Reconstruction and the Paris Commune

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

One of the things I've discovered in my survey of Marxist and left-oriented
literature on slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction is the tendency for
scholars to look at this history from either the perspective of the ruling
class or from the ruled. Genovese and Engerman-Fogel would be an example of
the first approach; David Montgomery and Harold Gutman the latter.

One of the real finds in my research is the 2001 "The Death of
Reconstruction: Race, Labor and Politics in the Post-Civil War North,
1865-1901" by Heather Cox Richardson, who seems strongly influenced by the
labor-oriented scholarship of David Montgomery. This book argues that the
ruling class turned against Reconstruction because it was seen as an
encouragement to labor radicalism in both the North and South. More
specifically, she claims that there was a great deal of nervousness about
whether something like the Paris Commune could find expression in the USA.

Given the observations I've made about E.L. Godkin's Nation Magazine, it
should come as no surprise that one of her citations caught my eye--namely
an October 5, 1871 Editorial that conflated Radical Republicanism and the
Paris Commune. The editorial is a stinging attack on abolitionist Wendell
Phillips and Civil War leader General Benjamin Butler, who are depicted as
stirring up the working class in Massachusetts. I especially appreciated
the Nation's worried reference to possible outbursts by "those who crowd
the tenement-houses and workshops of manufacturing cities."

---

The good people of Massachusetts, however, no less than the motley crowd of
blatherskite reformers [a reference to the labor movement and the
suffragists], may draw a very significant, though somewhat alarming, lesson
from the singular canvass they have just witnessed. They have had a very
great deliverance, it is true, and may well be very thankful for it; but,
at the same time, they had best look at the danger carefully, even if for
the time it has ceased to threaten. What was the significance of this
strange conflict? Was it, after all, anything less than the bold attempt of
a thoroughly bad demagogue to take possession of the whole politics of the
State, through the agency of its discontented factions? Was it not the
organization, prematurely and under false colors, but still the
organization of such a COMMUNE [this word appeared in italics in the Nation
editorial] as America could now supply?

While the citizens of Massachusetts, therefore, may well take pride in the
good courage and prudent conduct which at the eleventh hour saved the good
courage and prudent conduct which at the eleventh hour saved them from a
wry grave peril, it yet behooves them very seriously to consider the
deplorably low condition of political morality which the events of the last
two months have unmistakably revealed as existing throughout what is soon
to be their controlling class. Having maturely considered this subject,
they had best, while there is yet time, energetically bestir themselves in
regard to it. Should they fail to do so, some demagogue bolder than Butler,
and as unscrupulous, will yet illustrate to them the great difference which
exists between popular institutions emanating from those who follow the sea
and till the soil, and the same institutions in the hands of those who
crowd the tenement-houses and workshops of manufacturing cities.


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