Eric Foner Research Articles

Lincoln, Resurrected

In 1936, the great Lincoln historian J.G. Randall provocatively asked, "Has the Lincoln theme been exhausted?" At a moment when close to four thousand Lincoln titles were already in print, it seemed a sensible question, but Randall's answer was, counterintuitively, "no." An advocate of empirical, professional history, Randall lamented that the study of the sixteenth president had been dominated by amateurs. Lincoln, he argued, needed to be brought into the academy and subjected to rigorous research. Randall's summons did not go unheeded. Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, Lincoln attracted some of the most talented historians of the age, among them Richard Hofstadter, David Donald, Eric Foner, and James McPherson. The results were extraordinary. Donald produced what is still the best political biography of Lincoln to date. Foner situated Lincoln's Republican Party in a decades-long struggle over labor, slavery, and territorial expansion. And McPherson turned from finely grained histories of abolition to sweeping accounts of Lincoln's leadership in the first modern war. But as fine as post-Randall Lincoln scholarship was, it did not stanch the flow of new books. Although there is no accurate count, by best estimate about sixteen thousand titles have been published on the sixteenth president of the United States. For those strapped for time, the federally-funded Lincoln Bicentennial Commission compiled a list last year of 155 books that belong on the "essential Lincoln book shelf." Even if a mere 1 percent of the output on Lincoln is indispensable, it might be time, two hundred years after Lincoln's birth, to ask Randall's question again, but this time to answer it differently.

Splendid Failure: Postwar Reconstruction in the American South (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 232 president, he guided the forces of change as they finally overcame the southern caucus. Until 1946, most senators joined their southern colleagues in opposing cloture. From that point onward, southern senators fought to repel efforts to modify the chamber’s unique filibuster rule as a first line of defense. In 1957 southerners accepted a watered-down Civil Rights Act upon realization that a filibuster would fail and prompt angry northerners to pass more effective legislation. The South’s resort to a full-blown filibuster of the sweeping 1964 Civil Rights Act came as a last desperate effort in a battle that Russell and others knew they could not win. Much like the Civil War South to which southern senators often alluded , they won many skirmishes before losing the war. “Caucus members,” Finley concludes, “carried on a successful rearguard battle that delayed the collapse of segregation far longer than anything that occurred on the state level” (p. 309). CHARLES S. BULLOCK III University of Georgia Splendid Failure: Postwar Reconstruction in the American South. By Michael W. Fitzgerald. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publishers, 2007. x, 234 pp. $26.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-1-56663-734-3. $16.95 (paper). ISBN 978-1-56663739 -8. For more than twenty years, Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York, 1988) and A Short History of Reconstruction (New York, 1990) have introduced a wide variety of readers to the turbulent period that followed the American Civil War. Since the publication of Foner’s books, however, the study of Reconstruction as a set historical period and as a social, political, economic, and cultural process has evolved significantly. Scholars have advanced our understanding of gender relations within the household, African American political activities before and after emancipation, the effects of Reconstruction on regions beyond the South, and several other related topics. Such recent scholarship has underscored the need for a new synthetic treatment of Reconstruction, which Michael Fitzgerald’s Splendid Failure: Postwar Reconstruction in the American South strives to fulfill. Fitzgerald summarizes Reconstruction “as a contest between those who attempted the doomed, but mostly right thing, and those who were doing the very wrong thing and prevailed. But only for a time” (p. 212). These sentences conclude a survey of Reconstruction that encom- J U L Y 2 0 1 0 233 passes chapters on slavery, emancipation, Andrew Johnson’s failed selfReconstruction policy toward the South, the Ku Klux Klan’s violent campaign to reclaim home rule and reassert white supremacy, changes in gender and social conventions, and redemption with a moralistic eye on what might have been had the postwar conflict over the meaning of citizenship within the United States turned out differently. Although not a purely chronological narrative, Splendid Failure provides a solid overview of Reconstruction that keeps the experience of southern freedpeople at its heart. It also layers political, social, and economic development upon that foundation, giving readers an appreciation for the interrelated issues confronting the country after the war. The title of the book raises an obvious question: why did Reconstruction “fail”? White southern Republicans garner some blame for that outcome , but Fitzgerald places the greater burden of guilt upon the North. “Ultimately it would be the Northern public and its anti-slavery majority ,” Fitzgerald argues, “that determined the prospects for a different South” (p. 21). That majority’s dedication to change faded quickly. The northern public’s conclusion that reshaping the South was no longer worth the effort doomed those “who attempted . . . the mostly right thing.” Without northern support, white southern Republicans and their African American allies could not withstand the ferocious onslaught in the late 1860s and early 1870s. In short, northern advocates of African Americans’ rights lacked the wherewithal to sustain the struggle against conservative white southerners determined to recapture control over their region by any means necessary. Although Splendid Failure generally accomplishes the author’s goal, two issues may limit its broader influence. The first is functional. A popular or undergraduate reader will not object to the absence of footnotes, but for graduate students and...

A Cause Not Lost

Historians sometimes transform obscure events into oft-told stories almost overnight. Such is the case with the 1873 Colfax Massacre, which Eric Foner labeled the “bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction era.”1 Nicholas Lemann used Colfax as a prologue to his Redemption (2006), and James Hogue carefully contextualized the massacre in his examination of counterrevolutionary vigilantism in Uncivil War (2007). Now, historian LeeAnna Keith and journalist Charles Lane have contributed nearly simultaneous book-length accounts of a white posse’s murder of black prisoners in Central Louisiana. Neither book aims to significantly revise scholarly understanding of Reconstruction or even the Colfax Massacre itself; instead, both Keith and Lane offer contextualized accounts of the gruesome story designed to reach a wide audience. On that limited basis, Keith and Lane deliver compelling and largely congruent accounts of the massacre. In a state renowned for disputed elections, the contested 1872 Louisiana vote created two would-be governors, each of whom appointed a slate of local officials for Grant Parish. At first, exclusively white officials appointed by the Fusionist governor (supported both by white supremacist Democrats and disaffected Republicans) occupied a makeshift courthouse in Colfax, the parish seat. A group of Republicans, however, snuck into the building at night and installed officials—black and white—appointed by the Republican claimant to the governorship. Vigilantes, including members of the Knights of the White Camelia and the “Old Time Ku Klux Klan,” began filtering into Grant Parish, preparing to attack the Republicans. Those vigilantes—a posse, mob, or army, depending on one’s perspective—were loosely led by C. C. Nash, a Confederate veteran hardened by almost two years

