The most common historical parallel over the past four years has been to European fascism, for a variety of reasons.
Well, I guess the sight of people storming the Capitol and carrying Confederate flags with them makes it impossible not to think about American history. That was an unprecedented display. But in a larger sense, yes, the events we saw reminded me very much of the Reconstruction era and the overthrow of Reconstruction, which was often accompanied, or accomplished, I should say, by violent assaults on elected officials.
There was the Colfax Massacre, in , in Louisiana, where armed whites murdered dozens of members of a Black militia and took control of Grant Parish. Or you can go further into the nineteenth century, to the Wilmington riot of , in North Carolina. Again, a democratically elected, biracial local government was ousted by a violent assault by armed whites. They took over the city. It also reminded me of what they call the Battle of Liberty Place, which took place in New Orleans, in , when the White League—they had the courage of their convictions then, they called themselves what they wanted people to know—had an uprising against the biracial government of Louisiana that was eventually put down by federal forces.
Did the rhetoric of that time include the idea that those democratic elections were unfair? It was straight white supremacy.
Maybe one might say there were two different tacks. One was to say that the Reconstruction government was corrupt or dishonest or their taxes were too high, things like that.
That was meant to appeal to the North to not intervene, and say that these people were trying to restore good government in the South. But mostly it was straight-out white supremacy: Let the white man rule, this is a white Republic.
I mean, racism was totally blatant back then. Today, they talk about dog whistles or other circumlocutions, but back then, no, it was just that armed whites in the South could not accept the idea of African-Americans as fellow-citizens or their votes as being legitimate. It also reminds me of when President Trump first launched his political career and was pushing the idea that Obama was not really an American and, therefore, could not be president.
And it does link what we saw the other day to Reconstruction and the battles over that. Was there any symbolism used by the people rioting last week that stuck out to you or made you think back to this period, in addition to the Confederate flag?
So they identified themselves with the Confederacy, obviously, with their flags. They also identified themselves with the Patriots of After all, the United States was founded by a revolution that overthrew the existing authority, the British.
But, last week, these were fantasy revolutionaries. Well, the Confederates claimed to be in the tradition of the American Revolution. That did not appeal to them very much. Alexander Stephens, the Vice-President of the Confederacy, very famously gave a speech saying that white supremacy is the cornerstone of the Confederacy—that Negroes, as he put it, that their natural state is being a slave.
According to Stephens and most other Confederates, they certainly were not equal to white people. So this is a racialized view of the right to resistance in American history.
It excludes African-Americans, but it includes these violent white people. And we still have an evolving understanding of it. First of all, I think how we think about history is very important. Lincoln did not want Reconstruction to be a long, drawn-out process; rather, he wanted the states to draft new constitutions so that the Union could be quickly restored. Radical Republicans, on the other hand, wanted the South to pay a price for secession and believed that Congress, not the president, should direct the process of Reconstruction.
The Radical Republicans saw serious flaws in Civil War—era southern society and were adamant that the South needed full social rehabilitation to resemble the North. Many Republican Congressmen also aimed to improve education and labor conditions to benefit all of the oppressed classes in southern society, black and white.
In the end, Radical Republicans in the House impeached President Andrew Johnson in because he repeatedly blocked their attempt to pass radical legislation. Had Lincoln remained alive, he might have been in the same position himself: he wanted Reconstruction to end quickly and did not necessarily favor progressive legislation.
Indeed, Lincoln had made it clear during the Civil War that he was fighting to restore the Union, not to emancipate slaves. It is likely that Lincoln thus would have battled with Congress over the control of Reconstruction, blocked key Reconstruction policies, and met as vindictive a House as Johnson did All three thus played a role in ending Reconstruction. The executives bribed dozens of Congressmen and cabinet members in Ulysses S. The scheme was eventually exposed, and many politicians were forced to resign.
When the Depression of struck, northern voters became even less interested in pursuing Reconstruction efforts. Unemployment climbed to 15 percent, and hard currency became scarce. With pressing economic problems, northerners did not have time to worry about helping former slaves, punishing the Ku Klux Klan, or readmitting southern states into the Union.
Southern states were too poor to manage Reconstruction programs. The most difficult task confronting many Southerners during Reconstruction was devising a new system of labor to replace the shattered world of slavery.
The economic lives of planters, former slaves, and nonslaveholding whites, were transformed after the Civil War. As a result, by , policymakers in Washington had the nearly impossible task of southern Reconstruction.
Reconstruction encompassed three major initiatives: restoration of the Union, transformation of southern society, and enactment of progressive legislation favoring the rights of freed slaves. In President Andrew Johnson implemented a plan of Reconstruction that gave the white South a free hand in regulating the transition from slavery to freedom and offered no role to blacks in the politics of the South.
Reconstruction proved to be a mixed bag for Southerners. On the positive side, African Americans experienced rights and freedoms they had never possessed before. They could vote, own property, receive an education, legally marry and sign contracts, file lawsuits, and even hold political office.
And while he did oversee the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution outlawing slavery a process Lincoln had started , Johnson also believed on principle that each state had the right to decide the best course of Reconstruction for itself.
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