[Marxism] End of Black Reconstruction and the Paris Commune

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect wrote:

> Nearly everything I read persuaded me that the Northern and Southern
> bourgeoisie saw eye to eye when it came to putting an end to
> Reconstruction. Basically, the retreat was part of an overall shift
> to the right under the impact of a rising tide in the class struggle
> internationally.
>
> Despite the liberal interpretations of the end of Reconstruction, we
> can see close class affinities between the Northern bourgeoisie and
> its purported deadly enemy, the plantocracy, revealed in a number of
> places.  At its best, the Northern elite had *no interest* in
> creating a class of yeoman farmers in the south from the emancipated
> African population. While swearing allegiance to free labor, free
> soil was another matter  altogether.

The Northern elite feared that Blacks, if allied with poor white
farmers and workingmen, would go the way of the Paris Communards!

Take a look at the following reviews of Heather Cox Richardson's _The
Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil
War North, 1865-1901_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001):

<blockquote>_The Death of Reconstruction_ expands our understanding
of the North during the generation following emancipation. Reading
broadly in the region's newspapers, magazines, and popular books,
Heather Cox Richardson summarizes the story of southern
Reconstruction that was available to literate northerners. This
popular account, she argues, explains why northern sympathizers
deserted the former slaves. These often partisan media initially
depicted the freedpeople as good workers who subscribed to free labor
principles and a harmony of interest between labor and capital, in
this regard comparing favorably with strike-prone laboring Democrats
who regarded capital as their natural enemy. Soon, however, observers
began to wonder whether universal male suffrage would sustain the
free labor vision or instead enfranchise workers who would champion
collective entitlements rather than individual liberties. The rise of
a "labor interest" among black southerners rattled northern
Republicans, who feared that the freedpeople were coming under the
sway of demagogues. 1

Even as the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, reports from Louisiana
and South Carolina indicated that politics by ex-slaves challenged
property rights and proper government in ways reminiscent of the
oft-reported horrors of the Paris Commune. In the context of northern
fears of labor unrest, Richardson argues, white northerners even
interpreted white supremacist massacres as justifiable defenses of
the social order. Efforts to secure national civil rights protections
seemed to demand an expanded federal government that would rely on
freedpeople's votes while turning them into its subservient wards.
The Republicans' resulting fear "that the mass of African Americans
hoped to use the national government to attain prosperity," instead
of relying on their own hard work, rendered northerners unwilling to
rescue their onetime southern allies from Democratic terrorists. Thus
the disfranchisement and segregation of black southerners proceeded
without substantial northern resistance. 2 . . .  (Stephen
Kantrowitz, "The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics
in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901. By Heather Cox Richardson"
[Book Review], _The Journal of American History_ 89.3, December 2002,
<http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/89.3/br_44.html>)</blockquote>

<blockquote>Why did northerners abandon Reconstruction? After years
of pursuing a rough equality for the newly freed slaves, why did they
walk away and watch in silence as Jim Crow descended on the South?
Historians have offered a number of explanations for this
abandonment: partisan politics, racism, war weariness, corruption,
class needs of planters. But Heather Cox Richardson argues that these
explanations, while compelling, are "disparate aspects" (p. xi) of
the northern experience. How, she asks, did they fit together? The
answer can be found in northerners' adherence to free labor ideology.
1

This is a big topic, and to make the job manageable, Richardson
focuses almost entirely on northern newspapers and opinion makers:
she follows the trajectory of the northern discourse about the
nation's political economy between 1865 and 1901. Having fought a war
for free labor, Republicans were committed to the South's
transformation into a free labor society and were drawn to the newly
emancipated slaves as ideal free laborers: workmen who "worked hard
and skillfully, lived frugally, saved their money, and planned to
rise as individuals through their own efforts" (pp. 7-8). These
"good" workers, who believed in the harmony of interests between
employees and employers, stood in sharp contrast to bad workers:
those who allied with the Democratic Party, believed that "polarizing
wealth meant the creation of economic classes locked in inevitable
conflict" (p. 8), and looked to the federal government for help in
solving their problems. 2

When recalcitrant southern whites interfered with the South's
transition to a free labor society, Republicans concluded that the
federal government would have to assume an active role in the
process. Republicans passed civil rights legislation and the
Fourteenth Amendment and then fought for universal male suffrage, all
to ensure the protection of the freedmen's economic rights. But
Republicans' commitment to black male suffrage evoked Democratic
complaints of corruption and empire building, and the freedmen's
political activism, viewed in the context of increasing labor unrest
in the North, engendered Republican worries that enfranchising black
men would "harness the government to the service of disaffected
workers, who hoped to confiscate the wealth of others rather than to
work their own way to economic success" (p. 82). In South Carolina, a
convention attended by ex-Confederates protested new taxes and
accused black legislators of plundering property holders, fueling
northern concerns. In 1871, Horace Greeley chided "lazy" blacks (p.
99) who were unwilling to work, drawing a parallel between the Paris
Commune and the South Carolina freedmen. 3

Though not all blacks fit this category -- Republicans praised those
blacks who achieved success in an individualistic fashion -- an image
of "an uneducated mass of African-American voters pillaging society
was one of the most powerful ones of the postwar years" (p. 118).
Increasingly, Republicans "read the Northern struggle over political
economy into the racial struggles of the South" (p. 94) -- including
the campaign for a civil rights bill and the 1879 black exodus -- and
the debate over Reconstruction was recast as a debate over state
action, individualism, and the American way of life. By the 1890s, it
was clear to northerners that their faith in the freedmen as free
laborers had been misplaced, and virtually all black activism had
come to symbolize the threat that European-style class conflict posed
to American individualism. Thus northerners who hoped to preserve
traditional American values accepted black disenfranchisement and
came to believe that blacks were "bound by race into permanent
semi-barbarism" (p. 224). 4 . . .  (Melinda Lawson, "Heather Cox
Richardson. The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in
the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901" [Book Review], _American
Historical Review_ 108.5, December 2003,
<http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/108.5/br_46.html></blockquote>

Cf. Heather Cox Richardson:
<http://www.umass.edu/history/faculty/richardson.html>
_The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the
Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901_:
<http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/RICDEA.html>
--
Yoshie

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