Degrees of Freedom. Louisiana and Cuba After Emancipation (review)

Reviewed by: Degrees of Freedom. Louisiana and Cuba After Emancipation Richard Blackett Rebecca J. Scott. 2008. Degrees of Freedom. Louisiana and Cuba After Emancipation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 365 pp. (Paperback). ISBN 0-674-02759-0. The best thing one can say about Louisiana politics during Reconstruction is that it is Byzantine. Years ago, while I was trying to piece together the activities of a couple of African Americans who had gone to Louisiana in the early years of Reconstruction, I was forced on a number of occasions to thrown up my hands in despair of ever understanding the twist and turns of state politics with its competing governors, unpredictable relations between sympathetic whites and freedmen and, for that matter, the ways gradations of color informed relations among African Americans. After all, I am from the Caribbean and know a thing or two about the effects of color on political and social relations. But even that did not prepare me for Louisiana. Rebecca Scott has come to the rescue; or at least I think I now know more about the strange ways of Louisiana politics at the end of the 19th century. Part of the reason for this new appreciation lies in her commanding comparative analysis of developments of Louisiana and Cuba, two major former sugar-producing slave economies, in the years after the American Civil War and the Cuban Ten Years’ War and the shorter War of Independence. This is comparative history at its best, but one that in the end shows how the struggles in both locations became intertwined at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries with the intervention of the United States in Cuba. In order to make the study [End Page 207] more manageable Scott opts for an extensive examination of a sugar-producing center in each location—the Lafourche basin in Louisiana east and southeast of New Orleans and Central Cuba in the jurisdiction of Cienfuegos—economies based on the brutal coercion of labor. The approach allows her to examine the economic, social and political structures of each location in great detail. But it also provides her an opportunity to ask large questions of small places. Scott’s command of structures is complemented effectively by an appreciation for the stories of the people who lived and struggled to make a better world of freedom for themselves. Scott’s analysis of economic, political, and social developments—the structures—never fails to pay close attention to the stories of the men and women who struggled to make a better world for themselves and those who opposed these efforts at every step of the way. As others such as Eric Foner have shown, African Americans and their Republican allies in Louisiana saw the need for a declaration of rights that far exceeded anything guaranteed by the 14th or 15th Amendments. The 1868 Constitution, for instance, declared that all citizens were entitled to the same “civil, political and public rights.” The attainment and protection of these rights depended on a number of factors: the willingness of the national and state Republican Party to defend them by force if necessary against any attempts by the opposition to reverse these gains; accessibility to land for the freedmen; and the willingness of former slaveholders to accede to the demands for such a revolutionary redistribution of land. In less than 30 years after the adoption of the 1868 Constitution all of these gains had been reversed in the face of violence, murder, and mayhem. This “white supremacist project,” Scott argues, aimed to subordinate black labor, force segregation in public places and to suppress the black vote. Yet in spite of this sustained and overwhelming opposition she points to the many examples of racial cooperation, of efforts of black self determination, of cross-class alliances between the descendants of slaves in the country and artisans and professionals in the city. While the search for freedom in Cuba faced less formidable obstacles in the immediate post emancipation period, by the end of the first decade of the 20th century American intervention both encouraged and facilitated the articulation and adoption of policies that, in many ways, mirrored those of Louisiana...

Eric Foner , editor. Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World . New York : W. W. Norton and Company . 2008 . Pp. 336. $27.95.

Abraham Lincoln's bicentennial has resulted in a host of new books. In this collection of eleven essays editor Eric Foner brings together established Lincoln scholars and others new to the field to illuminate nineteenth-century America. Although the essays lack a single theme, they are grouped in four sections: the presidency, the emancipator, the person, and the political legacy. James M. McPherson's “A. Lincoln, Commander in Chief” opens the volume and serves as an introduction to McPherson's most recent work. Always a pleasure to read, McPherson takes a broad approach to understand Lincoln's leadership by considering both political and military factors. This is followed by Mark E. Neely, Jr.'s “The Constitution and Civil Liberties under Lincoln,” which builds on his work contrasting Lincoln's record with that of Jefferson Davis. In this essay, Neely contrasts the positions of President Lincoln with Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, as well as those of the Republican and Democratic parties. The contrast serves to the president's benefit. Sean Wilentz's “Abraham Lincoln and Jacksonian Democracy” portrays an egalitarian Whig who became more Jacksonian after 1854. Harold Holzer's “Visualizing Lincoln: Abraham Lincoln as Student, Subject, and Patron of the Visual Arts” concludes the first section of the volume by showing how America's sixteenth president used mass-produced lithographs and photographs to his political advantage.

Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan: Exposing the Invisible Empire During Reconstruction (review)

Reviewed by: Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan: Exposing the Invisible Empire During Reconstruction LeeAnna Keith Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan: Exposing the Invisible Empire During Reconstruction. By J. Michael Martinez. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. Pp. xiv. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $24.95.) Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan recreates the history of one of Reconstruction’s most gripping and important confrontations, the federal government’s effort to contain the power and violence of the Ku Klux Klan in the Piedmont region of South Carolina. Centered on events of 1871 and 1872, Martinez’s account covers the major test of the federal Ku Klux Klan Enforcement Acts, criminal codes enacted by the Republican-controlled Congress to address the burgeoning threat of conservative conspiracy and violence in the former Confederacy. The failure of the most prominent South Carolina cases prosecuted under the Enforcement Acts anticipated the sweeping defeat of the government’s new powers in the federal judiciary and by the determined network of southern whites committed to shielding KKK perpetrators from Enforcement Act justice. The South Carolina Klan cases—including hundreds of indictments and more than five hundred arrests in 1871 and 1872—have been well developed in [End Page 394] the literature on Reconstruction. Martinez’s version is more comprehensive than previous published accounts, and it wrestles successfully with the outstanding ambiguities of the story, including its complicated standing before the Supreme Court of the United States. The author substantiates his claim for the historic significance of the South Carolina trials: while they could not prevent the intimidation and murder of southern blacks, the cases revealed the true character of the Ku Klux Klan as a ruthless terrorist organization committed to subverting law and order in the South. Wearing the white hat in Martinez’s KKK drama is an unacknowledged American hero, Maj. Lewis Merrill of the Seventh U.S. Cavalry division. Despite his middling rank (and his uncomfortable subordination to the command of Gen. George Armstrong Custer), Merrill acted with considerable autonomy to investigate Klan violence in York County and other upcountry provinces of South Carolina. When President Ulysses Grant designated nine counties as being in a state of rebellion in 1871, he activated Enforcement Act provisions that suspended the writ of habeas corpus and allowed Merrill and the Seventh Cavalry to hold more than five hundred suspected Klansmen without charge. Merrill’s inquiry uncovered the organizational dynamics and political purposes of the Ku Klux Klan as well as the identity of key participants. His dossier would serve as the foundation for one of the largest federal prosecutions in American history. Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan also recognizes the three attorneys who made the government’s case. Amos T. Akerman was Grant’s attorney general, the first to preside over the newly organized Justice Department and a fervent advocate of justice for Republicans and freedmen in the southern states. Serving as prosecutors were U.S. attorneys Daniel H. Chamberlain and David T. Corbin. Both men were carpetbaggers, and Corbin had previously served as an agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina. Martinez echoes Akerman’s judgment that the two prosecutors “managed the business ably” and that together they had played a historic role in “the exposure and destruction of a terrible conspiracy.” Colorful sketches develop the biographies of a number of KKK defendants. The most notorious, perhaps, was Dr. J. Rufus Bratton, who fled York County for Canada and managed to evade incarceration after his conviction under the Enforcement Acts. Like others caught up in the government dragnet, Bratton succeeded in outlasting the federal commitment to bringing Klansmen to justice, living out his days as a free man held in high esteem among like-minded South Carolina whites. [End Page 395] The case of Dr. Bratton illustrates what Eric Foner has called the “unfinished revolution” of the Reconstruction era, which failed to deliver its promise of equality for southern blacks. Martinez’s book is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship that presents the human face of this gallant and arduous era of experimentation and progress. LeeAnna Keith The Collegiate School, New York City Copyright © 2009 The...

"For the Destruction of Radicalism": A Reconstruction Case Study

“For the Destruction of Radicalism”: A Reconstruction Case Study A GROUP OF MEN MET AT THE SMALL VILLAGE OF SHILOH in Marengo County on March 27, 1869, to protest a recent law passed by state legislators . Several months earlier, in December l868, the state assembly had approved legislation removing the seat of Marengo County government from Linden to Demopolis. That action began a prolonged struggle for the county seat that offers classic examples of logrolling and influence, and a view of grassroots politics. More distinctively, framed by the vicissitudes of Reconstruction, the confrontation accounted for an incongruous coalition of black Republicans and white Democrats. The county seat settlement, parsimoniously considered, determined a courthouse’s location. In a larger view, the campaign tested the ability of white Democrats to use economic coercion and other means to influence African American voters, and to affect the dynamics of Reconstruction politics. Enfranchising the black man had quickly become central to the radical Republican makeover of the South. Measured in any terms, the freedmen’s advancement was contingent upon possession of the ballot. Democrats based their dissent partly on tenets of federalism, reserving the prerogative of regulating suffrage to the states. It was also their conviction that freedmen could not cast intelligent ballots and that their inclusion in the electorate would corrupt the political process. Although Confederate states seeking readmission carried out the mandates of the First Reconstruction Act (March 1867) requiring enfranchising the freedmen, the issue remained divisive. W I L L I A M W A R R E N R O G E R S J R . William Warren Rogers Jr. holds a doctorate in history from Auburn University. He teaches at Gainesville State College in Athens, Georgia. He would like to thank the following people for their assistance: Peter Krafft, cartographer at Florida State University, and Jim Baggett, head archivist at the Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Birmingham Public Library. J U L Y 2 0 0 9 191 Democrats appealed to freedmen on behalf of Democratic nominee Horatio Seymour in the presidential election of 1868, but the party platform did not affirm black voting rights and most members of the party took strong exception to African American suffrage. In the Democrats’ view, the excesses attending Congressional or radical Reconstruction warranted their worst fears. To them, the venal carpetbagger and the equally self-serving scalawag, elevated to office by ignorant and credulous black voters, had seized political control of each southern state. Following that, according to Democrats, was corruption , excessive taxation, and financial mismanagement, all making for abominable radical rule. Reconstruction and Republican political domination caused unprecedented bitterness and passionate resistance among white southerners, accounting for the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and other night-riding orders. The perception of the Republicans’ nefarious behavior, and the resulting political violence, emblematically played out in Alabama.1 Yet by 1869–1870, with Ulysses S. Grant elected president and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments ratified, a certain ideological sedimentation was underway. In the South, those referred to as New Departure Democrats pledged their support for the political changes made on account of race and associated with Reconstruction. In his book The Road to Redemption, Michael Perman has written that the New Departure represented a “dramatic move” that envisioned the restoration of Democratic power in the South. What best signified that accommodation was acceptance of the Fifteenth Amendment (proposed in 1869 and ratified in March 1870), which prevented denying the franchise on racial grounds to otherwise qualified voters. New Departure spokesmen maintained that appealing to ex-slaves served party interests and expedited Democrats regaining political ascendancy in Raleigh, Jackson, Baton Rouge, and other southern capitals. The list certainly included Montgomery, Alabama. To New Departure Democrats, continued defiance was counterproductive, 1 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 1988), 221–22, 230–31, 239–43, 251, 273–77, 293–94, 297, 383–87, 340–44; Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869–1879 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984), 22, 80–81; Demopolis Southern Republican, April 7, 1869. T H E A L A B A M A R E...

