Eric FonerRecensioni

Eric Foner has always been a calming voice of reason. A historian by trade, he peppers his articles with perspective. History has seen it all, and today is just more of the same. This is dramatically on display in Battles for Freedom, a collection of his The Nation articles, which began in 1977. In them, readers will see the very same issues they anguish over today, plus historical context the media seem to not want to know about. It is a smooth and easy read, with lots of issues readers might think are new and unique. But Foner shows they are anything but.

In article from the late 90s called Our Monumental Mistakes, Foner examines the then (as now) blazing controversy over Civil War monuments. Should they be taken down? Should the war’s defeated be allowed to lionize their failed leaders? And who really were the people being given statues? A little digging shows that “most Confederate monuments were erected between 1890 and 1920 under the leadership of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.” This means they were offered to localities. It was not the case that residents clamored for them to be erected. The monuments glorify people like the founder of the Ku Klux Klan, for example. And all those horse-mounted heroes are situated facing north, never retreating but always attacking the Union armies. Games. And the US is still playing them, this round with Proud Boys and Neo-Nazis defending the statues of traitors.

The way American monuments lie about the past come in all kinds of flavors, but all amounting to lies just the same. In his usual polite manner, Foner simply says “Amnesia best describes America’s official stance regarding slavery.”

In another chapter, he examines schooling in Texas, where never was heard discouraging word, giving students a totally distorted view of the nation. He says high schoolers learn about Phyllis Schlafly, The Moral Majority, The Heritage Foundation, the Contract with America, and the NRA. All ultra-conservative, and hardly representative of anything but failed extremism. Today, Texas has added massive book banning to ensure its young never see reality. As Foner says later: “America was created perfect and has just been getting better ever since.”

He is dumbfounded by the attacks on affirmative action. This after diagnosing the Reconstruction era as hypocritical, and the Jim Crow era that immediately followed, undoing what little equality and affirmative action was gained. His argument: “Let us not delude ourselves, however, into thinking that eliminating affirmative action will produce a society in which rewards are based on merit. Despite our rhetoric, equal opportunity has never been the American way. For nearly all our history, affirmative action has been a prerogative of white men.” And this was 20 years before the Roberts court dismantled it.

A fan of Lincoln, Foner also points to his same kind of wit and wisdom in the 16th president: “Young America,” he remarked “owns a large part of the world, by right of possessing it; and all the rest by right of wanting it and intending to have it.” Hence his appreciation of Abe Lincoln.

Foner deftly puts topics in their place in American conversation: ”If racial justice is an acceptable subject, class conflict is not.” He is frustrated by the lack conversation around class and mobility.

He profiles Sacco and Vanzetti (his first article for The Nation, requested by the publisher in a completely cold call to Foner) on the 50th anniversary of their totally shameful executions, despite appeals and huge protest marches, not to mention numerous eyewitnesses. His ease with storytelling shows through, as his long career of writing for The Nation testifies.

He looks at labor movements, the safety net, and a salute and request to Bernie Sanders in 2015. The salute was for making progressive issues and policies front and center for the first time in decades in the USA. The request was not to downplay American radicalism. There is no shame in being radical in America; it is only through the pressure of radicals that there is any movement at all, was Foner’s point. Wear it proudly; it’s the American way.

Contrast his appreciation of Sanders with his criticism of Obama. He saw Obama as just more of the same. Same faces, same voices, and no new ideas. This was ironic because Obama was supposedly all about change. Foner was not the only one to recognize the hopelessness of Obama’s choices of who to listen to, and when asked about change, he simply declared that he was the change. Not helpful. And little to show for eight years in power.

The book consists of 27 such pieces, plus a concluding interview of Foner by The Nation’s Assistant Editor. The sheer variety of topics is wonderful, but the color and depth Foner adds to them ensures his work will long outlast him.

David Wineberg

This is a heartbreaking book.

Some brief thoughts-

- Foner does a good job showing how the Reconstruction period was a tremendous missed opportunity for the USA. Briefly on the track to some kind of political representation for black people, for want of political strength and fear of conflict we turned out back on our black citizens.

- The author also highlights the missed opportunity in not teaching Reconstruction in schools. I feel like I am typical among Americans in that I had no idea that there was a time following the Civil War where black people were elected to Congress, served as high level state officials, and even law enforcement in the Deep South. The authors epilogue which describes how the collective memory of this flowering of a black political voice was intentionally erased after only a few decades is so upsetting.


- The issues that the Radical Republicans we’re attempting to tackle at the time (support of voting rights, reparations for slavery in the form of land and or money, public education) are shamefully, still controversial in USA today. And yet we are still living with the long term effects of our failure to tackle these problems

- only giving this book 4 stars since I’ve never read anything else on Reconstruction/the Civil War, so I don’t feel suited to judge all its merits. Still think it’s essential reading for anyone trying to understand the US and cut thru the thick mist of our national mythology.

If you think you don't need to read another Lincoln book think again. The author writes in the preface "But I believe that casting a bright, concentrated light on Lincoln and the politics of slavery--with politics defined in the broadest sense, not simply as elections and office-holding but the shaping of opinion within the extended public sphere--can illuminate his life and his era in new ways." Fascinating book.

This is going to be an interesting read - I'm already having a conversation with the book and I'm just finishing the preface.

This is a history book that looks at the time period of Reconstruction in the U.S., following the emancipation of slaves.

