[ Charting the ironies of freedom won and lost during and after
the Civil War, Eric Foner, the American historian, has also helped us
better understand the ambiguous consequences of what were almost
always only partial victories.] [[link removed]]

THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION - ERIC FONER’S STORY OF AMERICAN FREEDOM.
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Michael Kazin
December 2, 2019
The Nation
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_ Charting the ironies of freedom won and lost during and after the
Civil War, Eric Foner, the American historian, has also helped us
better understand the ambiguous consequences of what were almost
always only partial victories. _

The Result of the 15th Amendment., Library of Congress // The Nation

 

Every great historian revises history in his or her own way. Eric
Hobsbawm replaced narratives about the making of the modern world that
focused relentlessly on the political games played by powerful men
with a rich tapestry of social and economic history. Gerda Lerner
explained how women defied patriarchal rule with everyday acts of
resistance and public confrontations. W.E.B. Du Bois, John Hope
Franklin, and Ira Berlin made it impossible to write US history
without understanding the pivotal role of African Americans, enslaved
and free.

BOOKS IN REVIEW

THE SECOND FOUNDING: HOW THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION REMADE THE
CONSTITUTION

By Eric Foner

Buy this book
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For nearly half a century, Eric Foner has been challenging and
overturning the benighted assertions made about the most studied and
contentious period in US history. Nothing has been more important to
the development of American society and politics than the Civil War
and Reconstruction. Yet until the 1960s, most influential scholars
conceived of the era as a sad departure from America’s grand march
of progress toward political liberty and economic plenty. They claimed
that the “war between the states” could have been avoided if sage
voices of compromise had only been able to silence the hotheaded
abolitionists and their secessionist counterparts. Their view of
Reconstruction tended to be even more wrongheaded, rendering a decade
of biracial democracy as an era dominated by vengeful Yankees who
headed south to stir up racial antagonisms, echoing the pro–Ku Klux
Klan narrative of D.W. Griffith’s _The Birth of a Nation_.

Foner has dedicated his career to demolishing these assumptions about
how the Civil War happened and how the victors shaped what came after.
Inspired by the black freedom movement of the 1960s and its
successors, he has demonstrated, perhaps more than any other historian
of his generation, how central emancipation was to the political
conflicts that eventually exploded into civil war. In his most
influential work, _Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished
Revolution_, published in 1988, he showed that the struggle for
equality and freedom continued long after the Confederacy died, even
if its victories were frustratingly incomplete.

_The Second Founding_, his new book about the trio of landmark
constitutional amendments all ratified less than five years after
Lee’s surrender, demonstrates his talent at unearthing insights
about the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, in particular how
Americans defined and acted on the ideals of freedom and democracy.
It’s a slim volume that synthesizes the vast library of works
devoted to Reconstruction. But he uses that rich scholarship to
highlight the radicalism of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and
how, over the past 150 years, clever and powerful conservatives have
diligently sought to undermine their egalitarian promise. As Foner
reminds us, the “key elements of the second founding, including
birthright citizenship, equal protection of the laws, and the right to
vote, remain highly contested…. Rights can be gained, and rights can
be taken away.”

Charting the ironies of freedom won and lost during and after
Reconstruction, Foner’s new book is also a guide to nearly all of
his scholarship, which examines not only the rights and better living
conditions gained through extended contests for power but also the
ambiguous consequences of what were, as a rule, only partial
victories. The sensibility that drives his work was likely born out of
his experiences on the left and the frustrations of a period of
American radicalism that helped do away with legal apartheid and
spearheaded movements for gender equality and the protection of the
environment but also failed to mount a serious challenge to the
conservative tilt of both major parties.