INTERVIEW WITH DR. JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN

INTRODUCTION In 2007 we celebrated 60th anniversary of first edition of From Slavery to Freedom (FSTF), John Hope Franklin's groundbreaking synthesis that introduced African Americans' narrative history to millions of people throughout world. Over years book received countless accolades from historians, other scholars, and public. In a brilliant discussion of book's treatment of women and gender, Darlene Clark Hine, influential historian of South and African American women's history, praised book as the Bible of Black History ... as much a historical document and artifact as it is a history of our civilization. Columbia University historian Eric Foner acknowledged that FSTF has introduced generations of students, as well as readers outside academy, to richness and drama of African American experience, as well as making plain why no account of American history can be complete that does not accord African Americans a central role. The impact and significance of this work secures John Hope Franklin's legacy as a historian who fundamentally altered way Americans know their nation's past. (1) After reading John Hope Franklin's autobiography, Mirror to America, which contains a chapter on Franklin's experience writing FSTF, I grew curious to learn more about origins and evolution of his most famous book. In large part, I wanted to study history of FSTF and gain insight into how African American history developed as a distinct and respected scholarly field within American history. I began this project with a foray into Duke University's Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library, which holds John Hope Franklin Papers. I hoped research in that collection would uncover documents that went beyond Dr. Franklin's chapter in his autobiography in explaining why he wrote From Slavery to Freedom, why Alfred Knopf, Inc., published it, and how book's content and historians perception of it changed over time. John Hope Franklin's papers certainly contained fascinating sources, but besides a vertical file of book reviews and promotional flyers announcing new editions of FSTF, there were few materials that covered book's origins and evolution. (2) A breakthrough occurred when Karen Jean Hunt, director of Franklin Research Center, encouraged me to schedule an appointment with Dr. Franklin and to speak with him about my research project. At first, idea of interviewing John Hope Franklin made me nervous. I didn't feel that I had read enough of Franklin's work to conduct a proper interview with him, and I thought there would be no way one of most prominent historians in country could make time for me, an extremely junior historian barely one year removed from his dissertation defense. Still, how many times does one get to interview John Hope Franklin? Excitement over chance to spend time with a legendary historian outweighed my lack of confidence in my meager scholarly record. I took Karen Jean Hunt's advice and thanks to her, Dr. Franklin agreed to meet me during last week I was in Durham. I had enough time to finish research in Franklin's papers and quickly study some of his other essays and monographs. I devoured The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860 (1943), Dr. Franklin's first published book, which contained many themes regarding social position of minorities in democratic societies that appeared in his second book, From Slavery to Freedom. Duke's rare books library held a copy of first edition of FSTF, and I selectively read it during days leading up to my appointment. I was familiar with seventh edition of FSTF, which I had read a decade earlier. To my mind, first edition read like a completely different book. I remembered seventh edition's prose as rather wooden and weighed down by specific names and dates. The first edition's narrative, on other hand, was lively and exciting, and book read more like a trade book than a textbook. …

Hail to the Chief and to the Thief: Fantasies, Fictions, and Fears about the United States Presidency

Hail to the Chief and to the Thief:Fantasies, Fictions, and Fears about the United States Presidency Gregory P. Downs (bio) Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People. By Dana D. Nelson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 256 pages. $24.95 (cloth). A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government. By Sean McCann. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008. 248 pages. $35.00 (cloth). The Presidents We Imagine: Two Centuries of White House Fictions on the Page, on the Stage, Onscreen, and Online. By Jeff Smith. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. 400 pages.$26.95 (paper). Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World. Edited by Eric Foner. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008. 336 pages. $27.95 (cloth). This Is Not a President: Sense, Nonsense, and the American Political Imaginary. By Diane Rubenstein. New York: New York University Press, 2008. 320 pages. $75.00 (cloth). $24.00 (paper). Apocalypse Management: Eisenhower and the Discourse of National Insecurity. By Ira Chernus. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008. 328 pages. $60.00 (cloth). November elections bring forth January reflections, like one writer's fearful description of a post-ballot "popular hallucination" that unrealistically made each new presidency a "new millennium." From "talk heard on the streets" about a "new and brighter epoch," a stranger might suppose each new president a "species of arbitrary monarch." As contemporary as the talk on the street might sound, the observer was Charles Francis Adams Jr., who had his own reasons to worry over the presidency, and the newly elected "arbitrary [End Page 405] monarch" of his era was Grover Cleveland, now remembered perhaps less for his kingly reign than for his mustache or the Roy Rogers–graced rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike named in his honor.1 For Adams, this tendency to make of presidents kings (and, by implication, of the people subjects) was more irritating than outrageous, but over the twentieth century it looked less ridiculous than prescient as presidents acquired power over sections of the government left previously to Congress or to the states. More recently, of course, the notion of an arbitrary monarch seems even less fanciful after the United States Supreme Court's December 2000 Bush v. Gore decision elevated to the White House an administration that expanded the frankly monarchical notion of a unitary executive required neither to obey nor answer to directives of the elected legislative branch. Instead of crazy talk on the street, a modern-day Adams could learn about "King George Bush" from the public remarks of a sitting United States senator.2 Against the administration's torture, war-mongering, and Robin Hoodin reverse tax cuts, and in the face of an often-acquiescent media, scholars fell upon their word processors. To their credit, many resisted alluring but inadequate arguments about Bush's personal failings. For Bush was no exception; his overreaching culminated a series of destructive trends in modern U.S. politics, trends that would not necessarily be reversed by replacing Bush with another, better person. It is a strange and useful thing to read these critical works on presidentialism as the president who inspired them has decamped to Preston Hollow and as a far more sympathetic figure takes possession of the White House. Conceived partly in outrage, the books under review here arrive in a political world defined, for now, largely by hope. In taking away the punchbowl of the presidency just as the party gets started, their chronological contrariness warns of dangers many might rather forget. Although they are serious works of literary, historical, and psychoanalytic scholarship, several of these books flirt with presentism. Remarkably, given publication schedules, five mention Obama directly, and the sixth discusses the Bush administration's handling of the War on Terror. In distinct ways, these works take as the starting point not the individual president but the presidency as an institution and as a site of the kind of fantastic projection that Adams described in 1893 or that Whitman called the "White House of future poems, and of dreams and dramas."3 The most frankly presentist, least nuanced, and most stimulating of these is Dana D. Nelson...