I had hoped it would focus more on the social and cultural tidbits, but the bulk of the book focused on politics. So, I found it very dry, very academic. Unfortunately, it was also a fat book with small font, so even when I skimmed, it was slow-going. And I did skim much of it. There were a few parts that I found a bit more interesting and did slow down and take in a bit more, and it is a time I really don’t know much about, so I did learn a few things, but overall, it’s just too slow/dry/academic for me. I did learn that black people (men) were able to vote, and were even elected to office; they also sat on juries. Things actually did loosen up for a bit before tightening up again. I didn’t know this.

recommended on AP US history listserv

The Fourteenth Amendment was badly written. Its language of "no state shall" opened it up to interpretation as applying only to action by the states, and its reference to "privileges or immunities" left it vague how broad or narrow these were. In the Slaughterhouse and Civil Rights Cases respectively, SCOTUS gave it these narrow readings and thereby betrayed the hopes of the Republicans who passed the amendment through Congress and wanted to root out most, if not all, the vestiges of race slavery. The book is worth reading even for the final chapter alone, which explains how this happened.

Could the interpretive history of A14 have gone differently? The book indicates dissents and arguments that would have done so. Did privileges and immunities include all the Bill of Rights and more? Could the enforcement clause empower Congress to step in with federal authority where states refused to protect civil rights or implement equal protection of the law? Did the federal government indeed retain the power to enforce rights expressly or impliedly set out in the Constitution?

It was a disaster at the time, with white mobs terrorizing African Americans as SCOTUS forbade the US government from taking action against them, but I'm not convinced it matters much today. By back-roads and byways of the Constitution, America has enacted most of the laws that Radicals foresaw: a public accommodations law under the Commerce Clause, even a Fair Housing Act with a fairly sweeping disparate impact construction put on it, a racial hate-crime law under the Thirteenth Amendment badges of slavery doctrine (blessedly unmarred by a state action clause), a Voting Rights Act against racial discrimination under the Fifteenth, and eventually incorporating the Bill of Rights under the guise of deprivation of liberty without due process.

What is wrong with the federal government's role in race in America today is not so much what it cannot do, but what it will not do. For example: regulate federal elections to prevent voter suppression and gerrymandering, require public housing it funds to be sited in areas with good jobs and schools, mandate civil rights training standards for police forces it funds. No hiding behind the state action doctrine!

Lincoln moved on the politics of slavery very, very slowly. Even after legally liberating the majority of slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation, he continued to push for the completion of abolition by states instead of coming out strongly for the Thirteenth Amendment. He kept defending the whites-only reconstruction government in Louisiana until he began to hesitate just before he was assassinated. It was Congress and Republicans in the country who pushed for national abolition and did what they could to impose a fair settlement in the South. Lincoln should be recognised as a genius of political diplomacy for moving piecemeal towards abolition while keeping the border states on the Union side, but he remained to the last a cautious, compromising moderate on emancipation and racial justice. He wasn't a straightforward hero of freedom and he repeatedly overestimated the chances of voluntary abolition, but he was wise in his careful policies and he grew in his recognition of black equality. Perhaps a more radical president would have lost the Civil War: as he said of Kentucky (which rejected the 13th 14th, 15th amendments), to have lost the state would have been almost to lose the whole game.

A buddy read with my dad. This definitely felt like the definitive work on the subject that we were looking for -- thorough but focused, careful and methodical. Its only drawback is just that the period is SO DAMN DEPRESSING. Especially toward the end when Republicans' best intentions started falling apart and shifted to hopelessness or victim blaming instead.

It's really not just the fuckheads out there putting on the white hoods, but the Governors and legislators saying "but look how much they (the KKK) do for their communities!" And the moderates saying the Enforcement laws were uncalled for, that the problems of the South should be fixed by the South. The folks in DC who got tired of hearing about the Klan every week, "We passed the 15th amendment! They should vote themselves out of the problem!"

Of course all of it would be less painful to read if it didn't still have so much to say about today. About leaders who talk about "very fine people" in crowds of violent white supremacists, refusing to denounce their violence. About an entire political party that is all too willing to associate itself with a belief in the illegitimacy of government itself. About the limited capacity of ALL OF US to stay engaged with a crisis long term. To get to a point where, rather than just taking a break to refill our cups, we say "WE HAVE DONE ENOUGH. I DON'T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT RACE EVER AGAIN."

Ahem. In short, an incredibly important and depressingly still timely read.

A ReaderEric Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia Universit
In his teaching and scholarship, Foner focuses on the Civil War and Reconstruction,
slavery, and nineteenth-century America.
ef17@columbia.edu in Afro-American History

Not that great. Better off with the full Reconstruction tome by the same fellow. This follows the career of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, along with the 1866 Civil Rights act - but to my reading in a bit of muddled way. Meaning he sorts of drifts between the contemporaneous debates on these items and the many changes / compromises that were part of that record, and then hearkens forward to later application of the item under discussion. Probably it is on me and my too casual reading (sorry) but I got muddled up often enough about just where we were and what we were talking about. Well intentioned of course and history with an agenda...

Short summary:
Scholarly, essential reading for the period of 1863-1877 in America, a time of extraordinary liberal progress, but which was met with inevitable backlash and thus an “unfinished revolution,” as author Eric Foner puts it. The shameful Jim Crow period which followed lasted for nearly a century, until the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s, and there are many elements of the struggle described here around racism and voter suppression that are still highly relevant in 2022. Particularly insidious were southern revisionist historians rewriting history as part of the mythology of the “lost cause,” a rare instance when the losers of a war wrote the history, and describing the period of Reconstruction as a disaster because African-Americans were voted into office and incompetent, when the reality was opposite. The value of this book being published in 1988 can’t be underestimated as it began setting the record straight, and it did so in a factual, balanced way.

