The Liberal Reformers, Reconstruction, and Redemption
- Isaac Cui
- Mar 20, 2021
- 10 min read
I want to write today about the liberal reformer wing of the Republican Party that arose toward the end of Reconstruction. But before getting too far ahead of myself, let me start by contextualizing the late Reconstruction period.
I should note that Reconstruction is one of the most contested eras of American history, and I’m by no means an expert. I’ll be taking from Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877.
Recall that Reconstruction is the period of American history after the calamitous Civil War. Central questions of politics in this period pertained to the rights and freedoms of the freedmen in the South, the recreation of Southern state and local governments, and the direct relationship of the federal government to the people. Note two particular trends.
First, Reconstruction represented the first time that America witnessed meaningful biracial governance. When the Radical Republicans were ushered into office with supermajorities in both houses of Congress in 1866, they quickly set about creating a new system of government in the South. They sent the Fourteenth Amendment to the states for ratification. They passed three Reconstruction Acts, placing the South under military governance and enabling Black male suffrage. Black participation in political and associational life skyrocketed in this period, with Black turnout reaching almost 90% in many elections. (By comparison, the 2020 election — a peak in turnout for recent elections — saw around a 66% turnout.)
But this was also a time of intense white backlash. The Ku Klux Klan, of course, traces its origin to this period. From 1868 to 1871, the Klan, with other white supremacist organizations, launched what Foner called a “wave of counterrevolutionary terror,” assassinating Black leadership, disrupting Republican Party meetings, attacking Black churches and schools, lynching Black farmhands engaging in labor disputes with plantation owners, and destroying Black property. Eventually, the federal government responded with a set of Enforcement Acts culminating in the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which effectively put down the Klan.
That, of course, wasn’t the end of political violence. Southern Democrats launched a campaign of Redemption to violently overthrow Republican governments throughout the 1870s, and over time, they were successful as federal law enforcement weakened. For example, in Mississippi — a predominantly Black state, and therefore a Republican stronghold in the South — Redeemers quite openly stole the 1875 election: in Aberdeen, white Democrats went to the polls armed with rifles and a six-pounder cannon to drive Black voters away; in other Black-dominant precincts, they literally destroyed ballot boxes; and in the few places where Republicans were still able to win election, they threatened (or carried out) assassinations. Having won the legislature, they impeached the Lieutenant Governor and then forced the Governor to resign under threat of impeachment. And by this point, the federal government under President Grant was unresponsive. He had become disillusioned with “bayonet rule” by sending military troops to restore order. Foner writes, “Unlike crimes by the Ku Klux Klan’s hooded riders, those of 1875 were committed in broad daylight by undisguised men, as if to underscore the impotence of local authorities and Democrats’ lack of concern about federal intervention.”
Second, Reconstruction witnessed a breathtaking expansion of the state throughout the country. Taxes ballooned as the government, to put it simply, began doing more: creating social services for children lacking homes and for people with disabilities, building public works, expanding (or, for the first time establishing) public schools and institutions of higher education, and so on.
Governments also did less positive things. Reconstruction is sometimes remembered as a time of intense corruption. This is true. But we should resist the stereotype that corruption was limited to Southern, Reconstruction governments run by Black people. This was an era of patronage, where winning office was tied to granting civil service positions to one’s political favorites to win their support. It was an era of state-supported capitalism, where states and municipalities funneled money to railroad, manufacturing, and mining corporations. There were, in short, many smoke-filled rooms in the North and the South, and the rents extracted by corporations from the state compounded trends toward increasing inequality, leading the period after Reconstruction to be what we now call the Gilded Age.
By the mid-1870s, as the nation plummeted into depression, a new wing of the Republican Party was rising. Since the 1866 election, protecting Black political and civil rights and promoting free labor ideology had been unifying ideas within the Republican Party. But as the North grew tired of Reconstruction, as the difficult work of building a new political economy in the South set in, a faction of liberal reformers in the Party argued for a reorientation of politics. Almost all of the liberal reformers were previously abolitionists and advocates of Black political equality. But they thought the federal government, having emancipated the slaves and secured Black male enfranchisement, should be finished with the work of Reconstruction.
The liberal reformers were primarily the intelligentsia of the North — those graduates of fancy institutions with fancy social scientific training. They believed in following what they called “financial science” — in lowering tariffs, respecting the free market, and upholding the gold standard. They sought limited government because they saw the vices of Reconstruction-era governments, North and South, in delivering corrupt outcomes. And they opposed “class legislation,” such as the income tax or eight-hour workday laws, which would benefit some groups in society over others. Foner explains, “In their own eyes, liberal reformers stood above social divisions as disinterested spokesmen for the common good. Yet at the same time, the ideology of reform helped to crystallize a distinctive and increasingly conservative middle-class consciousness.”
As a result of their ideology resting in their own enlightened understanding of the common interest, some liberal reformers advocated for limits on the franchise — they believed in education or property qualifications for voting, and they wanted to create more appointed, rather than elected, officials. They sought civil service reform, to bureaucratize the work of government and to remove the patronage system. And, with respect to the South, they diagnosed its ailments in terms of the exclusion of the “best men” from power: “Fundamentally, reformers believed, Southern violence arose from the same cause as political corruption: the exclusion from office of men of ‘intelligence and culture.’ If in the North, civil service reform offered a solution, in the South, reformers advocated the removal of political disabilities that barred prominent Confederates—the region’s ‘natural leaders’—from office . . . .”