Free speech in wartime

Newsweek recently proclaimed that Barack Obama's budget means, "We're all socialists now," and conservative erstwhile presidential contender Mike Huckabee declared that "a Union of American Socialist Republics is being born." For them, "socialism" means something like "big government." But when Eugene Victor Debs ran for president from 1912 to 1920, "socialism" had a different meaning: the end of capitalist exploitation. Today Debs's belief in the imminent birth of a classless society makes him seem "deeply deluded" about "the political and social reality in front of his face," as Ernest Freeberg suggests in Democracy's Prisoner. But if Debs was hopelessly naïve about the coming of socialism, he left a legacy for the country in another area: Eric Foner called it "the birth of civil liberties." Before the 1920s, Americans had no legally enforceable right to free speech. The First Amendment was not considered fundamental. The transformation in our definition of "freedom" came in response to what Foner calls "the most intense repression of civil liberties the nation had ever known"—the wartime policy of Woodrow Wilson, that Democrat and former Princeton professor of history who jailed Debs, and thousands of others, for opposing the Great War.

Race, Labor, and the Historians

The spirited Hill-Gutman and Roediger-Arnesen debates about blacks, whites, and unions have subsided so perhaps it is a good time to assess where we are. Robert Zieger's new book, For Jobs and Freedom, offers an opportunity. Zieger, the author of several solid studies of the labor movement, is fair-minded and comprehensive. The book is a study of the relationships of blacks and unions after Emancipation, based upon the secondary literature. It updates William Harris's The Harder We Run, published over twenty-five years ago. Zieger has consulted almost all of the new work produced since Harris's study. He has been influenced by Herbert Hill and David Roediger but rejects the essentialism of both. Neither union racism, nor working-class racism is imprinted. Zieger also rejects newer critiques embedded in laissez-faire economics. He is not persuaded by David Bernstein and Paul Moreno, who root working-class racism in the cartel-seeking, illegitimate behavior of unions. Zieger finds that unions played a more edifying role than both critical schools allowed (p. 6). Once few in number, black unionists today offer the best hope to revitalize the labor movement, he concludes. For Jobs and Freedom chooses two themes: the struggle of African American workers for equity and inclusion and labor's compromised egalitarianism (p. 8). These subjects reflect the literature. He uses Eric Foner's essay on rice workers during Reconstruction to demonstrate the link between black labor organization and Republican politics and explains the difference between the militancy of rice and sugar workers and cotton sharecroppers on the basis of their work. He relies on Alex Lichtenstein's work to demonstrate the prevalence of unfree labor in the Redeemer South, but leavens the grim picture with the biracial success of Eric Arnesen's longshoremen and Dan Letwin's miners. Tera Hunter's female domestics take their place along with male workers. Zieger incorporates the work of Joseph McCartin on blacks during World War I and Timothy Mitchen on the integration of the all-white textile work force in the South after the passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act

Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Post-bellum United States. Ed. by Thomas J. Brown. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. x, 246 pp. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-19-517595-0.)

Reconstructions, a collection of historiographic essays dealing with every conceivable aspect of Reconstruction literature published in the last sixty years, might just as well be called After Foner. In every essay Eric Foner's grand synthesis of the era, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988), looms as the elephant in the room that everyone steps around with a healthy respect for its bulk and power. Indeed, there occasionally arises in the essays a lament of sorts that portrays recent studies of the era as constricted by Foner's synthesis of social and political history. That line of argument sees his juxtaposition of black agency set against a failure of political will among northern reformers as a tragic narrative that has become so convincing as to prevent other questions and investigations. Several authors in the collection complain that gender as both a subject and a category of analysis has been squeezed out of the master narrative of Reconstruction. Others argue that Foner's emphasis on black agency has precluded the study of conflicts and divisions within black communities after the Civil War that may have significantly weakened the ability of black leaders to deal with powerful southern whites.

