Provocative Revisionist

THE ERA OF RECONSTRUCTION, 1865-1877 by Kennefh M. Stampp. 228 pages. Knopf. $4.95.

History has registered the Reconstruction as a monument to the vindictiveness of victory. Prostrate in defeat, the South played helpless host to its Northern plunderers, who not only despoiled the land but turned its government over to newly emancipated and ignorant slaves. Ever since, the South has rested part of its case against the Negroes on the fallout from this great Northern mistake. If only the conquerors had been understanding--so goes the argument--if only they had let Southern leaders work out their own salvation and cure, then those very recent chapters called Little Rock and Montgomery and Selma might never have followed the Reconstruction into the history books.

Impenitent Losers. In this reassessment of the period after Appomattox, Kenneth Stampp, professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley, calls the Southern version dead wrong. He is only one of dozens of contemporary historians who have recently undertaken to reconstruct the Reconstruction. Of these revisionists, Stampp is easily the most provocative. His proposition is that the impenitent postwar South set to work at once to restore the very order that it had supposedly yielded in defeat. The idea was to negate the war's outcome.

In this cause, says Stampp, the North served as unwitting accomplice. Lincoln's assassination propelled Andrew Johnson into the White House, a kind-hearted and derivative man anxious to implement Lincoln's injunction to let the South up easy. To staff the governments of the secessionist states, he granted wholesale pardons to Confederate officers and civil servants--and such men did not waste time accepting the chance to preside.

They simply moved to install the status quo ante in all but name, Stampp charges. Before the U.S. Congress reconvened in December 1865, the so-called "Johnson" state governments "had introduced the whole pattern of disenfranchisement, discrimination and segregation into the postwar South." Suffrage was restricted to whites; no effective provision was made for Negro education. The new "Black Codes" severely limited Negro rights. Modeled on the prewar slave codes, they permitted Negroes to marry other Negroes (but not whites), granted them a nominal right to own property and in some states bound the former slaves to their farms and employers. In the words of Republican Carl Schurz, the Black Codes were "a striking embodiment of the idea that although the former owner has lost his individual right of property in the former slave, 'the blacks at large belong to the whites at large.' "

Bayonets, Gently Applied. In the U.S. Congress, a coalition of Radical and moderate Republicans repudiated the Johnson governments in the South. Down to secessionist territory streamed federal troops. The area was divided into five military districts, and Northern bayonets enforced the investment of Negroes with full citizenship.

This, after all, was what the Civil War had been fought for. And the Republican Radicals were quite within their rights in insisting on full Negro citizenship. Historian Stampp's premise is that the insistence was gently applied, despite the bayonets, and considering the fact that, after all, these were victors dealing with the vanquished. All that the North ever demanded, in fact, was full equality for the Negro South; and if the conquered white South had complied, the armed troops would have been withdrawn.

The conservative Johnsonians, and most historians since, have refused to concede that the Radicals were seriously concerned about the welfare of the Negro, and insist instead that the Radicals were seeking to enfranchise the Negro solely to maintain the Republicans in power.

It was true enough that the newly enfranchised Negroes, facing the practical choice "between a party that gave them civil and political rights and a party whose stock-in-trade was racist demagoguery," became loyal Republicans. Yet while the Negroes had influence in all the Southern Radical governments, they did not, in fact, control any of them. Negroes served in all the state legislatures, but they were in the majority only in South Carolina, and there only in the lower house.

Nor was Republican politicking down South pure cynicism by any means. After all, such Radical Republicans as Pennsylvania's Representative Thaddeus Stevens and Massachusetts' Senator Charles Sumner were the same ones who had been passionate prewar abolitionists. To suppose that they lost their ideals at Appomattox, writes Stampp, is absurd. "In fact, Radical Reconstruction ought to be viewed in part as the last great crusade of the 19th century romantic reformers." Other historians might boggle at calling the spiteful Stevens a romantic.

But whatever their motives, these postwar Republicans were the men whose "program included the granting of citizenship, civil rights, and the ballot to American Negroes." Their monuments are the 14th (due process and equal protection of the laws) and 15th (right to vote) Amendments, which heavily affected the North as well as the South and which perhaps could have been passed in no other era.

Faltering Will. Southern resistance to Negro equality took a form that would today be called guerrilla warfare: a network of secret cells, random terrorism, assassination, intensive propaganda, and armed irregular units able to melt into the population like Mao Tse-tung's celebrated fish. The resistance was successful--like all other guerrilla movements that have succeeded--only because of a faltering of will and a turning away from the struggle by the Federal Government.

The South's version of Reconstruction blames everything on those vengeful Yankees who rammed their triumph down rebel throats--and implies that until then the rebels were willing to acknowledge the inevitable price of defeat. Stampp's purpose is to expose this version as a falsehood that has graduated, over the years, into a Southern mystique. His book presents compelling arguments that Selma is the predictable heritage of a South that, though losing a war, at once conspired to evade the moral indemnity that was its toll.

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