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ONE BRIEF SHINING MOMENT  
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Adam Hochschild
May 11, 2025
The New York Review of Books
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_ Manisha Sinha’s history of Reconstruction sheds fresh light on
the period that fleetingly opened a door to a different America. _

A Freedmen’s Bureau office, Richmond, Virginia, 1866, James E.
Taylor

 

Reviewed:
The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction,
1860–1920
by Manisha Sinha
Liveright, 562 pp., $39.99; $19.99 (paper)

In the sweltering days of early July 1913, more than 50,000 men
gathered for a most unusual reunion. To mark the fiftieth anniversary
of the Battle of Gettysburg, both Union and Confederate veterans from
forty-six states traveled to the battlefield. The War Department
provided field kitchens, latrines, cots, and long rows of tents. Boy
Scouts and other volunteers pitched in to help the elderly pilgrims, a
few of whom had to be taken away in horse-drawn ambulances when felled
by heatstroke. Hundreds of photographs show the old soldiers, in
Panama hats, white shirts, ties, and suspenders, with medals pinned to
their dark vests. Their faces bristle with beards, mustaches, and
side-whiskers, all gray or white, and they have that slightly shocked,
frozen look that people often show in group photos from long ago.

A climax of the reunion came on July 3, when men who had taken part
(or _said _they had taken part) in Pickett’s Charge and its
repulse by Union troops met at the stone wall that had been a center
of the fighting and shook hands across it. Photographers eagerly
caught more images of the two armies’ veterans—some wearing parts
of their old uniforms—greeting one another or dining together at
long wooden tables. President Woodrow Wilson, the first southerner to
occupy the White House in nearly half a century, arrived on July 4 to
speak to “these gallant men in blue and gray”:

We have found one another again as brothers and comrades in arms,
enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the
quarrel forgotten…. How complete the union has become and how dear
to all of us, how unquestioned, how benign and majestic.

Manisha Sinha does not mention the Gettysburg reunion in her
provocative _The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic_, but
it is an apt symbol of a central argument she makes: despite its
surrender in 1865, the South eventually achieved at least a draw over
the central issue that the Civil War was fought to resolve—the
rights of Black Americans. In Wilson’s saccharine “the quarrel
forgotten,” there was no hint of Abraham Lincoln’s famous words at
that same battlefield fifty years earlier about “the unfinished
work” of achieving “a new birth of freedom.” And much of what
had happened in between was anything but “benign and majestic.”

Just as we talk about the First Republic, the Second Empire, or the
Fifth Republic in France, so Sinha divides American history into
phases, although the transition from one to another is not so neatly
demarcated, sometimes taking years. Her focus is on what she calls our
Second Republic: the promise of Reconstruction following the Civil
War. This period, she points out, brought not just new rights for the
formerly enslaved but hope for women and Native Americans, surprising
flashes of solidarity with freedom struggles elsewhere, and “the
forgotten origin point of social democracy in the United States.”
All of this, however, was destined to be soon replaced by what she
calls the American Empire—a regime that resumed seizing land from
Native Americans, ruthlessly suppressed organized labor, and acquired
its first overseas colonies.

Reconstruction was bitterly opposed by reactionaries, most notably the
ghastly president Andrew Johnson (“This is a country for white
men,” he wrote, “and…as long as I am President, it shall be a
government for white men”), who was in office from Lincoln’s death
in 1865 until 1869. Sinha reminds us why the radical hopes of
Reconstruction enraged racists like Johnson. There were corrupt or
incompetent officials, to be sure, but besides safeguarding freedom
for some four million slaves, Reconstruction was “a brief, shining
historical moment” that held open a door to a different America.
Both Black and white northern volunteers went south to work as
teachers for former slaves who had previously been barred from all
education. Even though most Black Americans never got their promised
forty acres and a mule, some 25 percent owned at least a small amount
of land by the century’s end. The Reconstruction Amendments to the
Constitution guaranteed them full citizenship and, for men, the right
to vote. Johnson, nostalgic for his days as a slave owner (when he had
really been, he claimed, “their slave instead of their being
mine”), angrily vetoed one civil rights measure after another, but
Congress usually overrode him.