Thomas Fleming

March/April 2008 Historically Speaking 11 no discernible dividing line between diem. And the future is only the past that hasn't yet happened. Historians ' terrain makes the only useful launching pad for predictions, the only context for informed comment on what is happening now. Don't hang up when the news media call. Don't despise colleagues who exhibit themselves in the media: they're promoting all of us. Second, we should honor the only obligation of the writer in any genre and any discipline: write well. Language is a bright weapon, to be wielded freely. Historians need to be sensitive to words, if they are going to read documents aright. That sensitivity should make their prose gleam with the power of evocation and allusion, imagery and subdety. If we banish redundant terms, ill-chosen words, awkward phrases, dull sentences, and ill-crafted paragraphs, we will reach readers. Third, we should broaden our thinking. All history should be total history—sifting and stacking every kind of evidence, including postholes and bones, analogies and etymologies, bric-à-brac and objets d'art, literature and architecture. All history should be environmental history, because humans are inseparable from the ecosystems in which they live. And all history should be global history. If you Eve on this planet, you should be interested in the world. And even if your work is on pumpernickel production in selected villages in heatiiland environments in upper Westphalia in 873-74 with special reference to rainy weather, we all want to know the comparisons and connections that make your subject a vital part of our world. Finally, we must be welcoming. If we could turn history into a defensive trench, it would not be worth inhabiting: it would be full of detritus and rats. Some university departments already are. History's virtue is to be accessible. Accessibility is good. Our welcome should embrace amateurs who embrace scholarship and historians whose vocation is for teaching rather than research. It should also include scholars in other disciplines. Because every discipline has a history , and because historians, if they are truly to be historians, must know something about everything, our departments should burst with adjuncts and our curricula should be rich and thick with cross-listings. Felipe Fernánde^Armesto is Prince of Asturias Professor of History at Tufts University andprofessorof globalenvironmentalstudies atQueen Mary, University of London. His most recent book is Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America (Random House, 2007). Thomas Fleming Adam Hochschild is right. There is a gap between so-called "popular" historians and the academy. But it is not quite as wide as he seems to think. This year I was named president of die Society of American Historians (SAH), which was founded by Allan Nevins in 1 939 to encourage good writing and good scholarship in the historical profession. With membership limited to 250, the SAH continues to flourish. Distinguished historians from the academy such as Mary Beth Norton, David Kennedy, and Eric Foner work harmoniously with professional writers such as Nicholas Lemann, Geoffrey Ward, and David McCullough. Everyone is voted into the organization on the basis of his or her books. Nothing else gets you in. The SAH devotes not a little time to trying to bridge the gap between history and literature by giving annual awards for the best doctoral dissertation (the Allan Nevins Prize) and the best nonfiction book (the Parkman Prize). Some years ago I persuaded them to add a biennial award for the best historical novel (the James Fenimore Cooper Prize.) Starting this year, the SAH will also give a lifetime achievement award (the Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Prize). It will be funded by die Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. In the SAH we don't like the term "popular history ." It is frequendy used in a derogatory, put-down way. It also suggests diat only bestselling history books are worthy of note. We all know dozens of books diat a better review or a different publication date might have made more salable. I recall asking Alfred Knopf which was more important in a writer's life, talent or luck. He resoundingly replied: "Luck!" There are many ways to write...

Herbert Aptheker on Race and Democracy - edited by Eric Foner and Manning Marable

Herbert Aptheker on Race and Democracy - edited by Eric Foner and Manning Marable

Taming the "Savagery" of Michigan's Indians

Taming the "Savagery" of Michigan's Indians by James Z. Schwartz When immigrants from New England and western New York began streaming into Michigan in the late 1820s, they voiced great alarm about the perceived barbarism and wildness of the territory's first inhabitants. Although Michigan's Native Peoples had developed complex, sophisticated cultures, Yankee-Yorkers viewed them as primitive savages who existed without ethical or spiritual boundaries, worshipped false gods, drank excessively, delighted in violence, and lived like animals. Consequendy, Yankees insisted, Native Peoples failed to achieve the technical, moral, or intellectual progress that distinguished civilized from savage societies. Michigan's French residents seemed nearly as barbaric as its Native Peoples to these Anglo settlers. In their opinion, the French had relinquished their civilized ways for savage Indian customs rather than trying to tame Indian wildness. Appalled by Native Peoples' behavior, Yankee-Yorkers sought to eradicate what they viewed as savagery and to avoid the fate that had supposedly befallen the French. To accomplish these goals, they established two types of boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable behavior: both types of restraints would help to establish order and to stabilize group identity by transplanting New England norms to the West. The first control entailed establishing formal legal boundaries, including laws to reduce Native drinking and treaties to place tribes on reservations or to force them out of Michigan. The limits that followed were informal cultural boundaries, which consisted of books and articles in local newspapers that sought to persuade Michiganians to reject the lure of Native ways. When this effort to civilize Native Peoples was at its height in the late 1820s and early 1830s, Michigan contained roughly eight thousand Native inhabitants and some thirty thousand white settlers.1 Most of the former were Algonquian speakers who belonged to one of three tribes?the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, or Odawa. They engaged in hunting, fishing, and agriculture, supplementing their income by trading furs for 1 Willis F. Dunbar and George S. May, Michigan: A History of theWolverine State (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans, 1995), 182,195. Michigan Historical Review 34:2 (Fall 2008): 39-55 ?2008 by Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved. 40 Michigan Historical Review European manufactured goods. In addition, Michigan's Native Peoples had established what scholars describe as a borderland culture. This culture arose after the French claimed Michigan in the seventeenth century. As Native Peoples and Europeans mixed, they exchanged values, customs, and material goods, creating a hybrid or borderland culture that fused Indian and European elements into new cultural forms.2 Destroying these practices, Yankee-Yorkers believed, would enable them to preserve the purity of New England culture, instilling inMichiganians such important Yankee values as sobriety, industriousness, commitment to one's calling, and adherence to the tenets of evangelical Protestantism. In examining this "civilizing" process, which occurred primarily during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, this article seeks to bridge the literature on state formation, which in the past has focused mosdy on formal legal boundaries, and the "new western history," which concentrates on informal cultural borders. Thus, it will demonstrate the importance of multiple boundaries in both "taming" Native Peoples and establishing republican polities on the frontier. Additionally, this article joins a growing list of works that sheds light on a relatively neglected feature of borderlands?the methods that anxious elites used to destroy them.3 2Most scholars define borderlands as regions, either literal or metaphorical, located between nations, empires, or groups where the power of the center is weak. As a result, individuals are free to mix the customs, beliefs, or values of these neighboring entities to create new, hybrid cultures. For theoretical work on borders and borderlands, see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 1966), 39-41; Richard White, "Social History," in The New American History, ed. Eric Foner, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 203-39; Fredrik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Sodal Organisation ofCultural Differences (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969); Michael Rosier and Tobias Wendl, eds., Frontiers and Borderlands: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Peter Lang, 1999); Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Sodal...