Details:
It was thrilling to read of the brilliant string of progressivism after the war: the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments (dealing with slavery, due process, and male suffrage), the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Reconstruction Act of 1867, and the Enforcement Acts of 1870-71. The advances during this period (much of which was taken away) is astonishing – blacks dominating the legislature in South Carolina, black chiefs of police in Tallahassee and Little Rock, the intermingling of the races in New Orleans, and Texas barring railroads from segregating passengers. I found that heroes in Charles Sumner (Senator, Mass.), Thaddeus Stevens (Congressman, Penn.), and Lyman Trumbull (Senator, Ill.) for pushing ideas that were considered radical in their day. I also found heroes in black elected representatives like Benjamin S. Turner (Congressman, Alabama), Robert Smalls (Congressman, South Carolina, and Civil War hero), and Robert Elliott (Congressman, South Carolina). Foner did a great job of describing the struggle and politicking between parties and within each party to get progressive legislation passed. He wrote:

“Biracial democratic government, a thing unknown in American history, was functioning effectively in many parts of the South. Men only recently released from bondage cast ballots and sat on juries, and, in the Deep South, enjoyed an increasing share of authority at the State level, while the conservative oligarchy that had dominated Southern government from colonial times to 1867 found itself largely excluded from power. Public facilities had been rebuilt and expanded, school systems established, and tax codes modernized. … Reconstruction had nipped in the bud the attempt to substitute a legalized system of labor discipline for the coercion of slavery, and enhanced blacks’ bargaining power on the plantations.”

He notes the dramatic expansion of the federal government in this period, and in a great insight “that freedom stood in greater danger of abridgement from local than national authority (a startling reversal of the founding fathers’ belief, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, that centralized power posed the major threat to individual liberties.” And yet, the founders did not consider the rights of non-white men. Still, it’s hard to fathom the shift, from a time when most functions of the government were handled at a state or local level, and the federal government was “in a state of impotence.”

It was of course equally disheartening to read in great detail the backlash to this progress and the ugly racism that accompanied it. The level of violence and terrorism from white people was incredible. Excerpts could be extracted by the dozen, but to Foner’s credit, he refrained from making these events the sole focus of his book or sensationalizing them. Just a couple of examples:

“Texas courts indicted some 500 white men for the murder of blacks in 1865 and 1866, but not one was convicted. ‘No white man in that state has been punished for murder since it revolted from Mexico,’ commented a Northern visitor. ‘Murder is considered one of their inalienable state rights.’”

“The basic problem, concluded Col. Samuel Thomas, who directed the [Freedmen’s] Bureau in Mississippi in 1865, was that white public opinion could not “conceive of the negro having any rights at all”: “Men, who are honorable in their dealings with their white neighbors, will cheat a negro without feeling a single twinge of their honor; to kill a negro they do not deem murder; to debauch a negro woman they do not think fornication; to take property away from a negro they do not deem robbery… They still have the ingrained feeling that the black people at large belong to the white people.”

In the antithesis of the American Revolution and the principle of democracy, North Carolina Governor Worth said that “Universal suffrage – government by mere numbers – I regard as undermining civilization,” and all political mattes were trivial compared to the overriding question: “Shall this country be ruled by the whites or the niggers?”

The section on the Ku Klux Klan, who spread a “wave of counterrevolutionary terror” that “lacked a counterpart either in the American experience or in that of the other Western Hemisphere societies that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century” is particularly strong. “To blacks, indeed, the violence seemed an irrefutable denial of the white South’s much-trumpeted claims to superior morality and higher civilization. ‘Pray tell me,’ asked Robert B. Elliott, ‘who is the barbarian here?’”

Foner also makes this insightful comment, based on the data:
"Contemporary Democrats [at that time], echoed by subsequent scholars, often attributed the Klan’s sadistic campaign of terror to the fears and prejudices of poorer whites. … The evidence, however, will not sustain such an interpretation. … Usually, the Klan crossed class lines. If ordinary farmers and laborers constituted the bulk of the membership, and energetic ‘young bloods’ were more likely to conduct midnight raids than middle-aged planters and lawyers, ‘respectable citizens’ chose the targets and often participated in the brutality.”

This included extraordinary levels of violence at the polls, necessary in some places to ensure Democratic victory, and which plunged black voting levels from their post-war highs of 90+%, causing one writer to comment that “a revolution has taken place – by force of arms – and a race are disenfranchised – they are to be returned to condition of serfdom – an era of second slavery.”

Balance:
Such a read is invaluable not only because it bears witness and fleshes out details, but also because it gives us the nuances in views throughout the country, both North and South. Only five states, all in New England, allowed blacks to vote on the same terms as whites prior to the 13th Amendment, and “the majority of Republicans were not Radicals but moderates and conservatives who resented the ‘element that seem to have the negro on the brain all the time.’” It threatened to divide the party. Meanwhile, residents of the mountainous country of the south, wrote one Unionist, were not “afraid of negro equality,” if “rebel superiority” was the alternative.