The most important Reconstruction agency was established in 1865: the
Freedmen’s Bureau, “a sort of proxy state for African Americans”
that did everything from helping them settle on public land to
protecting them from wage theft and assault by white planters furious
at losing their human property. Its schools taught more than 200,000
children over the course of seven years. It ran orphan asylums and
more than sixty hospitals, and its medical workers also treated the
newly freed in their homes.

All of this was still grossly inadequate to the needs of millions of
impoverished men and women newly freed from slavery and surrounded by
resentful, armed whites, but nonetheless, Sinha declares, “the
Freedmen’s Bureau was the first government social welfare agency in
US history.” Among other achievements, it founded and helped fund a
number of what today we call HBCUs—historically Black colleges and
universities. The most prominent, Howard University, bears the name of
General Oliver Otis Howard of Maine, an ardent evangelical who lost an
arm in the Civil War and was the Freedmen’s Bureau’s first
commissioner.

Much of this picture is largely familiar from the work of historians
ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois to Eric Foner. What Sinha adds to it are
the intriguing signs of a wider radicalism that flourished, if
briefly, as this idealistic moment began. Other historians have noted
such connections, but I’ve not seen such an array of them compiled
before. A Black division of the Union Army, Sinha writes, “called
itself ‘Louverture,’ after the leader of the Haitian
Revolution.” The country’s first Black daily newspaper, the _New
Orleans Tribune_, declared that “whether the victim is called serf
in Russia, peasant in Austria, Jew in Prussia, proletarian in France,
pariah in India, Negro in the United States, at heart it is the same
denial of justice.” One meeting of Black citizens of Illinois in
1866 warned “lovers of…constitutional liberty” of the dangers of
a “coup d’état” such as the one staged in France some years
earlier by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, who declared himself Emperor
Napoleon III. Their statement also spoke of “the aboriginal man of
America, once the undisputed possessor of this continent,” who was
“_by coercion_” robbed of land.

Indeed, for a time it seemed as if the Second American Republic might
promise a better deal for Native Americans. Ely Parker, a Seneca, had
served as a Union officer and aide to General Ulysses S. Grant; the
surrender terms that Robert E. Lee signed at Appomattox were drafted
in Parker’s handwriting. Four years later, when Grant became
president, he appointed Parker commissioner of Indian affairs. Parker
pushed for a more peaceful policy toward his fellow Native Americans:
protection of their land rights, opportunities for education, and
more.

The new constitutions that southern states adopted right after the war
(almost all soon amended or ignored) were often wide-ranging. Alabama
established an agricultural college and property rights for married
women, and its constitutional convention resolved that ex-slaves could
collect pay from their former owners for the period they were kept
enslaved after the Emancipation Proclamation—surely America’s
first reparations bill. Sinha, who has a frustrating tendency to race
through long lists of events, quotes, laws, and resolutions, does not
say if anyone was actually able to collect.

Although several of the conventions debated land reform, none of them
enacted it. On the other hand, state constitutions

created tax-funded public school systems on a wide scale for the first
time in the South, with South Carolina…and Texas making attendance
mandatory…. They did away with undemocratic laws that penalized the
poor, imprisonment for debt, as well as capital and “cruel and
unusual” punishment for minor crimes. Most also protected laborers
and sharecroppers by giving them the first share, or lien, on the
crops they produced.

Finally, during Reconstruction, Black southerners were elected to
office for the first time: to the US Senate and House of
Representatives and—more than six hundred of them—to state
legislatures.

