Book report-Forever free: the story of emancipation and reconstruction

Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction by Eric Foner and Joshua Brown was a great read on the period leading up to the Civil War and the brief decade afterwards of enforced civil rights enjoyed by African-Americans in the occupied rebel states. Although he admits the "40 acres and a mule" was only an ad hoc offer by Sherman after he arrived at the Atlantic surrounded by escaped slaves and weary war mules and large plantations abandoned by their rebel owners he concludes that the American people still need an equivalent to the land reform started during but negated after Reconstruction. He makes a strong case for continued Affirmative Action. And he's white...

Here are a few paragraphs that resonated with me...

p.14
The entire system of southern justice, from the state militia and courts to slave patrols in each locality, was committed to enforcing the master' control over their human property. In one celebrated case, a Missouri court considered the "crime" of Celia, a slave who had killed her master while resisting a sexual assault. State law deemed "any woman" in such circumstances to be acting in self-defense. But Celia, the court ruled, was not, legally speaking, a "woman." She was a slave, whose master had complete power of her person. The court sentenced her to death. However, since Celia was pregnant, her execution was postponed until the child was born so as not to deprive Celia's owner's heirs of their property rights....At the cotton plantations in Tennessee and Mississippi owned by President James K. Polk, conditions were so brutal that only half the slave children lived to the age of fifteen.

p.44
At the outset of the war, Lincoln invoked time-honored northern values to mobilize public support. In a message to Congress, he identified the Union cause with the fate of democracy for the "whole family of man." He identified the differences between the North and the South in terms of the familiar free-labor ideology: "This is essentially a people's struggle. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form and substance of government, whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men...to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life." But while appealing to free-labor values, Lincoln feared that action against slavery would drive the border states, with their white population of 2.6 million and nearly half a million slaves into the Confederacy while also alienating conservative northerners.

Yet as the Confederacy set slaves to work as military laborers and southern blacks began to escape to Union lines, the policy of ignoring slavery unraveled. By the end of 1861, the military had adopted the plan, begun at Fortress Monroe by General Butler, of treating escaped blacks as contraband of war- that is, property of military value subject to confiscation by Union forces. Butler's order gave the fortress a new name among Virginia's slaves - "Freedom Fort," and added a word to the war's vocabulary.

p. 87
By the end of Reconstruction, the vast majority of black southerners had withdrawn from churches dominated by whites. Baptist churches attracted the largest number of congregants, followed closely by the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The creation of an independent black religious life was an irreversible element of freedom. Black churches were also centers of community life. They housed schools, social events, and political gatherings, adjudicated family disputes, and provided a base for the institutional infrastructure - fraternal orders, mutual aid societies, literary clubs, trade associations - that sprang up during Reconstruction. The first institution completely controlled by African Americans, the church also became a breeding ground for black leadership, and many ministers soon entered politics. At least 240 black ministers, including some who came south as missionaries after the war, held some public office during Reconstruction.

p. 174
Of course, most white southerners did not commit criminal acts, and some spoke out against the Klan. But the large majority of southern whites remained silent. Indeed, the Democratic Party's constant vilification of carpetbaggers and scalawags as corrupt incompetents, their insistence that blacks were unfit for equal citizenship, and their public laments about the intractability of black labor created an atmosphere that made violence seem a legitimate response in the eyes of many white southerners. Community support for the Klan extended to lawyers who represented the criminals in court, editors who established funds for their defense, and the innumerable women who sewed costumes and disguises for them. While most white southerners were law-abiding citizens, they seemed willing to forgive the Klan's excesses because they shared the organization's ultimate goal - the overthrow of Reconstruction and the restoration of white supremacy.

p. 175-176
Part of the problem was that blacks took democratic and legal procedures more seriously than did Reconstruction's opponents. To be sure, blacks sometimes intimidated, ostracized, or assaulted fellow freedmen who wished to vote Democratic. But no Republicans rode at night to murder their political foes. "We could burn their churches and schoolhouses," wrote one former slave from a violent section of Georgia, "but we don't want to break the law or harm anybody. all we want is to live under the law."

Increasingly, Reconstruction governors appealed to Washington for aid. Only "power from without," said one southern Republican leader, could restore order and save Reconstruction. In the early 1870s, national Republican leaders responded. "I am willing," said Senator John Sherman of Ohio, "to...again appeal to the power of the nation to crush, as we once before have done, this organized civil war." In 1870 and 871, Congress enacted three Enforcement Acts, meant to suppress violence in the South. Most sweeping was the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, one of the most far-reaching measures of the Reconstruction era. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 had been directed primarily against discriminatory action by state and local governments. Now, for the first time in American history, certain crimes committed by individuals were declared offenses punishable under federal law, including conspiracies to deprive citizens of the right to vote, hold office, serve in juries, and enjoy the equal protection of the laws. The KKK Act allowed the president to suspend the writ of habeas corpus (that is, to have individuals arrested and held without charge) and use the army to suppress Klan violence.

Traditionally, private criminal acts had been punished under state law. The unprecedented expansion of the federal government's criminal jurisdiction outraged Democrats and alarmed even some Republicans in the North. The Ku Klux Klan Act, complained The Nation, armed the federal government with power "over a class of cases of which if has never hitherto had, and never pretended to have, any jurisdiction whatever." To most republicans, however, the act seemed a logical extension of the expansion of national power wrought by the Civil War and already embodied in the Reconstruction legislation. "If the federal government," asked former Union army general Benjamin F. Butler, now representing Massachusetts in Congress, "cannot pass laws to protect the rights, liberty, and lives of citizens...why were guarantees of those fundamental rights put in the Constitution at all?" Black congressmen staunchly supported the new measures. While Democrats charged Congress with violating constitutional guarantees of state autonomy, a black Republican member of the House of Representatives, Joseph Rainey of South Carolina, responded: "Tell me nothing of a constitution which fails to shelter beneath its rightful power the people of a country. "Robert B. Elliott, another black congressman from South Carolina, caustically noted that Klan violence refuted southern whites' claims to superior morality and a higher level of civilization. "pray tell me," he asked, " who is the barbarian here?"

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