Glyn Ford on a tale for today
The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 by Manisha Sinha published by Liveright
American democracy was ever a transitory truth, an initial desert flowering in the aftermath of the Civil War, followed generations later by the half-century passage between Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 2013 Supreme Court sabotage of its enforcement. The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic is a close mapping of the first. The Union’s victory over the rebel Confederacy in 1865 saw over the next five years, the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, promising birthright citizenship, equal protection under the law, and voting rights for former slaves and men of colour.
Initially, Union troops were posted in the Confederate States to enforce this reconstruction. Abraham Lincoln made two mistakes: getting shot and choosing the Southern Quisling Andrew Johnson as his running mate. One of the best succeeded by one of the worst. On his shotgun elevation, Johnson brutally reversed the direction of travel using his veto in the interests of restoration rather than reconstruction. His blanket pardon of all Confederates who had ‘directly or indirectly’ participated in the rebellion opened the door to counter-revolution. The South’s white supremacists promptly galloped through it.
Frank Blair, the 1868 Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate, argued reconstruction was a set of ‘atrocious measures by which millions of white people have been put at the mercy of the semi-barbarous negroes of the South’. The white minorities – and majorities – in the former Confederate States introduced all manner of voter suppression targeting the new freedmen with spurious claims of suppressing ‘voter fraud’; literacy tests and the poll tax were favoured. Yet there was collateral damage as many poor whites proved less literate than their black neighbours. The ’so-called grandfather clause’ rode to the rescue, allowing a free pass for men to vote if their grandfathers had. Where this was not enough, white terror was visited on recalcitrant communities and individuals as Southern barbarism went with Southern piety. The Ku Klux Klan emerged in their white sheets to represent the Confederate dead, with them and their ilk burning and mutilating, raping and lynching prominent black men, women and children and their white allies.
Out of the 107 Southern Congressmen elected in 1874, 80 had served in the Confederate army, and 35 were former generals. By 1876, the Democrats had seized power in all but three ex-Confederate States. To all intents and purposes, the black community was separate and unequal. The system was entrenched and expanded over the decades. When Union troops were removed from the South, they went West to pogroms against America’s indigenous population, while the force of law came to ban Chinese migrants. A potent cocktail of subjection, extermination, and exclusion.
Science – or rather pseudo-science – was recruited to the cause. Great whites had lesser whites, and so on ad infinitum. By the 1930s, eugenics and race theory underpinned American apartheid with consequent laws against miscegenation that proved the envy of Hitler’s Nazis. All sequentially justified by pliant and partisan Supreme Courts. It was toxic at so many levels. As the US industrialised towards the end of the nineteenth century, interracial Union organising was the exception, not the rule, much to the benefit of the bosses. They used black scabs to break white strikes. The women’s suffrage movement had its Southern franchise that saw educated women as more deserving than indolent men and whose votes would buttress white supremacy. White superiority had no limit. Manifest destiny knew no borders. Savages were equally there to be saved in Hawaii, Cuba and the Philippines.
Sinha’s book is a tale for today. In passing, she reminds us that the US has long been into real estate. It bought Alaska from the Russians in 1867 and tried, the same year, to buy the Virgin Islands from Denmark. Where this exceptional book can be faulted is in The Rise and Fall’s failure to fully follow the money. Capitalism and democracy are not conjoined twins. It served the economic interests of Northern capital for the Southern plantocracy to be reborn, after emancipation, scarcely altered on the backs of black peons and sharecroppers. Today, we see the same gambit, slicing and dicing the population into race, sex and nation to fracture opposition in the US’s flawed authoritarian quasi-democracy.