On this day in history in 1870, Joseph Hayne Rainey became the first African-American sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives. Yes, I know, commenter Lucy B. yesterday raised the case of the nation’s first African-American governor, P.B.S Pinchback (bio here, context here). And maybe that would have been the time for this post. But it’s my (partly) blog, so please get off my back.
Rainey’s biography is interesting: born into slavery in 1832; his father, a barber, bought his family’s freedom while Rainey was a child; after being forced by the Confederate government to improve fortifications in Charleston at the start of the Civil War, Rainey escaped to Bermuda, where he waited out the conflict with his wife; he got involved in politics after the South finally admitted defeat.
Equally intriguing, I think, is Rainey’s term of service in congress: from December 12, 1870 to May 22, 1879. Again, 1879. Which means that he won reelection as the so-called Redeemers, the de facto military wing of Dixie’s Democratic Party, overran South Carolina, perpetrating horrors like the Hamburg Massacre.
Nicholas Lemann, in his most recent book (brilliantly reviewed here), argues that the Redeemers effectively won “the last battle of the Civil War,” rolling back Reconstruction and returning Southern society, at least when it came to civil rights, to the antebellum era. It’s not an original thesis; Eric Foner, the unchallenged giant in the field, made the same case almost twenty years ago. But Lemann’s book is short and quite a good read. It pivots on a Reconstruction romance, a move which, though a risky literary conceit, keeps the story clipping along. And the basic argument, again, drawing heavily on Foner, is right.
But there’s no mention of Rainey in Lemann — if I’m not mistaken. And there’s not much to be found about the man in Foner either.
So I’m left with two questions. First, how did someone like Rainey get reelected in a political context dominated by the Redeemers, long after the Republican Party had demonstrated that it wouldn’t fight to protect the rights of African Americans? Rainey’s victory suggests that either he appealed to white voters or that freed people risked life and limb to keep him in the House. Either is interesting. The latter is more likely. And second, where is the Amity Shlaes of Reconstruction studies? Shlaes is the writer whose revisionist history of the New Deal Eric trashed. It’s not that I want more bad books so Eric can write more scathing reviews; it’s that I want more smart people challenging scholarly consensus.
For decades, adherents to the Dunning school dominated Reconstruction discussions. They argued, in essence, that Reconstruction failed because the federal government botched the job. But now Foner, who found that white supremacists, not federal incompetence, scuttled Reconstruction, is virtually unchallenged. Which is a shame. Don’t get me wrong. I agree with Foner. And with Lemann. But while comity is comfortable, creative tension is how we learn new things. Among those things might be how Joseph Rainey managed to keep his seat while other African Americans in South Carolina were losing their lives.
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11 comments
December 13, 2007 at 4:38 am
Ben Alpers
Hey Ari! I just discovered that you blogged….nice place ya got here!
Here are my quick, quasi-professional answers to your two questions (“quasi” because Reconstruction is most definitely not my period)…
How did someone like Rainey get reelected in a political context dominated by the Redeemers, long after the Republican Party had demonstrated that it wouldn’t fight to protect the rights of African Americans?
South Carolina is a very, very weird state, and Reconstruction in SC was very, very weird. Before the war it had one of the largest free black populations in the South (only Louisiana was bigger); after the war it had the largest black population (as a percentage) of any state, with the possible exception of Mississippi. Black South Carolinians achieved more political and social power than did their counterparts in other Southern states. For example, the University of South Carolina was the only Southern public institution of higher learning to desegregate during Reconstruction (though I believe that the University of Arkansas was founded as a desegregated institution during these years). At any rate, I suspect that your guess as to the particulars in this case is correct. But Redemption had more to wipe out in SC than it did in many other Southern states.
Where is the Amity Shlaes of Reconstruction studies?
I think this has to do with the status of race (and racism) in American movement conservatism today. It’s the intellectual foundation that dare not speak its name. Notice how atwitter conservative columnists got at Paul Krugman’s pretty incontrovertible observation that Reagan’s decision to begin the 1980 general election campaign with a speech on states rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi was a loud and clear dogwhistle to white supremacists. Neo-Dunning School takes on the Civil War and Reconstruction would be, I think, a tad too revealing of certain tendencies in American political life.
On a more positive note, I think that much of the right by and large accepts Lincoln (which is admittedly not the same thing as accepting Reconstruction) in ways that they didn’t in the past. And here the much-maligned Straussians actually might deserve some positive credit. The Straussians, especially the so-called West Coast Straussians, love Lincoln. One of the oddest things I’ve run into in my research in recent years is political philosopher George Kateb’s review of a 1965 book by Jaffa in the then-still liberal Commentary. The whole review is trying to figure out how Harry Jaffa, who Kateb clearly thinks is a liberal, could have supported Goldwater. My sense is that Kateb’s basis for considering Jaffa a liberal is largely Jaffa’s authorship of Crisis of the House Divided which is a bracing argument for the Lincoln as a kind of perfecter of the American constitutional vision. As late as the mid-1960s, it was very hard to see someone who would mount such a defense of Lincoln as a conservative. This is, needless to say, much less true today.
