Failures of the Reconstruction (1860-1920)
A discussion with Manisha Sinha, whose new book, "The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic," is now the definitive work on the most consequential period of American history.
Manisha Sinha, my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast, is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and a leading authority on the history of slavery and abolition and the Civil War and Reconstruction. She was born in India and received her Ph.D from Columbia University, where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina, which was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico and featured in the New York Times’ 1619 Project. Her multiple award winning second book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition was long listed for the National Book Award for Non Fiction.
Her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920, offers a fresh, expansive, and timely take on the most consequential—and arguably the most misunderstood—period of American history. It’s impossible to understand the United States without understanding Reconstruction, and yet the subject is often given short shrift in high school history classes. And even the authoritative work on the subject, Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, ends in 1877 and thus doesn’t get into the critical events of the rest of the 19th century.
Enter Manisha Sinha. Her book is, simply put, an instant classic: the new definitive work for the period. She shows the United States at the time in all its complexity, weaving together the various historical threads—the traditional Reconstruction period, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and its program of domestic terror, Grant forming the DOJ, the election of 1876 that ended the occupation too early, the conquest of the West, the labor movement, and so on—in a way that makes us better understand why we are the way we are. Also: this is not one of those Howard Zinn-style history books where the author is all, “America sucks.” Far from. There are plenty of heroes from this time period, and their courage and determination is just as inspiring as the overt racism and sadistic violence of the former Confederates is horrifying.
Here are three takeaways from our discussion:
The election of 1876 was more pivotal to American history than I ever realized.
Booth killed Lincoln in 1865, after the war, right at the start of Lincoln’s second term. That elevated Andrew Johnson, a contemptible white supremacist and Confederate sympathizer, to the White House. He was the anti-LBJ. He wanted the policy of racism to continue, and thus sought the approval of all the hateful scoundrels—like Elon Musk does on social media. And almost everyone in Washington flat-out despised him for his obdurate stupidity. It was like going from Obama to Trump—whose similarities to Johnson Sinha wrote about in 2019 in the New York Times.
Johnson gave way to Ulysses S. Grant, a fine man but a so-so president, who must have been physically and existentially exhausted by his second term. Then came 1876, which pitted Samuel J. Tilden, a Democrat—which in those days mean racist Confederate apologist—against Rutherford B. Hayes, a Lincoln Republican. Hayes lost the (suppressed) popular vote but prevailed in the Electoral College. The thinking was that he would continue Reconstruction and continue Lincoln’s project. But he didn’t. As soon as he took office, he pulled federal troops out of the South, throwing the emancipated Black Americans living there to the proverbial wolves.
Sinha explains:
All that leads to the fall of a formal commitment by the federal government to upholding these Reconstruction governments. So whether there was a formal compromise of 1877 or not—I’ll let other historians keep disputing that—I do know what the results were. And the results were that Hayes is in power, and that Democrats take over the last states in the South, which they had systematically started doing already in 1870.
So, you know, what we need to understand about Reconstruction is how short-lived it was. It’s a very short period. It’s not even 1865 to 1877, because many Southern states have already been restored. (I don’t like to use the term “redeemed,” with all of its kind of fundamentalist religious overtones, that many white Southerners used at that time.) They’re restored to sort of elite undemocratic rule. And certainly African Americans have been…systematically and violently put out of the body politic. So, you know, that is an important landmark in the start of the complete unwinding of Reconstruction.
Because then after 1877, there’s still places at state and local levels where you have Black officeholders, where you have Black voting, especially in majority Black areas like low country South Carolina….African Americans retain power, they continue. It’s really not until the 1890s, with that complete uptick in racial violence and the systematic legal disenfranchisement green-lighted by a very reactionary Supreme Court—sounds familiar—that Reconstruction is completely undone.
The situation in 1876 is not dissimilar to the here and now. Modern-day Republicans look to 1876 for tips on how to finagle their way back to the White House.