All these advances, of course, were doomed. As southern whites
reasserted their power, they swept away the Black officeholders; in
1874 eighty former Confederate officers were elected to Congress, and
by 1910 one, Edward Douglass White of Louisiana, was chief justice of
the Supreme Court. The early moment of promise had existed only while
the defeated South was under military occupation. The last remnants of
that came to an end in the Compromise of 1877, following a disputed
presidential election. In return for Rutherford B. Hayes entering the
White House, all remaining federal troops were withdrawn from the
South. That left white southerners free to impose Jim Crow laws and to
use poll taxes, lynching, and a ruthless campaign of murder,
mutilation, and castration to terrorize Blacks, prevent them from
voting, and ensure that the South would remain white-dominated and
highly segregated for nearly a century to come.

It was also a South dominated by the wealthy, for poll taxes reduced
voting by poor whites as well as Blacks. Again, Sinha’s wide
perspective covers more than race:

Once in power, conservatives passed laws that adversely affected all
poor and working people, including fence laws that cordoned off common
grazing lands…. They also rescinded lien laws that protected
sharecroppers and wage workers. Virginia…even authorized whipping
for petty theft.

Central to the book is her assertion that crushing the Second Republic
was a precondition for the rise of the American Empire. The white
elites who overthrew Reconstruction, she writes,

helped make possible other antidemocratic policies and forces, from
the conquest of the Plains Indians to the establishment of American
empire to the crushing of the first mass labor and farmer movements.

The troops withdrawn from the South were then deployed against Native
Americans. Gone from power was Ely Parker and his talk of peace.
General Howard of the Freedmen’s Bureau later showed a very
different spirit as he led a war against the Nez Perce people. “The
rise of the Jim Crow South and the conquest of the West, often told as
separate stories, were parallel events connected at a fundamental
level,” Sinha writes. General William Tecumseh Sherman, leader of
the Union Army’s march through Georgia, was in the field again,
declaring, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the
Sioux even to the extermination of men, women, and children.” Just
as the progressives looked overseas, Sinha points out, so did the new
empire builders: Sherman sent officers to England to learn how the
British were so successful in their colonial wars.

Among those protesting the brutal seizure of Indian lands were many
abolitionists. Lydia Maria Child urged in 1868 that “the white and
Indian must jointly occupy the country.”

 William Lloyd Garrison wrote that “the same contempt is generally
felt at the west for the Indians as was felt at the south for the
negroes.” He compared a ruthless massacre in Montana to British
vengeance following the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Other abolitionists
also thought internationally. When the Massachusetts senator Charles
Sumner argued for civil rights, he compared the treatment of Blacks in
the South to the sufferings of the lower castes in India, colonial
subjects in Africa, and Chinese immigrants here at home.

The last Indian resistance was crushed in the massacre at Wounded Knee
in 1890. The big expansion of our overseas empire came eight years
later as the United States seized Spain’s colonies, most importantly
the Philippines, after the Spanish-American War. Many Confederate
veterans had been welcomed back into the US Army for these campaigns.
One of them, Major General Joseph Wheeler, got his enemies mixed up
and shouted, as his men advanced against Spanish troops in Cuba, “We
got the Yankees on the run!”

On the run, also, were labor unionists. Sinha writes that “federal
troops, once deployed to secure freedpeople’s rights,” were now
“being used on a wide scale to put down striking workers.” In an
apt analogy, she reminds us that just as slaveholders had once talked
of states’ rights but demanded a federal fugitive slave law, now
postwar railroads and industries fended off laws about safety and
working hours but demanded that government soldiers suppress unions.
And they did, on a huge scale, from the Great Railroad Strike of 1877
onward. Intriguingly, Sinha mentions that the Pennsylvania Railroad
magnate Tom Scott may have been one of the architects of the
Compromise of 1877, although the full story of that fateful bargain
will never be known.

It is poignant to imagine the America that could have been if the
Second Republic had survived. If Lincoln had lived, or if he had
chosen a more enlightened vice-president; if more federal troops had
remained in the South; if their presence hadn’t been bargained
away…there are many more ifs.