December 13, 2007 at 5:54 am
eric
According to Black Americans in Congress, 1870-1989, Rainey won re-election unopposed in 1872, presided over a House session (first African American to do so) in 1874; won by evidently under 700 ballots in 1874 over an “Independent Democrat,” who unsuccessfully contested the election; in 1876, with federal troops deployed to the state as a consequence of the Hamburg Massacre, won again, and again was contested by the Democratic opponent who claimed voter intimidation by the soldiers, which claim was eventually upheld by the Committee on Elections but the full House did not take action; 1878 he was defeated.
December 13, 2007 at 8:43 am
ari
Hey, Ben, great to have you here. Thanks for dropping in. Ben, meet Eric. Eric, meet Ben. As for South Carolina, yes, it was unusual. But Hamburg and other episodes of terrorism perpetrated by the South Carolina Redeemers suggest that by the mid 1870s, racial violence was putting the kibosh on Reconstruction there as elsewhere in the South. And, as you note, Mississippi had a huge population of former slaves as well. And yet, Mississippi, as we know, begat the Mississippi Plan — just enough violence to suppress African Amerian voting rights, but not so much that Grant administration had to send troops back into the South — which then spread throughout the Deep South and eventually begat Jim Crow.
As for the centrality of racism within movement conservativism, or, to be fair, in most facets of American life, I agree that it’s a subject that one doesn’t want to bring up in polite company. So the Amity Shlaes of Reconstruction studies almost certainly won’t found her/his work on a neo-Confederate vision of the South’s proper social order. But what about bashing the federal government? What about a serious study of the economic history of Reconstruction? Of the federal bureacracy’s bungling in the South? Or something like that. Surely there’s some young hotshot conservative intellectual out there who could rehabilitate that part of the Dunning project — and get a lot of publicity in the process — even if they don’t want to embrace the scientific racism (and now we double back to Andrew Sullivan) that underlay so much else that Dunning believed.
Finally, yes, I’m amazed at how many conservatives want to claim Lincoln. The logic, no matter how many times I try to fathom it, always escapes me. But the point you make about the Straussians is really interesting. How’s that project going? I always thought that was an amazing idea for a book.
Turning to Eric, good morning sir. I saw a simliar source to the one you bring to the table, but yours is better. I knew that the ’76 election took place with federal troops present. But I hadn’t seen anything about the voter intimidation claim. That’s right useful information, and it helps me, but I still think there must be a good story there.
December 14, 2007 at 4:27 pm
David Carlton
I’d like to add here that blacks continued to serve in Congress from South Carolina through the mid-1890s. What made this possible in large part was the late-nineteenth-century version of race-based redistricting; a bizarrely gerrymandered Seventh District was created that packed enough black voters in to make it easier for whites to get elected elsewhere. It also needs to be noted that it in fact took a while for disfranchisement to be fully implemented; in South Carolina it required the Constitutional Convention of 1895 to do the jjob thoroughly. Prior to that time white supremacists had to be leery of sparking new northern intervention; also, having a handful of black office-holders was a handy way of mobilizing white voters to head to the polls to prevent a return to the “dark days” of Reconstruction.
December 14, 2007 at 4:47 pm
ari
That’s incredibly helpful, David, and makes good sense. Also, welcome to the site. Thanks for stopping by. While you’re still here — I hope — do you have a particular source that’s useful on these issues. Again, thanks.
December 15, 2007 at 2:31 pm
Matt S
Hey everyone. I feel a bit fortunate to have stumbled upon this, as I’ve never actually understood Reconstruction that well and have always been bugged by something related to it. I have no formal historical training–I was an English major. :)
Do you guys think that Reconstruction played some role in the “backwardness” of the South that lasted up until the latter part of the 20th century? This is my reasoning: With the traditional order in shambles, and the former subalterns, under the direction and blessing of the federal government, as the new political representatives, isn’t it logical that the upper-class whites would go to extremes to reestablish their former hegemony? I mean, couldn’t one logically see the establishment of Jim Crow and the failure of late 19th-century Southern populist movements as reactions to this up-ending of the former political order?
I’m not trying to say these things would not have happened, but if Reconstruction would have played out differently, could Jim Crow and other manifestations of Southern reactionary-ism been avoided, or at least lessened? Or would white racism have likely won out in the end, no matter how the “carpetbaggers”/Federal Government implemented Reconstruction?
Thanks for considering for a few moments, and helping me to get my mind around this. The site is a welcome addition to my RSS reader, and I look forward to more and more goodness to come.
December 16, 2007 at 6:38 am
Vance Maverick
I’m not a historian either, but it strikes me first that it would be difficult to distinguish Matt S’s hypothesis in practice from the null hypothesis — that the failure of Reconstruction partly restored the “old order”, and that this old order was just plain backward in the first place.
Second, though, this idea has the distinct flavor of the “go slow” arguments that were heard around the time of the 20thC civil rights movement. However badly the existing order might need revision, changing it “too fast” would cause great stress and resentment, so that in the end the good intentions of the reformers would be frustrated, and the cause of African Americans set back. (E.g., “you can integrate our schools, but the result will be worse than what we had before.”)
December 16, 2007 at 7:43 am
I don't pay
Reconstruction’s in the air just now; Olbermann made a literate analogy to it while being interviewed by Moyers on Friday night.
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