Here’s what was up in 1876, the centennial, and the year of that pivotal election: You’ve got angry, violent racists who are armed to the teeth. You have corrupt state governments run by these asshole conservatives openly thwarting the rule of law to protect their hateful allies. You have a reactionary Supreme Court that would absolutely rule in favor of the authoritarian, if push came to shove. You have a presidential election that could, in a nightmare scenario, wind up in the House. And you’d potentially wind up with the Democrat winning the popular vote but the Republican prevailing in the Electoral College. Which, um, sounds uncomfortably like the landscape in 2024.
I asked Sinha about this. She says:
Well, hopefully we won’t repeat the mistakes of the past. Hopefully we’ll be able to combat this. And in a way, I write history because history is—it’s not just learning about the past, but it’s also a lesson in citizenship. I think Americans [are inundated] with the amount of disinformation we have coming at us from these right wing, you know, the whole Rupert Murdoch empire and other right wing places and of course bad actors, foreign actors, Putin. I just read an article on the amount of disinformation that Russia is feeding into the American political system. I mean, we really are at a stage where I hope we can combat this.
In 1876, the electoral votes in Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina were disputed. Different slates of electors were sent to Washington. Ted Cruz, Sinha says, tried to use that precedent in 2020. She continues:
But that didn’t happen in Arizona. That didn’t happen in Pennsylvania. It didn’t happen in Michigan….It was quite clear that there was no other electoral slate, as it was during Reconstruction. But [Ted Cruz] tried to use that. And he tried to use the controversy at that time to say that maybe we should now relook at the results….
During Reconstruction, they actually had proposals to abolish the Electoral College and make the elections of presidents direct elections—as they had done for [state] governors…which in the original Constitution was indirect through the legislature; as they would do with Senators in the Progressive era. Unfortunately, that failed. And I just think we need to strengthen our democratic institutions a little bit because…bad actors could do anything under the cover of convoluted and unclear rules, and pretend as if they’re following the Constitution when they clearly are not. So I hope 2024 will be a complete repudiation of that kind of politics.
What’s shocking is the Republican Party—the way they have all fallen in line with this anti-democratic and virtually traitorous kind of agenda, where they don’t want to fund the war in Ukraine, where they praise Putin rather than allies. And, you know…somebody said they should stop calling themselves the Republican Party because, you know, the original Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, you know, that’s not what it was, [or] what it is today. And maybe they should just call themselves MAGA or some other nickname because that’s what they are today.
American Empire began in North America after Reconstruction.
When I think of the brief foray of the United States into imperial conquest, what comes to mind is the period after the Spanish-American War, when we acquired Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and when we annexed Hawaii. But American imperialism came into its own in the later decades of the 19th century, when the West was “won.”
Sinha explains:
First, America is founded on Indian dispossession. You’re going back to the colonial era and European colonization. So people just took that as sort of an inevitable process that would happen in the West too. And there were some important and large Indian nations like the Lakotas, like the Apaches. I mean, they had considerable political power and military power. And the U.S. had to expend a lot in terms of money and men to conquer these areas. And maybe it’s because I was brought up in India with the history of British colonialism, [but] I looked at those wars, and they were colonial wars….the way in which the U.S. Army did not follow Lincoln’s code of warfare, of civilized warfare. The way in which they massacred women and children. I mean, you look at the massacres….you know, it starts even during the Civil War with a lot of these volunteer units, especially coming from California, where they had really committed massive massacres of Native Americans. But I think at this moment, there has been so much written and done on Western history and Native American history that it is virtually historical malpractice not to look at this area while writing a history of this period.
The same army that was protecting African Americans in the South was sent to the West to slaughter Native Americans. Sinha explains:
The final conquest of the West comes with the downfall of Reconstruction in the South. I mean, literally the same army units that are trying to implement Reconstruction are diverted to these imperial projects in the West. So I think it’s really the fall of Reconstruction that facilitates the conquest of the West. I mean, the U.S. army would have been disbanded if there weren’t these Indian Wars…..