Rather than laud the role African-Americans had played in building the wealth of the country, and give them land plots as a form of retribution (out of 850,000 acres of abandoned land the Freedman’s Bureau had its disposal, or Thaddeus Stevens’ call to seize 400,000,000 acres belonging to the wealthiest 10% of Southerners and distribute it), most complained of their indolence and “Few Northerners involved in black education could rise above the conviction that slavery had produced a “degraded” people, in dire need of instruction in frugality, temperance, honesty, and the dignity of labor. Rare indeed was ‘The Freedman’s Book,’ a primer written by abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, that sought to develop a sense of racial pride through brief biographies of black figures from Benjamin Banneker and Frederick Douglass to Toussaint L’Ouverture.”

The North is certainly not presented in a rosy light here, and Foner devotes time to explaining how big business and its “Indian policy” was essentially to “surrender most of their land and cease to be Indians,” the Dominican Republican was annexed in a very unsavory manner, and massive corruption reigned, along with the bane of democracy – lobbyists. “The Supreme Court repeatedly prevented municipalities from repudiating railroad-aid bonds even when evidence came to light that bribery accounted for their being issued,” Foner writes, and “Blacks could not help noting the contrast between such largesse [100 million acres of land and millions of dollars of aid to support railroad construction] and failure to provide freedmen with land.”

There was great debate over stronger and weaker versions of the 15th Amendment, with the result being one that it did not prohibit literacy tests, and did not break with the idea that voting was a privilege. In the South, Democrats were ascending and violently pushing back on Reconstruction, while in the North, politicians wanted to retain their own local qualifications, and in the West, Chinese-Americans could not vote – to say nothing of women, who were denied entirely. How regrettable was it to read that feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton voiced racist and elitist bile while arguing for women’s suffrage during this period!

Meanwhile, in Foner’s view, President Johnson also made the “most blatantly racist pronouncement ever to appear in an official state paper of an American President,” when in his December, 1867 annual message to Congress, he insisted that black people possessed less “capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.”

The Supreme Court was retrograde in this period as well – and viewed today much as how the current one will be viewed by history. One example is the 1876 decision in U.S. v Cruikshank, which arose from the Colfax massacre, which “rendered national prosecution of crimes against blacks virtually impossible, and gave a green light to acts of terror where local officials either could not or would not enforce the law.” As a small criticism, it seemed like Foner could have devoted more time to explaining how this 3rd branch of American power had come to be assembled, as he does with the Congressional and Presidential elections.

Some parallels to today:
Keep in mind for all of them that the parties have swapped relative to progressivism; the Democrats in this period are the Republicans of today, and vice-versa:

- On presidential behavior: the polar opposite of Lincoln in personality, Andrew Johnson made decisions in isolation and had little sensitivity to the views of others. Ala Donald Trump, when a heckler yelled “hang Jeff Davis” at a political rally, Johnson replied, “Why not hang Thad Stevens and Wendell Phillips?” He also “indulged his unique blend of self-aggrandizement and self-pity. On one occasion, he intimated that Providence had removed Lincoln to elevate Johnson himself to the White House. At St. Louis, he blamed Congress for instigating the New Orleans riot and unleashed a ‘muddled tirade’ against his opponents: “I have been traduced, I have been slandered, I have been maligned….” If that doesn’t sound like President #45, I don’t know what does.

- On fake news, ala Fox: “Southern newspapers consistently misinformed their readers about Northern politics, overestimating the strength of the National Union movement, portraying Johnson’s opponents as a band of Radical fanatics who lacked broad popular support, and predicting Congress could not possibly do the things it then proceeded to do.”

- On a bitterly divided political climate: “Democracy, it has been said, functions best when politics does not directly mirror deep social divisions, and each side can accept the victory of the other because both share many values and defeat does not imply ‘a fatal surrender of…vital interests.’ This was the situation in the North, where an Alabama Republican observed, ‘it matters not who is elected.’ But too much was at stake in Reconstruction for ‘normal politics’ to prevail.” And sadly, while a former Confederate officer shrewdly observed, it was precisely the Klan’s objective “to defy the reconstructed State Governments, to treat them with contempt, and show that they have no real existence,” acting as if conducting a revolution, “Republicans typically sought stability through conciliation,” which was a mistake morally as well as politically.

- On the rich avoiding taxes, and income disparity: There were heavy poll taxes on freedmen, and extremely low taxes on property owners in the south. Meanwhile, in the north, “Despite widespread prosperity, the unprecedented fortunes accumulated by the nation’s captains of commerce and industry helped create one of the highest levels of income inequality in all of American history.” … “Even Rochester railroad president Isaac Butts identified the concentration of wealth ‘in fewer and fewer hands’ as the nations’ most serious problem.” … something the periodical The Nation called “the great curse of the Old World – the division of society into classes.” Gee, doesn’t that sound familiar.

- On public education and charter schools: “…the governor [of North Carolina] feared that if white children were educated at public expense, ‘we will be required to educate the negroes in like manner.’ To avoid having to expend public monies on black education, Worth and his legislature authorized localities to establish tax-supported private academies, risking, as one ally warned, ‘the entire alienation of the poorer class’ of whites, and destroying the South’s only extensive system of public education.” The connection to the charter schools of today is uncanny. Schooling became a “major casualty” of Democratic rule, with Virginia being an exception.

- On blacks being taken for granted by their party: “Already, blacks confronted a political dilemma that would plague them throughout Reconstruction – their very unanimity as Republicans meant their ballots could be taken for granted by party leaders seeking the white vote.” – which is still true today.