Leaving the Good Mother: Frances E. W. Harper, Lydia Maria Child, and the Literary Politics of Reconstruction

African American activist and poet Frances E. W. Harper gained attention in 1850s with her passionate antislavery poetry; end of war saw Harper publishing anew. But for a poet who carefully shaped responses to her work by unambiguously referencing current events, some of Harper's postwar publications seemed inscrutable. In 1869, Harper published Moses: A Story of Nile, a book containing two items: a forty-one-page eponymous poem that elaborately revises Exodus, and a four-page prose allegory, of Flowers, in which a rose tree magically transforms a garden's other flowers into roses. By 1870, book was in its third edition, and, according to William Still, Harper often read from when she spoke in public, to warmly positive reviews (779). Contemporary editions of Harper's work offer no context for understanding this seemingly strange pair of texts. has been reprinted in two anthologies, Complete Poems of Frances E. W. Harper and A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, in both cases separated from of Flowers. In former, two pieces are separated by genre, and in Complete Poems, Mission is simply and silently excised. Critical readings have been equally puzzling. When is granted any attention, (1) most critics focus on identifying Moses--as Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, or even as Harper herself. (2) What these divergent interpretations have in common is that they read poem as backward-looking. Harper's other writings intervene vigorously in here and now. Why, then, four years after legal emancipation, would Harper choose to adapt story of Moses leading Hebrews out of slavery? Consider that while name often serves as shorthand for leader, not all allusions to Moses make use of fact that he was adopted and that he became a great leader only after leaving his adoptive home. In other words, original biblical story inverts standard rags-to-riches narrative. Brevard S. Childs writes of Moses from Exodus, He is not an unknown child who becomes king. ... Moses is first 'exalted' and later returns to a position of humility by identifying with his people (The Book of Exodus 12). Moses chooses to leave Pharaoh's household to lead Hebrews because he is Hebrew. Harper's poem foregrounds this leave-taking: It takes up nearly half text. So while Harper is certainly making use of longstanding analogy between ancient Hebrews and American blacks, this choice suggests that Harper's subject is Reconstruction, historical moment in which she is writing. For newly freed slaves, a crucial question was whether their quest for civil, political, and social equality would receive white assistance. Many whites were not simply unhelpful--they stood defiantly in way. Eric Foner details wave of violence that raged almost unchecked in large parts of postwar South. ... [I]n vast majority of cases freedmen were victims and whites aggressors (119). Thus, I read Harper's as a declaration of independence not only from paternalistic former owners, but also from former friends and allies. Closely reading and clearly understanding its pairing with Mission suggests that Harper's interests lie not simply with figure of Moses, but with his two mothers. The mother whom Harper has Moses reject is a woman of a different race who sheltered him during infancy and childhood. If figure of Moses can be said to stand for oppressed blacks in an American context, analogue to Pharaoh's daughter is radical antislavery white woman, long a powerful voice for voiceless and suffering slave. Beginning in 1830s, many white feminists wholeheartedly adopted abolitionist cause. Indeed, as Ellen Carol DuBois writes, the development of American feminism was inseparable from unfolding of antislavery drama (31). …

Encyclopedia of the Reconstruction era

Foreword by Eric Foner Preface Introduction Guide to Related Topics Chronology Map 1: Reconstruction Military Districts and Dates of Readmission and Redemption Map 2: Slaves as a Percent of Total Population 1860 A-Z Entries Primary Documents Appendix 1: Commanding Generals of Military Districts, as per the Military Reconstruction Act of March 2, 1867 Appendix 2: Reconstruction Governors for Former Confederate States Appendix 3: Dates of Readmission, Redemption, and Ratification of 13th and 14th Amendments for Former Confederate States List of Contributors Bibliography

"A Most Singular and Interesting Attempt": The Freedmen's Bureau at Marshall, Texas

