesteads by the government. If it does not carry out the promises its agents made to us, if the government haveing concluded to befriend its late enemies and to neglect to observe the principles of common faith between its self and us its allies in the war you said was over, now takes away from them all right to the soil they stand upon save such as they can get by again working for _your_ late and their _all time_ enemies . . . we are left in a more unpleasant condition than our former. . . . You will see this is not the condition of really freemen.
You ask us to forgive the land owners of our island. . . . The man who tied me to a tree and gave me 39 lashes and who stripped and flogged my mother and my sister and who will not let me stay in his empty hut except I will do his planting and be satisfied with his price and who combines with others to keep away land from me well knowing I would not have anything to do with them if I had land of my own -- that man, I cannot well forgive. Does it look as if he has forgiven me, seeing how he tries to keep me in a condition of helplessness?
In these words, the committee expressed with simple dignity the conviction of all freedmen that land was the foundation of freedom, the evils of slavery could not be quickly forgotten, and the interests of former master and former slave were fundamentally irreconcilable. (Foner, pp. 48, 72-3)</blockquote>
>Frankly, one of the realities is that leftwing critics of
>Reconstruction have been collaborators with the racists in the South
>in denigrating the historic achievements and values of the leaders
>who enacted Reconstruction. It makes the crime of its end seem minor
>if it's achievements are pictured as so minimal. But Reconstruction
>was a shining accomplishment-- a whole population moved from the
>status of slaves to voters and even the dominant political force
>within a matter of a couple of years. The tragedy was that the
>Supreme Court made the federal power used for this change illegal,
>stripped federal prosecutors of the power to enforce voting rights
>in the south, and made the existence of the military in the South
>large irrelevant, since they couldn't prosecute anyone.
W. E. B. DuBois called Black Reconstruction "a glorious failure." It was a lost opportunity of world-historic proportions. What killed the promise of Reconstruction was the Republican Party's lack of Jacobin spirit and demobilization of the Union Army. White terror had to be prevented and suppressed by the use of military dictatorship, but the pro-business wing of the Republican Party, dominating Black and white Republicans who understood the crucial importance of the land question, refused to prevent or put down the planter class's counter-revolution -- what DuBois called "the dictatorship of property" -- and came to terms with it instead. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>