- On controlling the vote: gerrymandering “ensured Democratic control, reduced the number of polling places in black precincts, empowered the legislature to appoint local governments, and barred from voting all those who had failed to pay a poll tax or been convicted of petty larceny,” precisely the same techniques we see to this day.

- On originalism and fear mongering: the Democratic party was “a party of negations,” with a “potent cry of white supremacy,” and called to originalism even though it implied a system of apartheid in the country, despite the good in the revolutionary documents. “The Union as It Is – the Constitution as It Was,” was the Democratic slogan. Fear mongering over black men raping white women and miscegenation, replacing “pure blood” and changing the racial dynamic of the country abounded, similar to a country whose conservatives now fear the inevitable day when its white populace will be in the minority. One of the best responses to this incessant fear of racial mingling was from a black delegate in Georgia, who pointing out that the “purity of blood” lauded by their opponents had “already been somewhat interfered with” by planters assaulting or cohabitating with female slaves.”

- On reaction to economic crisis: The original “Great Depression” was a downturn that started with the Panic of 1873 and lasted nearly to the end of the century (and the 65 months of contraction before it hit bottom in 1878 remains the longest uninterrupted such period in American history). The results were predictable, and mirror other such periods (such as our own), with the progressive side calling for socialistic reform, and business interests (often controlling newspapers) calling for union busting and even having the gall to view the Depression as “not an unmixed evil, since it promised to lower wages, discipline labor, and curb the power of unions.” Meanwhile, voters reacted to hard times by turning against the party in power.

- On the wrong kind of reparations: the insane idea that slaveholders should be compensated for the liberation of the people they had kept as property, an idea that persists in far-right circles to this day, to which radical Henry Winter Davis of Maryland said “Their compensation is the cleared lands of all Southern Maryland, where everything that smiles and blossoms is the work of the Negro that they tore from Africa.”

- On “good people on both sides”: Foner points out that aside from direct participation in the Ku Klux Klan from all classes in the south, it had tacit approval from those who remained silent and spoke of the “good” the organization accomplished despite its “excesses,” strongly opposing Federal intervention, which reminded me of the position Trump took in response to Charlottesville.

Wrapping up:
In addition to the thorough research and his devotion to the unbiased truth, a part of what makes Foner such a great historian is that he takes the broader view of these events. He makes observations like “liberal reformers were increasingly obsessed by the same dilemma with which men like Madison had wrestled a century earlier – how to reconcile private property with political democracy.” There is wisdom in his analysis of the Emancipation Proclamation, that it was Lincoln’s attempt to find a middle ground and not alienate Southern Unionists, but at the same time, initiate the emancipation process in a way that was “legally unassailable,” which may answer modern criticisms of Lincoln’s morality. He says quite simply and factually that the Democratic Party was devoted to two things: white supremacy and labor control, and it’s a history that must be confronted.

As a criticism, sometimes it seems the nuggets of gold and key takeaways are buried within the text, instead of being highlighted by Foner. This is quite a tome at 600+ pages and extremely detailed, which may be intimidating for those who want to learn about this time period outside of a college history course.

A good companion reader would be James Lowen’s “The Confederate Reader,” which contains documents in the form of speeches, articles, and laws in this period which make it clear that slavery was the reason for secession, and after losing the war, white supremacy the goal in the Jim Crow south. A fictional work that makes for a good companion read is W.E.B. Du Bois’ “The Quest of the Sliver Fleece,” as it deals well with the political and economic forces of the period, in addition to prevailing social attitudes.½

Excellent summary of the post-Civil War constitutional amendments.

a heavily researched scholarly work without the usual romantic fictions around the civil war

Not a biography of Lincoln, but an insightful look at the Nation's, as well as Lincoln's, position on slavery and the equality and rights applicable to the enslaved and freed blacks. It's a well known era of our Nations history, and we all know the basics. But not many books can cover such a well known subject and still introduce so many new or unrecognized facts about slavery and the viewpoints of the citizens and politicians of the day.
While slavery is acknowleged as evil, undoing the slavery policy was much more complex than we would think given today's mindset. Many in the North favored abolishing the practice of slavery over time, compensating slaveholders, and then relocating freed slaves to designated colonies to be established. The immediate freeing of all slaves, many feared, would lead to chaos and anarchy with a million suddenly free men, without jobs, without land, without resources, without education, and rightfully angry and resentful, suddenly roaming the country.
We've all read of how Lincoln freed the slaves by the Emancipation Proclimation, but we don't normally hear about how it came to be, the political thoughts, for and against at the time, what prompted Lincoln to issue the declaration when he did and how he did, and what it actually meant since those affected were in rebellion. The politics behind the decision are not well known, nor do we hear often of how Lincoln's views on the subject may have changed over his years in politics. There were so many more issues and complexities on the issue at the time, things we aren't often exposed to. The new insights into this subject made this a very interesting book.

nonfiction/history-biography. A comprehensive portrait that shows how Lincoln changed and grew over the course of his political career.

It's just so g*****n bleak. We've done this before, and given in at the finish line. We are one more federal election way from a minority party nullifying election results they don't like. The terrible thing is that would mean the cynics were right all along.