One political project had to be replaced by another. The emancipatory aims of the nation state had to be replaced by these imperial aims. And the fall of Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow in the South, facilitates this. And it’s in the political and intellectual atmosphere of the period. You know, you have either pseudoscience or race—this is a heyday of scientific racism, social Darwinism, the ways in which people viewed the working classes, immigrants, especially Asian, Chinese immigrants, the ways in which they viewed Native Americans and then Filipinos and Cubans—it’s not as if these things were disparate. They were quite similar. And imperialism is one way in which we can understand the history of the conquest of the West, and how it then bleeds out into the Pacific, to actual colonization, with the annexation of Hawaii and the colonization of the Philippines.
LISTEN TO THE PODCAST
In this discussion with Greg Olear, the historian Manisha Sinha discusses her book “The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920.” The book explores the period between the Civil War and World War I, highlighting the importance of Reconstruction in shaping the country. Sinha explains her motivation for writing the book and the significance of the Second American Republic. She also draws parallels between Andrew Johnson and Donald Trump, emphasizing the consequences of showing mercy to Confederates. Sinha delves into the horrors of the first Ku Klux Klan and the violent opposition to Reconstruction. The conversation explores the end of Reconstruction, the Compromise of 1877, the nadir of American democracy, the conquest of the West, and the legacy of Reconstruction. It also delves into the question of how a society can atone for its national sins. Plus: coup right, with Coup-Vite!
Follow Manisha:
https://twitter.com/ProfMSinha
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Good morning, Greg. I haven't listened to the podcast, so I am only reacting to what you have written and quoted here. I will read this book, as this is the period in US history that fascinates me most, so thank you for bringing it to my attention.
What stands out to me in the excerpts here is that an "outsider" looking in (a woman, a continental Indian) to the system is more likely to see with acuity, particularly when her own land's history overlaps (colonialism) with the foreign system she observes. I am more likely to trust such an observer, as a result.
About 4 years ago, I attended a funeral in Conn. In attendance was a big-name-bank financial advisor to the wealthiest of the wealthy, who was explaining to me the latest what I can only call "scheme": making up a new entity in name only, with no intention of doing anything at all with it, and then raising money off it in order to then create a vehicle to buy actual assets. So, selling shares of nothing in order to buy all the things.
He then explained that the politics of the day (2020) were just like Reconstruction, with the same kind of power grab and violence. This was making the marketplace ripe for new ways to "succeed".
To which I asked, "Do you mean, act illegally?" Which elicited a laugh.
So, perhaps had Reconstruction not been how we rigged our nation's wealth in the past, we would not have the same shell game today.
My takeaway from what you've shared here is that we've a) never had a true, free Capitalist marketplace; b) we've never had true democracy ("Save the slaves, kill the Indians!"); and c), one way we've done this is to create an empire at home and abroad while simultaneously saying that is not what we're doing --- "here, go to sleep, have an American Dream..." and lastly, d) we've allowed the conflation of democracy into Capitalism by confusing citizenship for consumerism...to fund wars that keep us confused, and this started with Reconstruction, which, by the way, was really just a period when a handful of weirdoes said, thought, and acted as though they were better than everyone else -- similar to the Nazis -- and so demanded they have all the resources. It is colonialism in its archetypal form.
May I suggest a companion book by Heather Cox Richardson, "How the South Won the Civil War (2020)." I have not listened yet to the podcast, but what Greg has summarized pretty much mirrors what Professor Richardson has written in her book. "West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War (2008)" is another Cox Richardson book that I have yet to read but I trust is another detailed account: "A sweeping history of the United States from the era of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, this engaging book stretches the boundaries of our understanding of Reconstruction. Historian Heather Cox Richardson ties the North and West into the post–Civil War story that usually focuses narrowly on the South, encompassing the significant people and events of this profoundly important era."
Thanks, Greg, for introducing me to another "voice," speaking for our side!
UPDATE: This podcast with Manisha Sinha was terrific. I will be ordering (and reading!) her book, for sure.