A Second Reconstruction Harper Howze

My friends (and at least one professor) could all attest to the fact that I’m rather fascinated by the history of the American Civil War. Not the war itself, though. While the history is definitely striking, what I find most compelling are the years which followed its closure: they have the most to tell us about the disturbing times we now find ourselves in. 

Those years, from 1865 till 1877, are known as the Reconstruction Period. For more than a decade, the United States experienced what remains its most aggressive moment of self-reckoning. We passed three (three!!) constitutional amendments, a tall task for a country whose constitution is infuriatingly resistant to change, to ensure that newly freed slaves were given full citizenship rights. The secessionist states were placed under federal occupation, and with the support of Northern troops, elections were held. The results were extraordinary: deeply slaveholding states, fighting

to leave mere months before, found themselves with hundreds of Black elected officials. New state constitutions were written, as DC forced every Southern state to redraw their racist laws to be readmitted to the Union. The first black member of Congress, Hiram Rhodes Revels, came from, of all places, Mississippi (and can we appreciate just how cool a name he had?). 

Reconstruction was hardly a utopia, but it was the most radical moment of reform in American history, save maybe Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s. For a few brief years, America seemed to be actually living up to the lofty ideals of its founding documents. 

We let Confederate cruelties and inequities fester under the humid Southern sun, while the racists who began America’s most deadly war were left to comfortably retire to their plantations under the shade of live oaks. 

And then, barely a decade later, it all fell apart. 

The 1876 election was contentious; in order to get the results certified, a backroom compromise was reached. Rutherford B. Hays got the Oval Office, but, in return, federal troops would withdraw from the South. In 1877, Reconstruction ended, and the fallout came quickly. The South’s former plantation owners, still fabulously wealthy, swiftly moved to enact a campaign of racial terror, lynching hundreds and forcing Black southerners out of politics at gunpoint. They instituted a regime of violent oppression which would not be brought to heel until nearly a century later. The light of reform had died, snuffed out by plantation aristocrats who never lost their slave-built fortunes.

I promise this is not merely a history article, so I shall drag us back into the modern day, itself a bleak place. The US, right now, is experiencing what seems to be its most internally threatening moment since the Civil War. The nation's institutions are being actively destroyed, our civil service ground into pieces. At the behest of the president, federal forces are brutally executing Americans on the street whilst conducting a campaign of terror and occupation. We are not yet in an actual conflict, but the first Civil War did not start instantly. It was preceded, like today, by localized moments of intense violence, spread out across a country so large that they could easily be dismissed as too distant to worry about. 

The state I grew up in, Kansas, had a fierce antislavery streak, and, as a result, spent the 1850s being periodically invaded by its enslaver neighbor, Missouri. Those “Bleeding Kansas” years present a chilling parallel with the modern sight of Texan ICE agents on the streets of Minneapolis. Kansas was attacked for being a place of safety for the enslaved; Minneapolis for being a ‘sanctuary city’ for migrants. History rhymes far too much with the present sometimes. Even if, as I desperately hope, we do not descend into an actual internecine conflict, the devastation of this administration will require far more than a simple return to the status quo. 

We will need a Second Reconstruction, another era of fundamental reforms to the systems which led us to this point. What we must not do, though, is repeat the key failure of the original. Those who allowed these crimes cannot be left free in the name of reconciliation: they must face consequences. 

 Bumper stickers and flags regularly promise that The South Shall Rise Again; but it never truly fell.

The postwar South should never have been left to its old ways: the structures of slave power should have been dismantled utterly. Slaveholders’ wealth should have been distributed to new freedmen and leading traitors should have been brought before juries of their peers. We let Confederate cruelties and inequities fester under the humid Southern sun, while the racists who began America’s most deadly war were left to comfortably retire to their plantations under the shade of live oaks. If the left ever comes to power in America again, we must hold accountable the people and structures which facilitated Trumpism; those who abetted it cannot be again permitted to slip away from their actions while their victims spend another century waiting for the promises made in 1776 to be fulfilled. The Chuck Schumers of the world would have us believe that all we need is another moderate to steady the ship. But the ship has been set ablaze, and it will do us little good to have a smoother ride down to the grasping depths.

What is happening now is not entirely unprecedented. That those with wealth will tear down everything else to facilitate their greed has been a recurrent theme throughout history. Bumper stickers and flags regularly promise that The South Shall Rise Again; but it never truly fell. The same avarice which drove the slaveholders now drives the tech barons; the same bigotry borne of fear drives ordinary people into their ranks. The sins which have dogged the United States since its earliest years have grown to their antebellum prominence once more. This time, we cannot merely cut them down and walk away. They must be dug out at the roots.