All the more impressive for having been initially released as a PhD dissertation, this is one of the most comprehensive and insightful treatments of a specific ideology that I've read. While it requires some fairly advanced knowledge of the issues of the antebellum political system (issues like the Wilmot Proviso, party factions like Barnburner Democrats, and key figures like Horace Greeley get dropped into the analysis with cursory to no effort made to explain their context), Foner manages to pull together a large amount of primary source material to explain just what ideological positions and political tactics took the Republican Party from marginal upstarts to the nation's dominant political party in less than a decade. While his decision to structure the book one theme at a time instead of purely chronologically means that the narrative jumps around a bit, ultimately it's a highly effective way to tie together all the threads of thought from the various movements and issues that dominated the national agenda in the 1840s and 50s - how the country would expand, who would get to settle in the new territories, and what kind of life they would be able to live.

My copy begins with a fascinating essay written by Foner for the book's 25th anniversary that delves more deeply than the original book did into how the free labor plank of the Republican platform related to industrial capitalism and the beliefs of the Founding Fathers. Catchphrases like "Free labor" have always meant different things to different people (he mentions the modern Orwellianism of "right to work" laws), but at the time of the Republican ascendancy, when the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution were making it clearer than ever that the US had broken decisively with its agrarian origins, the slogan implied to many people that the American promise of labor freedom meant working with and through industrial capitalism instead of against it. Instead of Thomas Jefferson's ideal of "every man a yeoman farmer", "every man a shopkeeper or factory laborer" was a much more attractive vision for the rapidly growing population of the North. Foner discusses the limitations of the ideal - the "freedom" to engage in wage labor often meant settling for dangerous, degrading, and poorly remunerated factory jobs; women were excluded almost entirely; arguments that white laborers shouldn't have to compete with black slave labor were often extremely racist - but in an era where the democratic, egalitarian, populist sentiments of Jacksonian democracy still remained powerful, "free labor" was quite congenial to the white working majority. He doesn't mention Karl Marx's "Address from the International Workingmen's Association" correspondence with Lincoln through Ambassador Charles Francis Adams, but even a socialist like Marx saw "free labor" as a powerful tool to help emancipate the working class from oppression.

The heart of the book is the sections where Foner traces the genesis of the party to the inability of existing parties to address the question of slavery. The Democrats were particularly wracked by the issue, even going so far as to split in two for the 1860 Presidential election and remain the underdog for most of the rest of the 19th century, but parties like the Whigs withered completely as other issues of the day like economic development were subordinated to the larger questions of abolition and national unity. The Republican Party that competed in unsuccessfully in 1856, more successfully in 1858, and triumphantly in 1860 was composed of several heterogenous groups of political refugees, and Foner constructs ideological and organizational genealogies for each:
- the Free Soil Party (an extremely influential single-issue anti-slavery party focused on slavery's negative economic impact on white workers, they invented the eponymous slogan of the book)
- the Liberty Party (a related but much smaller single-issue party that focused more on the immorality of slavery than its economic effects)
- many Whig Party members (the Henry Clay-led stereotypically pro-industry, pro-banking, pro-tariff "big government" party that broke up over its inability to unify on the slavery issue, Lincoln and many other Republican leaders were originally Whigs)
- the Know-Nothing Party (AKA the American Party, an anti-immigrant pro-WASP racist party that was officially neutral on slavery, but the anti-slavery wing liked how abolition helped white workers by reducing competition from slave labor)
- disaffected Northern Democrats (they hated how plantation aristocrats dominated the Southern wing of the party and were uneasy at slavery's relationship to their supposed Jacksonian ideals, even if they weren't quite comfortable with how Whig-dominated the Republicans were)

Each of these groups brought something different to the table, and it's interesting watching the Republican leadership trying to cobble together a coherent party platform out of all these antagonistic blocs. By far the most vigorous and essential to the Republicans' success were the radical abolitionists, and by far the best weapons in their arsenal were abolition and Unionism. Then as now, the American public had an almost religious reverence for what they believed the "will of the Founding Fathers" to be, and one successful tactic the Republicans hit on was to claim that the Constitution was actually completely neutral on the subject of slavery, yet was being hijacked by the Slave Power to pass things like the Fugitive Slave Act or get slavery extended to the Western territories. In contrast to people like William Lloyd Garrison who claimed that the Constitution was a "pact with hell" for either mostly punting on the question of federal involvement with the "peculiar institution" or actively abetting it, and who therefore remained fringe figures, Republicans figured out that it was much easier to convince people that the Constitution was perfectly fine as is and that all they were trying to do was restore its original vision.

Southerners played right into their hands by forcing repeated showdowns over how to deal with each new territorial acquisition, using the Kansas-Nebraska Act to renege on the Missouri Compromise, or trying to get federal judges to overturn Northern "personal liberty" emancipation laws for escaped slaves via terrible Supreme Court decisions such as Dred Scott. Much like with "free labor", "free soil" was a powerful rallying cry for Northerners who were tired of the increasingly frequent standoffs forced by the delicate balance of power in the Senate between free and slave states, and hoped to use the newly acquired territories to break the political stalemate. However, even given the advantage of those provocations, the Republicans still had to fight off defectors within their ranks who started to flirt with states' rights from the opposite direction. Many otherwise orthodox Republicans gave extremely impassioned speeches in the 1850s about the rights of free states to nullify pro-slavery federal laws like the Fugitive Slave Act, only to change their tune when, thanks to the influence of the more moderate and conservative factions, they discovered that abolition and pro-Unionism was a better sell in most of the North.