This sensibility was also a family inheritance rooted in the
experiences of his father, Jack Foner, and his uncle Philip Foner.
Both men wrote important works on African American and labor history
but, as sympathizers with communism, suffered from an early rehearsal
of McCarthyism during World War II, when the New York State
Legislature led an investigation that resulted in the loss of their
jobs as professors at City College. Given this legacy, Eric Foner has
always recognized that while most Americans viewed their nation as the
“embodiment of freedom,” the contest to define and act on that
idea “has been used to convey and claim legitimacy for all kinds of
grievances and hopes, fears about the present and visions of the
future.” He expresses these judgments in what another eminent
historian, Christopher Lasch, called “plain style”: direct and
vivid prose without a trace of specialized language, which anyone with
a passing interest in the subject can read, learn from, and enjoy.

Born in 1943, Foner began his career as a historian by answering a
critical question that hardly any American historian had thought to
ask before: How were the leaders of the new party that nominated
Abraham Lincoln and governed the nation through the bloodiest conflict
in US history able to unite? In the run-up to the Civil War, there
were three distinct camps of Republicans, each with its own
constituency and distinct reasons for opposing the expansion of
slavery. On the left were the abolitionists, who initially refused to
participate in a political system they considered evil to its core and
who insisted on immediate emancipation by any means necessary. To
their right were the former Democratic and Whig politicians who had
abandoned their parties in search of an organization that could stop
the growth of slavery but who favored a less immediate plan to
eradicate the “peculiar institution,” which they believed would
die out in the states where it had long existed. Many abolitionists
had lambasted the same politicians for whom they now campaigned—and
the antagonism had often been mutual.

Foner’s answer to that complex question, delivered in a dissertation
written at Columbia University and published as his 1970 book _Free
Soil, Free Labor, Free Men_, was that the moral activists and veteran
office seekers who created the Republican Party built their coalition
around a shared ideology that transcended their differences. Each
group could agree that the expansion of slavery posed a serious threat
to the interests of ordinary white craftsmen and farmers in the
North—who, after all, composed the majority of citizens and voters
in that region. What all three groups wanted was free soil, free
labor, and free men.

This new ideology, Foner argued, “gave northerners of divergent
social and political backgrounds a basis for collective action. It
provided the moral consensus which allowed the North, for the first
time in history, to mobilize an entire society in modern warfare.”
But it did not eliminate the differences between those Republicans who
continued to work for racial equality and those who cared mostly about
breaking the grip of Southern planters on the nation’s economic and
political life. At a time when the data-driven social history of
families and communities was all the rage among other young scholars,
Foner persuasively insisted that big ideas and national politics still
mattered.

Foner next turned his attention to another subject with a familial
resonance, the history of American radicalism. He began with the
American Revolution and intended to conclude with the New Left.
However, he got so immersed in the life of Thomas Paine, one of the
nation’s earliest and most prominent radicals, that he wound up
devoting an entire book to him and never did get around to unraveling,
at length, the rest of the left’s often tortured, occasionally
triumphant past. The work he produced, _Tom Paine and Revolutionary
America_, returned to a theme found in his first book: the dialectic
between moral purpose and political exigency. The English stay-maker
turned pamphleteer pioneered notions about work, political freedom,
and self-governance that future leftists would champion, but he was
also a supporter of the new Constitution, written largely by men who
sought to limit the power of the plebeian masses.

Despite these ambiguities in Paine’s politics, Foner persuasively
argued that he was a radical forerunner: “Modern in his commitment
to republicanism, democracy and revolution….modern in his
secularism, modern in his belief in human perfectibility…modern in
his peculiar combination of internationalism…with his defense…of a
strong central government for America.” As in his book on the making
of the Republican Party, Foner placed ideology at the core of his
analysis. People start revolutions, he suggested, only when they
acquire the ability to express their desires for fundamental change in
fresh and enthralling ways.

