Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration picks up where Eric Foner’s Reconstruction left off. Foner sought to counter the Dunning School that, in the early 1900s, condemned Radical Republicans, Northern carpetbaggers, Southern scalawags, and freedmen. Later, W.E.B. Du Bois, in 1935, and Howard Beale, in the 1940s, initiated the revisionist school, which cast Northern policymakers and freedmen in a more positive light. Foner’s work used the Dunning School’s research methods to argue that African-Americans were actors in Reconstruction and that racism played a pivotal role. Hahn shifts from the broad-strokes and top-down elements of Foner’s work to focus on the ways in which black Americans envisioned and created political identities beginning during the Civil War and ending in the early 1900s.
Land plays a pivotal role in Hahn’s argument. He writes, “Whatever their experiences in slavery, it became apparent during the war that freedpeople widely shared the desire to obtain land and use it as a basis for securely planting their families and kinship networks” (pg. 79). While many in the South believed that Northern agitators created the desire for land redistribution, Hahn writes, “Whatever many planters preferred to believe, rural freedpeople did not need tutors or outside agitators to nurture their desire for, or sense of entitlement to, the land” (pg. 135). Even without organized land redistribution, the threat of the idea offered a form of political power as freedpeople could hold “off from signing contracts until the new year,” thereby creating “a temporary labor shortage” that “weakened the landowners’ attempts to tie them down and dictate the terms” (pg. 156). In the end, these conflicts demonstrated the problems with Presidential Reconstruction.
Beyond the acquisition of land, Hahn focuses on the role of literacy. African Americans who escaped to Union lines during the Civil War took advantage of opportunities to learn. Hahn links this with the creation of political agency writing, “The wartime military, by its very nature, thus provided the sort of basic political educations that enslaved people had found almost impossible to come by” (pg. 97). Describing the role of printed matter in promoting colonization, Hahn writes, “We can see in this process the extension and vitality of a new popular culture of belief and verification tied more closely to the printed or written, rather than the spoken, word” (pg. 326).
Finally, Hahn argues that women gained more political agency in the wake of Reconstruction. Though women could not vote, they could help shape votes within their communities. Hahn writes, “Manipulating gender conventions and the expectations of courtship and sexual favor, they both shamed reluctant menfolk into performing their political duties and wreaked the most intimate and humiliating vengeance on those who strayed from the fold” (pg. 228). The shift in the focus of African American political life in the early 1900s toward the church, school, and home offered other opportunities, though men continued to dominate. As Hahn writes, “There was, in other words, not so much a stepping back of the men and a stepping forward of the women as a necessary redeployment to terrain in which both had recognized roles and authority, although the roles and authority still tilted power and leadership toward the men” (pg. 463). ( )