"A Most Singular and Interesting Attempt":The Freedmen's Bureau at Marshall, Texas Christopher Bean (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The "Little Virginia Courthouse" in Marshall, 1852–1889, the first of Harrison County's brick courthouses. It was the courthouse in Marshall when the Freedmen's Bureau operated there. Courtesy the Harrison County Historical Museum. [End Page 464] On March 3, 1865, Congress created, according to historian W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the most "singular and interesting of theattempts made by a great nation to grapple with vast problems of race and social condition." This organization, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, which resided under the auspices of the War Department and was responsible for the freedmen's transition from servitude to citizen during Reconstruction, faced a daunting task the likes of which had never been tried before and one that most white southerners vowed to make impossible. According to historian Eric Foner, white southerners "resented the Bureau as a symbol of Confederate defeat and a barrier to the authority reminiscent of slavery that planters hoped to impose upon the freedmen." Most white southerners harbored deep animosity toward the victorious Union army, white Unionists, and black freedmen and were willing to employ intimidation and even murder as a means of maintaining the established racial order. Under these circumstances, the Freedmen's Bureau became a focal point of opposition to Reconstruction.1 All former Confederate states, and some southern states that did not secede, resisted Union efforts at reconstruction. Texas, however, stood out for the level of lawlessness and violence. Texans, especially those in the northeastern part of the state, remained virtually untouched by the war as compared to their [End Page 465] Confederate brethren in the east and remained belligerently opposed to Union control in ways reminiscent of the recently ended conflagration. Few who did not personally experience it could comprehend the state of affairs in northeastern Texas. One assistant inspector general of the bureau toured the region and discovered "a fearful state of things." "The campaign of an army through the eastern part of the State, such as was made by General Sherman, in South Carolina," concluded Bvt. Brig. Gen. William E. Strong, "would improve the temper and generosity of the people."2 "[H]ell has transferred its capital from pandemonium to Jefferson," remarked one correspondent on the area, "and the devil is holding high carnival in Gilmer, Tyler, Canton, Quitman, Boston, [and] Marshall.3 Marshall, which had a population estimated at two thousand in 1860, was a key entry point into northeastern Texas from Shreveport on the Red River in Louisiana. The town served as the seat of government for Harrison County, the center of slaveholding and cotton production in that part of the state. Whereas blacks represented approximately 30 percent of the population of Texas as a whole, they accounted for nearly 60 percent of the people in Harrison County. Indeed, the county had a slave population nearly comparable to Delta counties in Mississippi, Black Belt counties in Alabama, and coastal counties in South Carolina.4 Harrison County, because of its strategic location, was one of the first places in Texas to receive Union occupation forces (Federal troops arrived in Marshall on June 17, 1865, two days before the occupation of Galveston). And the county, because of the size of its black population, became one of the first Freedmen's Bureau subdistricts created in the state. Thus Harrison County provides an excellent setting for a study in microcosm of bureau activities in northeastern Texas.5 No subdistrict in Texas or across the South exactly matched any other, of course, and no claim is made here that Harrison [End Page 466] County was typical in any way. Nevertheless, it is a good place to seek answers to important questions concerning the bureau's role in Reconstruction. What difficulties did bureau officials face in dealing with local whites? What degree of commitment existed on the part of Union military headquarters concerning the duties of bureau agents in the Marshall subdistrict? Did the military and bureau agents cooperate effectively to provide protection for the freedmen and whites loyal to the Union...

Ohio & the World: Essays Toward a New History of Ohio (review)

Reviewed by: Ohio & the World: Essays Toward a New History of Ohio Bruce Bigelow Ohio & the World: Essays Toward a New History of Ohio. Edited by Gregory Parker, Richard Sisson, and William Russell Coil. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005xiv, 199 pp. Cloth $49.95, ISBN 0-8142-0939-4; Paper $22.95, 0-8142-5115-3; CD $9.95, 0-8142-9068-X.) To honor the bicentennial of Ohio statehood in 2003, The Ohio State University sponsored a series of eight public lectures that have been collected in this text. The first chapter, by Andrew Cayton, defines themes of Ohio history, including, "to rethink the popular image of Ohio as a bastion of American normalcy, the comfortable heartland"; "the progressive story of nineteenth century Ohio turns into decline and stagnation"; and the geographical diversity of the state, particularly between north and south. David Edmunds, in the next chapter, reconstructs Ohio in the late eighteenth century. He portrays the Native American groups as they allied with either the French or British then, later, with the Americans or British. The Indians did quite well until the collapse in the 1790s and when they were removed from the state in order to gain their land. James Horton continues the theme of cultural intolerance in the next chapter as he emphasizes the second-class citizenship that African Americans suffered in the antebellum era. Horton contrasts liberal northeast Ohio, which was settled by New Englanders and Pennsylvanians, with southern Ohio, which was settled by Southerners, a contrast illustrated by the difference between Cleveland and Cincinnati. Eric Foner displays the importance of Ohio during the Civil War era. Many of the major political and military leaders were sons of Ohio, and the state contributed more soldiers to the Union cause per capita than any other Northern state. As a result, the presidency was dominated by Buckeyes from 1869 to the early 1900s. Kathryn Sklar illustrates the progressivism of Ohio in the era between the Civil War and World War I as it urbanized and industrialized as the focus of the national core. A civil society of popular culture based on democracy and justice prevented major violence in the state in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 in Newark, unlike some other states. The national social gospel movement was led by Washington Gladden of Columbus. Tom Johnson emerged as a populist progressive mayor of Cleveland. National female leaders of the temperance movement (Eliza Stewart) and the suffrage movement (Harriet Taylor Upton and African American Hallie Quinn Brown) came from Ohio. James Patterson discusses the strength of Ohio as late as the 1950s, with its booming [End Page 157] industry based on steel, oil, and automobile manufacturing. Ohio was still a place of choice in the American Union, with its stalwart small-town conservative values represented by Republican Robert Taft in contrast with the more cosmopolitan and liberal Atlantic coast. Nonetheless, racial tensions were an issue, particularly in the larger Ohio cities in the 1950s and 1960s. Herbert Asher depicts Ohio in 2003 as in a state of decline economically and politically. Globalization has led to deindustrialization, and the average educational attainment in Ohio is among the worst in the nation. Ohio is no longer a place of choice, giving way to more vibrant regions like the Sunbelt and he two coasts. In the last chapter, William Kirwin echoes Asher in his formula for reviving Ohio economically by 2053, emphasizing higher education focused on the sciences and computer technology. However, as Asher pointed out, Ohio is no longer geographically central to the national economy as it once was in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. This book will work well in Ohio history courses as a supplement to a more detailed central text. The writing is enhanced by many illustrations, particularly the New Deal post office murals that are examples of popular imagery of the state. All in all, other states would do well to produce a similar text as they celebrate their history. [End Page 158] Bruce Bigelow Butler University Copyright © 2007 The Kent State University Press

Black History and the Reconstruction Era

Eric Foner presented this lecture on November 18, 2005 as part of the “Black History Matters” lunch and lecture series hosted by Columbia University's Center for Contemporary Black History. Foner discussed the misperception that historical sources documenting Black voices during Reconstruction were not available. He argued that understanding the Reconstruction Era is key to comprehending the historical shift represented by the Civil Rights Movement.