Over the next decade, Foner returned to the Civil War, but his next
major book focused on its aftermath. Adding to his fascination with
ideology, _Reconstruction_ is also a work of sweeping social and
political history that helped revise how most historians—as well as
much of the reading public—understood this crucial period. Most
history textbooks rehashed it as a sorry tale of vengeful white
Northern radicals who bestowed the vote on ignorant freedmen to punish
white Southerners, leading to a period of political corruption and
disorder. Beginning in the 1960s, scholars started to chip away at
this bigoted and historically inaccurate portrait, pointing out that
the fledgling biracial state governments in Dixie taxed big planters
to pay for roads, schools, and hospitals that benefited everyone. But
the idea, dripping with racist condescension, that Reconstruction was
a “tragic era” had largely survived the legal demise of Jim Crow.

 

In his 1988 work Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution,
1863–1877, Eric Foner drives a final nail into the coffin of
outdated interpretations of history. His fascinating account of the
decade following the American Civil War shows that black people were
an integral part of the movement to end centuries of slavery and were
often key drivers of what successes there were in the Reconstruction
period.
Apple Books Review
Foner destroyed that notion so completely that no serious
historians—even those on the right—have attempted to revive it.
Drawing on a wealth of documents written by and about freedmen and
-women, he thrust to the center of the drama the determination of
black people to exercise political power in the South and to assert
their right to a share of the wealth and property their labor had
created. Expanding on a thesis Du Bois developed in his 1935
book _Black Reconstruction in America_, Foner showed that the
struggle for true emancipation required economic as well as political
equality. With the inconstant aid of federal agencies like the
Freedmen’s Bureau, some African Americans went on strike for higher
wages, while others squatted on fallow land, demanding that the
government fulfill its promise to grant them homesteads so they could
be truly independent of their former owners.

Throughout this grand narrative, Foner reveals how the actions of
powerful men in both the North and the South closed down the
possibilities for a social and economic transformation that black
Americans helped open up in the South. In 1867, Thaddeus Stevens, the
veteran abolitionist who was an influential Radical Republican leader
in Congress, introduced a measure that would have confiscated
Confederate lands and doled them out in 40-acre lots to freedmen and
their families. But many of the same Republican colleagues who had
rallied to pass the 13th and 14th Amendments balked at the idea of
redistributing the wealth of traitors now that the war was over. Even
most Radical Republicans, Foner wrote, “believed that in a free
labor South…black and white would find their own level.” Giving
freed people what one lawmaker called “a perfectly fair chance”
should not mean challenging the unwritten rules of the capitalist
economy. The defeat of Stevens’s plan doomed the potential for
building a democratic order in the South and unintentionally sowed the
seeds of a century of American apartheid.

More than 30 years after its publication, Foner’s book remains a
thrilling piece of historical imagination as well as a vital work of
pathbreaking research. It transformed Reconstruction from an epilogue
to the drama of civil war into the pivot on which the future of
African Americans, the South, and the nation turned. Unfortunately, in
the late 1870s, the arc of history turned back to injustice as white
politicians in the North abandoned the experiment in biracial
democracy and let former Confederates take back control in Dixie.

In his next major work on the Civil War era, Foner examines our
greatest president’s struggle throughout his political career with
the question of how to bring about black freedom. _The Fiery Trial:
Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery_, published in 2010, applied the
historian’s fascination with ideology to a question that countless
authors inside and outside the academy had argued about for more than
a century: how the self-made man from Illinois evolved from a local
politician who assumed the inferiority of black people and merely
hoped to stop the “peculiar institution” from spreading westward
into the president who led what became a war to abolish slavery. To
eradicate the sin of human bondage, Lincoln declared at his second
inaugural in 1865, about a month before his murder, might require that
“every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another
drawn with the sword.”

Although Foner clearly admires Lincoln, the book, which won the
Pulitzer Prize for history, bore out the logic of his subject’s
modest statement in 1864 that “I claim not to have controlled
events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” As a
young politician, Lincoln was content to leave the decision of whether
to abolish slavery up to each state. During his first months in the
White House, he made no protest when Congress passed a constitutional
amendment that would have stopped the federal government from
interfering with slavery where it existed. Less than two years later,
however, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Then, in 1863, he
oversaw the recruitment of close to 200,000 black soldiers, most of
whom had recently been freed or escaped from bondage.