To that end, Foner does go into the demographic aspect of who in the North supported abolition and who didn't, in slightly greater detail than James McPherson did in his otherwise peerless Battle Cry of Freedom. The parts of Northern states that were settled by Germans or Yankees (generally the northern parts - even to this day many downstate or rural areas of the Northern states are culturally and demographically similar to the South) hated slavery, while big cities were mostly apathetic. Small towns were often the most fervently Republican, while cities remained more Democratic thanks to their efforts to appeal to immigrants. The nativist and temperance movements, previously powerful and independent, eventually became subsumed into the broader Republican coalition, much to their chagrin. There were forceful debates over exactly how far to entrench opposition to slavery in the party platform - was endorsing popular sovereignty sufficient, or was the risk of allowing slavery in the territories too great, and therefore outright abolitionism the only acceptable option? Once the Republicans had recaptured control of the government from the Slave Power, could it confine slavery to the South and allow it to wither away somehow, or would more extreme measures be needed?

The radical faction was helped once again by the South's intransigence and threats of secession, and though its preferred candidates like Salmon Chase or William Seward proved unacceptable to the party at large, a moderate former Whig like Abraham Lincoln had to endorse radical principles like slavery's "ultimate extinction" sufficiently in speeches like the famous "House Divided" one to gain the 1860 Presidential nomination. Different arguments were used to support the Republican message in different parts of the North, and one of Lincoln's hidden strengths was that as "everyone's second choice" his candidacy could be rendered palatable to just about every Northern demographic, particularly given his unrelenting emphasis on keeping the Union together at all costs. The Republicans' emphasis on national unity, the evils of slavery, and the power of free labor to help the workingman gave them a greater and greater advantage in the North, and in 1860, Lincoln and the Republican Party won convincingly in the Senate, House, and Presidential races.

It's important to keep in mind that the rhetoric about "free men" was directed more at white Americans than blacks - even Lincoln was forced to claim in his debates with Douglas that he wasn't in favor of making blacks socially or politically equal: "I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects - certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man." (This distinction between natural rights and social or civil rights would cause free blacks many problems in later years, from the famous Reconstruction-era Slaughterhouse cases and Plessy v. Ferguson all the way until the civil rights acts and cases of the 1960s). Though many Republicans abhorred the idea of living alongside blacks, and opposed black suffrage or allowing blacks to serve on juries, they made many converts by arguing that the institution of slavery drove down wages for white workers, as well as encouraging undesirable patterns of aristocratic government in Southern states that harmed poor blacks and whites alike. While most Americans agreed that whether settlement in the new Western territories would be slave or free was of vital importance, many "racially progressive" politicians openly hoped that blacks would be excluded from the new lands altogether, or perhaps colonized in Africa or Latin America as a further tentacle of Manifest Destiny. Often the question of who's on the side of progress means picking the lesser of two evils, and Southerners could see that whatever their Northern counterparts agreed with them on in regards to racial superiority, the Republicans' fundamental opposition to slavery meant that ultimately no compromise was possible.

In contrast to his discussion of pre-war Northern Republicans, Foner talks much less about the ideological currents of the South or the Democrats, or about how the Republican ideology survived past the war into Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. This is a pity for several reasons. There's a lot to be said about how much of Southern opposition to the North was due to their conception of themselves as a unique region of the country, with their own ethnic heritage and distinct culture, and how with the South out of the government during the war, many important initiatives were passed - good ones like the Morrill Land Grant College Act, the Homestead Act, and the National Banking Act, along with more mixed ones like the Pacific Railroad Act. Additionally, I would have liked for more info on how the Democratic Party managed to survive splitting in two in 1860 and remaining the usually weaker party for the next few decades instead of simply dissolving. Finally, further discussion on how the "free labor" plank of their platform endured the increasing amount of labor violence in the later part of the 19th century would be very interesting, since labor biographies such as Ray Ginger's The Bending Cross focus more on key characters like Eugene Debs than the philosophical systems they were fighting. All told, however, this is an excellent survey of its topic.

This book is long, and reading it was definitely a time commitment. But it was worth it to gain a much better understanding of the Reconstruction era and why things happened the way they did. Overall, the author does a good job laying out his arguments, although the non-linear approach makes it a little hard to keep track of the order of events. In addition to the political events directly involved with southern Black people, the book deftly ties in economic developments and other political movements of the time period. I appreciated that the ending included a discussion of Reconstruction's ongoing legacy.

The Underground Railroad was the metaphorical name for the system of routes and safe houses that enslaved Black Americans used to escape slavery and find some modicum of safety in free states of the North and in Canada. I expected the book would primarily, but that was not the case. Instead it focused on the work of abolitionists, both free Black and white, who organized the Underground Railroad, as well as the work of Black people who emancipated themselves and then worked to help others. It focuses specifically on activity in New York City, so some of the most famous abolitionists, like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, are only mentioned tangentially where their stories intersect with the city. This history of the Underground Railroad is particularly focused on how abolitionism, antislavery, and freeing the enslaved was affected by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The book is an interesting prism on how many different people - often ordinary and uncelebrated - worked to help free thousands of people from the bonds of slavery from the 1830s to the 1860s.½

5708. The Second Founding How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution, by Eric Foner (read 25 Sep 2020) This little book is the fourth book by Foner I have read. It tells the interesting story as to how the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution came to be added. He also relates how the Supreme Court has handled those amendments--in this the 14th has been most interpreted, in many cases involving issues unrelated to why it was adopted. He shows that the Supreme Court weakened the amendment in the 19th century and that weakening has not been set aside by the Court, so that students of constitutional law have a lot more trouble understanding that amendment than one would expect..Relatively few cases involving the 13th and 15th amendments have occurred whereas the 14rh has given rise to much litigation indeed, much unrelated to what it ostensibly was enacted to cure.