Some of those ifs could have given us a country with less bloodshed
and more justice, but I doubt that they would have changed as much as
Sinha implies. She writes, for example, that “the conquest of the
West after the war…was not inevitable.” I fear it was. As the
nineteenth century went on, the powerful new tools of the imperial
age—trains and steamboats, the repeating rifle and the machine gun,
telegraph lines to send orders to distant troops and
officials—enabled colonizers or settlers to seize land across the
world at an accelerating pace. It happened on the Great Plains under a
capitalist democracy in the United States; it happened in Central Asia
and the Caucasus under the absolute monarchy of tsarist Russia; it
happened in Africa, India, Australia, and Southeast Asia under a
variety of European regimes like Britain, France, and Germany. Even
the great Frederick Douglass reflected a touch of this spirit when he
said that there might be “a deficiency inherent to the Latin
races” and advocated American annexation of what today is the
Dominican Republic.

If the Second Republic had lasted longer, would Black Americans be
better off today? Surely yes. But even under the best of
circumstances, with both an administration and a Congress generous and
enlightened, would the victorious North have had the necessary
decades-long commitment required to undo the vast gulf in income,
wealth, land ownership, education, and more that was slavery’s
legacy? I doubt it. Short of revolution—which seldom has ended
well—such differences are stubbornly enduring. In every country once
blighted by slavery, the huge economic gap between descendants of
slaves and masters yawns wide, even on the many Caribbean islands
where the former far outnumber the latter and control the government
as well.

I wish I could say that Sinha’s writing is as fresh as her
perspective. It’s not. Important terms she uses, like the
“contraband camps” where refugees fleeing slavery gathered during
the Civil War, go undefined and barely described. She piles up
cavalcades of detail about matters that are well known, such as the
horrific years of terror that restored white supremacy in the South,
while she rushes past other eye-catching but less familiar events. She
devotes only part of one sentence, for instance, to the proposal by
Senator Henry W. Blair of New Hampshire for a federally funded
“uniform national system of primary and secondary education.”
Versions of this bill passed the Senate three times in the twilight of
the Second Republic, but never the House. Think how different America
would be if a Black child in the Mississippi Delta had as much money
spent on her education as a white one in Silicon Valley.

Sinha also never slows down to paint a narrative picture—whether of
a particular community, say, that experienced the dreams and then the
crushed hopes of Reconstruction, or of a typical meeting of one of the
Black “conventions” of this period that she calls a “missing
link” to the twentieth-century civil rights movement. She never
gives us full, flesh-and-blood portraits of any of the major figures,
especially those like Douglass who had a clear vision of the America
that might have been.

Nonetheless, it’s valuable to have her history of unfulfilled hopes.
The nation we had become when the frail Union and Confederate veterans
clasped hands at Gettysburg in 1913 fell short of the one that at
least some of those Union soldiers thought they were fighting for. As
the white-haired men met, few Blacks in the South could vote, and in
that year alone fifty-one of them were lynched. Native American
children were forced to go to the notorious government boarding
schools where they were punished if they spoke their native languages.
By 1913 the American Empire was well underway; US troops were
stationed in Hawaii, Cuba, Guam, Nicaragua, and the Philippines, a
list that would grow far longer as the decades passed. One crucial
promise of the Second Republic—the right to vote—was finally
fulfilled in the 1960s with much effort, suffering, and sacrifice of
lives. More remain to be realized. Given the new occupant of the White
House, we may well find ourselves living under a Third Republic, with
which those side-whiskered Confederate veterans might have been very
satisfied.

_ADAM HOCHSCHILD’s most recent book is American Midnight: The Great
War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. He is
working on a book about American social movements of the 1930s. (May
2025)_

_THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS has established itself, in Esquire’s
words, as “the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English
language.” The New York Review began during the New York
publishing strike of 1963, when its founding editors, Robert Silvers
and Barbara Epstein, and their friends, decided to create a new kind
of magazine—one in which the most interesting and qualified minds of
our time would discuss current books and issues in depth. Just as
importantly, it was determined that the Review should be an
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* Reconstruction
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* History
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* United States
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* Civil War
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* Andrew Johnson
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* African Americans
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* Radicalism
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* state constitution
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* Black elected officials
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* Indigenous peoples
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* Abraham Lincoln
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