As with his first book, Foner explains a feat of ideological
conversion. His incisive tracking of Lincoln’s speeches and writings
about slavery, combined with a matchless grasp of the political
exigencies of war, results in a narrative simultaneously intimate and
of major historical consequence. It is probably as close a study of
Lincoln’s mind on this critical matter as can ever be written, and
Foner’s judgment balances a biographer’s praise with the
contextual sobriety of a historian: “If Lincoln achieved greatness,
he grew into it.”

T_he Second Founding_ draws on a theme that has animated all of
Foner’s work, the gap between the nation’s lofty ideals and the
way those in power, abetted by the prejudices and fears of ordinary
people, fail to act on or deliberately sabotage efforts to embody them
in durable laws and institutions. Here, he dwells more than ever
before on the complex yet profound consequences of additions to the
Constitution that, on paper, may appear rather straightforward
attempts to secure the gains of Reconstruction into perpetuity.

The import of the 13th Amendment, for example, seems simple enough. It
abolished slavery and any other form of “involuntary servitude,”
save for those convicted of a crime. Recently, critics of mass
incarceration, such as Ava DuVernay with her documentary _13th_, have
made the amendment an emblem of the country’s long history of legal
racism. Yet Foner also points out how fundamental a departure the
amendment was at the time from the constitutional norms that had
existed since the ratification of the founding document nearly 80
years before. The 13th Amendment did not just end slavery; it
“created a new fundamental right to personal freedom, applicable to
all persons in the United States regardless of race, gender, class, or
citizenship status.” In Congress, most Democrats, marrying foul
racism with a defense of states’ rights, warned that if valuable
possessions in the form of human beings could be wrested from their
owners without compensation, nothing would prevent power-hungry
Republicans from seizing other forms of property.

Foner then turns to the even greater consequences of the 14th
Amendment. He recounts how the Republicans who controlled Congress
enacted it over the irate protests of President Andrew Johnson, a
dedicated white supremacist who passionately opposed giving black
people any rights besides the right not to be owned. Johnson’s
partisan adversaries passed a series of acts that compelled any former
Confederate state that wanted to elect people to Congress again to
ratify the amendment, which included giving black men who lived within
their borders the right to vote. The Republican majority added the
guarantee of citizenship to any child born in the United States—an
entitlement only a few countries bestow today.

But Foner pushes further in making clear how the expansive language of
the amendment also allowed champions of the rising corporate order to
institute “freedom” of a quite different kind. The first section
of the amendment famously bars states from depriving “any person”
of “life, liberty, or property” without “due process of law”
and prohibits states from denying “the equal protection of the
laws” to their residents. Because the drafters did not define
“person,” Supreme Court majorities regularly used it to strike
down laws enacted by Congress and state legislatures to regulate big
business. In 2011, when Mitt Romney snapped at a heckler,
“Corporations are people, my friend,” he was evoking that
pro-capitalist doctrine of “personhood.”

Foner shrewdly points out that hardly any of the Republican-appointed
justices who used the 14th Amendment as a cudgel against working- and
middle-class interests had been among the corps of antislavery
activists and politicians who conceived of the amendment and advocated
its passage. But in the final decades of the 19th century, the GOP
moved closer in spirit to the tycoon-loving body that nominated Mr.
Bain Capital than the party led by the president who vowed that the
Civil War would usher in a “new birth of freedom.”

When Foner moves on to the 15th Amendment, he tells a similar story of
splendid intentions written into law before being undermined. The
clear statement that the right to vote cannot be “denied or
abridged…on account of race, color, or previous condition of
servitude” failed to prohibit other sorts of restrictions on the
franchise. By 1900, canny racist politicians employed devices like
poll taxes, requirements to interpret arcane parts of state
constitutions, and old felony convictions to disenfranchise most
African American men in the South. As the memory of Reconstruction
faded, neither the Supreme Court nor federal lawmakers felt any
pressure to reverse the actions of these saboteurs. Digging into
Congress’s debates about the amendment in 1869, Foner finds that
even its Republican sponsors understood how weak its provisions might
prove to be. One senator grumbled that “it left untouched…’all
the existing irregularities and incongruities in suffrage’, other
than those explicitly directed at blacks.”