A thorough discussion of the early post civil war period

Pulitzer Prize winner Eric Foner is recognized as America’s leading expert on the history of the period immediately after the U.S. Civil War, known as Reconstruction, during which the North tried to build an egalitarian society. The title of his latest book, The Second Founding, encapsulates his thesis that the changes to American society effected during Reconstruction were so profound they amounted to a new beginning - indeed, a second founding - of the nation.

The principal purpose of the original ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill Of Rights, was to protect individuals from the power of the new central government. Though the original authors of these documents (often hallowed as “the Founders”) wanted a national government more formidable than the one established by the feckless Articles of Confederation, they sought to limit the power it could exercise over its citizens. But those constraints did not apply to individual states. For example, many of the states continued to have established religions even though the first Amendment forbade the national government from establishing any single religion.

Foner argues convincingly that the Civil War was fought over the southern states’ efforts to preserve the institution of slavery. [Although the declarations of secession by Southern states clearly articulated that the protection of slavery was the paramount impetus for the rupture per, for example, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, enough later Southern history revisionists averred that secession was actually about "states' rights" that the argument has to be constantly relitigated.] But even though the North had won the war, there was no immediate legal basis for eliminating slavery or for protecting the newly freed slaves from the depredations or their former masters. Ironically, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 had “freed” only those slaves still under the control of the rebel armies, leaving slaves in the northern and border states in a legal no-man’s-land concerning servitude.

The legal scaffolding for reorganizing the country took the form of three transformative amendments to the Constitution: the 13th, 14th, and 15th. The 13th abolished slavery throughout the country. The 14th established birthright citizenship for any person born in the United States “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” along with requiring the states to provide “due process” and “equal protection” to all “persons within their jurisdiction.” The 15th prohibited the states from denying the right to vote to any person on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The effect of these amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was to attempt to put into practice the ideal of equality expressed in the Declaration of Independence. To that end, the amendments invested substantially more power in the national government and provided the means to make the national government the protector of individuals against discrimination and unfair treatment by states or local governments.

This indeed was revolutionary.

Discussion: Foner is not only superb historian, he is an excellent legal analyst. As an historian, his description of the political maneuvering behind the adoption of the amendments is riveting. But what really stands out in his narration is his explication of the legal niceties behind the language adopted. [Well, maybe that’s just the lawyer in me enjoying some good legal writing.]

Unfortunately, the story of the second founding does not end with the adoption of praiseworthy amendments. As Foner recounts, the language of the amendments left enough wiggle room for malevolent racists in the postwar South to reestablish white race-based hegemony. With the end of U.S. Grant’s presidency in 1877 (Grant was dedicated to ensuring that freed blacks realized their newly legislated rights), national commitment to helping and protecting blacks ended in large part as well. Northern troops were withdrawn from the South. “Jim Crow” laws taking rights away from blacks were enacted in one state of the South after another. The Klan was given free rein to exercise police power over blacks without fear of reprisal. Schools and other public services for blacks were defunded. History textbooks used in southern schools were designed to teach white superiority and black backwardness, so that children imbibed these ideas from the earliest age. These practices persisted until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, but did not end entirely. Rather, they took on new shapes; the battle for racial justice continues to this day.

Foner recapitulates the sorry history of how a complicit United States Supreme Court abetted racist politicians and lower court judges in their efforts to eviscerate the original intent of Civil War Amendments for almost 100 years after their enactment. Again, his legal skills come to the fore as he takes us through the intricacies of numerous cases that constitute the corpus of civil rights jurisprudence.

Evaluation: This book is surprisingly brief (only 176 pages) considering the depth with which it treats a complex subject. It’s principal thesis, that the Civil War and Reconstruction completely overhauled the Constitution and the society it governed, is ably and cogently argued. I very highly recommend it as required history for all American citizens.

(JAB)

Erc Foner's book is less the comprehensive history of the Underground Railroad that its subtitle might suggest than a history of what he terms the "Metropolitan Corridor" -- the network that passed through or near New York City. This is because of the discovery which inspired the book: the "Record of Fugitives" kept by Sydney Howard Gay, an abolitionist journalist who in the 1850s helped assist hundreds of slaves escaping bondage. Yet this important source and the events it chronicles serve as just one part of the book, as Foner goes back further to describe the beginnings of the informal networks that arose in the 1830s to both aid fleeing bondsmen and to prevent the seizure by slave catchers of free blacks off of the streets of New York. Through his description of the people involved and the often dramatic events in which they were involved he illuminates the efforts of a group of Americans who undertook great efforts to make the promise of freedom real for thousands who were denied it by the color of their skin. It's a story that deserves to be told, and it's one that Foner tells well.

This is by far the best and most influential book on a critical period that has been politically interpreted and reinterpreted several times. Foner has the goods. He's done the research and shows how reconstruction showed that a multi-racial America was possible. He also shows how white supremacy not only reasserted itself with black laws and Jim Crow, but how it attempted to re-write the history of reconstruction as a period of utter failure, and a proof of racist theories.

This should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in the attempt to get to racial justice in America. It should also be read by anyone who hears, "Slavery wasn't the cause of the Civil War, states' rights was," or some other counter-factual nonsense trying to justify the South's position in the Civil War and mollify people now (150 years later), who still can't come to grips with what America was up to from its inception until the Emancipation Proclamation and from that proclamation to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.