The half-truths of the Reconstruction Era

You might have noticed that the Reconstruction Era that climaxed in 1877 has become Topic A (and often B and C also) in the discussion of Confederate history and its disfavored monuments.

For anyone who has labored as a teacher or taught in history classes, the reason should be both obvious and instructive. Reconstruction historiography in its many phases has been what one writer labeled a “dark and bloody ground” of dispute – so much so as to offer a lesson in the relativity of historical certainties.

Consider two radically different views of Reconstruction, both of which saw their day of prominence. Early in the 20th century and for decades thereafter, Reconstruction was pictured as a season of exploitation of the seceded states, featuring “Negro rule” (as it was called) and carpetbag plunder. If the Germans, after World War I, could be fed the fiction that their armies had not been defeated but “stabbed in the back,” the South could be brainwashed in the fiction that “radical” Reconstruction was a nightmare of misrule and plunder. The oddity was that this was not merely the mantra of neo-Confederate apologists but a national consensus, embraced North and South.

The misrule myth was enshrined in a lively work of history by Claude Bowers titled “The Tragic Era.” Bowers laid out the story in vivid terms and was widely credited. Not incidentally, Bowers was a Wilson-Roosevelt Democrat; and since it was Republicans who had imposed “radical” Reconstruction on the helpless South, other partisans would draw the obvious conclusion. Oddly, the oppression myth was generated not in Southern seats of learning but at Columbia University in New York, by the “Dunning School” presided over by Professor William Dunning. This gifted historian trained many eminent historians, including Professor J.G.D. Hamilton of Chapel Hill, the doyen of the UNC history department in my father’s day. But if you looked into the actuality, the “Dunning School” (including the writings of the master himself) was far more various than its reputation – another lesson in the relativity of historical perceptions.

The myth of Reconstruction evoked above has been largely supplanted in the past half a century by a counter-myth. Thanks to well-argued revisionist studies, the old picture of oppression and plunder has yielded to Reconstruction as an alternative effort to impress on former Rebels the Unionist view of the outcome of the struggle between 1860 and 1865 – including requirements that the seceded states ratify the 14th Amendment and adopt new constitutions renouncing slavery. This story has now supplanted the old story of “Negro rule” and plunder and corrupt “carpetbaggers.” No doubt the latest story, too, will suffer its day of revisionist attack. No set view of the past lasts forever. A century ago, even Yankees foamed at the mouth over the tragic misrule of the prostrate South; today, even UNC academics foam at the mouth over Confederates and their monuments. History never lacks hanging judges; they flourish among C students.

Is the relativity of history the point? Yes, but not the only one. The principal lesson suggested by these conflicting parables, as in the past of many causes, is the need to distinguish between moralism, which is about judgment, and history, which is primarily about understanding. Years ago, a British novelist had a character say, memorably, that “the past is another country.” Perhaps the first demand of good history should be an effort to understand the otherness of that other country, after which the quest for hints of our advanced and moral present may commence – the surrender of the dangerous idea that we are superior in virtue to our ancestors.

A great historian of my acquaintance has remarked that in the study of history “half-truths are more dangerous than lies.” Lies expose themselves in due course. Half-truths linger and weave their way into the texture of public understanding.

As applied to today’s continuing argument about the monuments to a disfavored past, history proper will step cautiously, with an appropriate modesty, among the pratfalls that await a facile moral certainty.

Contributing columnist Edwin M. Yoder Jr. of Chapel Hill is a former editor and columnist in Washington.

This story was originally published November 29, 2017 at 11:36 AM with the headline "The half-truths of the Reconstruction Era."