An ironclad statement that guaranteed suffrage to all adult men would
have been much harder to subvert. But the amendment’s sponsors
feared that three-quarters of the state legislatures would never
ratify language that so clearly took away their power, enshrined in
Article I of the Constitution, to decide which of their residents had
the right to vote and which did not. When it came to interpreting the
law, to quote Humpty Dumpty in _Through the Looking-Glass_, “it
means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less. The
question is which is to be master—that’s all.”

For a historian so instrumental in moving the mainstream of American
historical writing leftward, Foner can be warmly empathetic toward the
work of earlier scholars whose personal politics differ rather
markedly from his. This is, in particular, the case with Richard
Hofstadter, his graduate school mentor at Columbia, whose approach to
history he praised in a 1992 essay.

In the postwar years, there was no more admired or popular author of
American history in the country. Yet two decades after his death in
1970, at the age of 54, Hofstadter’s scorn for what he viewed as the
nostalgia and xenophobia of Gilded Age populism; his neglect of the
histories of women, the working class, and black people; and his
increasingly defensive liberal opinions alienated many young
historians. It didn’t help that Adlai Stevenson was the contemporary
politician this cautious liberal admired most. Hofstadter’s
reputation among left-wing scholars has, in fact, only declined
further since then. A few years ago, at a scholarly conference,
someone in the audience shouted that Hofstadter was a terrible
historian. No one told him to shut up.

In his 1992 essay, Foner does not mention such rising disdain, but he
does explain Hofstadter’s influence on his own intellectual and
scholarly career. Hofstadter, he insists, crafted works imbued with
graceful prose and provocative arguments about everything from the
emergence of mass parties to the influence of social Darwinism to the
“paranoid style” of the right, and he did so while demonstrating
an ability “to range over the length and breadth of American
history.”

Having broken with the economically determinist Marxism of his youth,
Hofstadter put at the center of his work what the Italian Marxist
Antonio Gramsci called “common sense,” including an appreciation
of how difficult it could be for radicals to break through this
ideological consensus. In _The American Political Tradition_,
published in 1948, Hofstadter argued that, in a variety of ways,
nearly all of the nation’s leaders, from the founding fathers to
Franklin Roosevelt, promoted the hegemony of market society and made
radical alternatives to it seem downright unpatriotic. With such
ironic chapter titles as “Thomas Jefferson: The Aristocrat as
Democrat” and “Woodrow Wilson: The Conservative as Liberal,”
Hofstadter’s book challenged the sanctimonious regard for
America’s leading men—and sold over 1 million copies. “It is
indeed ironic,” Foner reflects, “that one of the most devastating
indictments of American political culture ever written should have
become the introduction to American history for two generations of
students.” (Indeed, on the epic civil rights march from Selma to
Montgomery in 1965, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader
John Lewis, now a longtime US congressman from Georgia, brought _The
American Political Tradition_ along in his knapsack.)

In paying tribute to Hofstadter, Foner inadvertently offers some
insight into what makes his own work so critical to understanding the
political ambiguities at the heart of America’s past and present.
Both he and Hofstadter came out of the Marxist left, but both placed
ideas about how the United States was governed at the center of their
work. Both regretted the gap between the promise and practice of mass
democracy in the past, yet both wrote out of what Hofstadter called
“a concern with some present reality.” As writers, both
scrupulously avoided dumbing down their narratives or resorting to
even a smidgen of jargon. Foner’s essay about his late adviser
concludes, “His writings stand as a model of what historical
scholarship at its finest can aspire to achieve.” The author might
well have been describing himself.

_[Michael Kazin teaches at Georgetown University and is a coeditor
of Dissent. He is at work on a history of the Democratic Party.]_

_Copyright c 2019 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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