The liberal reformers succeeded at pulling the Republican Party to the center. As a result, even before 1876, when the disputed presidential election led to the full withdrawal of federal troops from the South, everyone understood that the era of Reconstruction was over. The Republicans abandoned their commitment to biracial governance; they sought reconciliation, to move on from the bitter Civil War; and white Southern Democrats, for the most part, were able to cement their power, monopolizing power in the South until the Voting Rights Act’s passage. Redemption was not a linear process, just as Reconstruction wasn’t. Even in the late 1870s, Virginia witnessed a resurgence of biracial politics in the form of the Readjuster Party. But Radical Reconstruction wasn’t to last.
Reading our current understanding of Reconstruction is a bit like rereading a tragedy. You see the rise of Radicals in Congress, the potential of the federal government in stamping out the Klan in 1871, and you feel an optimism that Reconstruction didn’t have to lead to Jim Crow. But you know it did. And though I won’t pretend to know all the reasons why Reconstruction met its tragic end, it seems to me clear that the liberal reformers were part of that story. That leaves me uneasy, because I can’t help but to feel parallels between the liberal reformers of the 1870s and the technocracy I study everyday.
With both, there is an assuredness that formal education will enable one to discern the “common good” that transcends parochial “class interests.” With both, there is a skepticism of democratic actions for being seemingly unenlightened. Compromise and bargaining, we say in my law and regulation classes, lead to incoherent rules. Why, we ask, is there a rule limiting the quantity of pre-trade transparency waivers for over-the-counter equity trading to 8% of total EU-wide trading under the Markets in Financial Instruments Regulation (MiFIR)? It’s because Member States have parochial disagreements about the value of “dark,” over-the-counter trading versus “lit,” venue-based trading. So they create rules to balance between multiple ideas of good public policy. There’s nothing special about 8% except that everyone could agree on it.
In my mind, that balance is a good thing — it reflects how a plural, diverse polity reconciles different understandings of the common good. To liberal reformers and technocrats, it reflects the problem of democratic policymaking. It is a problem to be fixed by creating more technocracy, more independent agencies. Isn’t that the natural bias for well-educated people who see themselves as more enlightened and thus more able to discern the common good?
I don’t mean to say that expertise is a bad thing. Technocracy is very important. It is a good thing that we have an expert FDA to decide on when a vaccine is safe for the public, that we have a CDC to advise an virology-illiterate public about how to respond to a dangerous virus, that we have competent lawyers in the SEC to regulate the financial markets by identifying and dealing with conflicts of interest among traders vis-a-vis their clients. Policy issues invariably include technical components, and so we need expertise to create good interventions. I do want to emphasize, though, that I think reducing politics to expertise can lead to two risks.
First, experts will tend to be anti-democratic — to fear the mob and protest, to disdain the nitty-gritty sausage making of legislative compromise and the grubby work of organizing. Insofar as democracy is a value that is substantively held and not just a platitude evoked as a feel-good slogan, experts must be wary about extending their individual, parochial beliefs into institutional forms. But I imagine that’s the tendency — that because they disagree with the 8% volume cap rule, technocrats will push, during MiFIR II negotiations, to include greater delegation of power to independent regulators so that any such trading-waiver cap can be decided by technocrats rather than legislators. Who decides must, I think, tilt toward democratic actors unless we have very good reason to defer to technocrats.
Second, I am wary that experts will tend to trust other experts over non-experts, even when they hold substantive moral disagreements with those other experts. A striking aspect of the liberal reformers is that they were abolitionists and supporters of Black suffrage who came to believe that ex-Confederate leaders rather than Black southerners ought to lead the South. How can that be? It must be, at least in part, because they believed that the “best men” — those who are educated or who hail from aristocratic families — are superior to less formally educated people, even if the “best men” committed treason in service of protecting slavery. The argument must be that, to some liberal reformers with racial justice bona fides, it’s better to have an educated white supremacist as a leader than an uneducated freedman. Education and aristocratic qualities, one must conclude, are more important than moral purity for leadership. That logic seems very dangerous to me.
* * * * *
Rose: A few this week. First, I had a call with the Pomona professor I’ve been doing research with because we just heard back about a paper we submitted — we got a “revise and resubmit,” which means the journal is interested in publishing our paper if we rewrite parts of it to their editors’ satisfaction. I’m a bit nervous about some of the comments, but my professor thinks the reviews overall were really positive, such that we should be able to get this paper over the finish line.
The UK has been doing its census, and I got to fill it out today! It was pretty cool. I know it must sound weird to be excited about filling out a census form, but I enjoyed doing it, especially after following the census litigation in the US and having some sense of how important censuses are.
I went for two walks this week. With the first, I went to Joseph Grimaldi Park, St Pancras Old Church, as well as Regents Park. I got some feedback that someone appreciated maps from a few weeks ago, so I thought I might start adding maps of where I’m going. Here’s a rough sketch of the route I took (both of these routes were probably much more windy in real life than on maps, since I’ve been walking based on instinct for the most part).
I went to Joseph Grimaldi Park because there’s a cool musical “grave” installation there. It turns out Grimaldi was something of a clown who lived in Islington, and so the grave is meant to be danced on. The grave is supposedly tuned to be able to play the song “Hot Codlins,” which Grimladi was famous for.
His epitaph reads, “Joseph Grimaldi was 3 years old when he first went on the stage of Sadler’s Wells with his father, and he worked there for 43 years as performer and part-proprietor. From his debut in 1806 at Covent Garden in Mother Good he was adored by all and could fill a theatre anywhere. The name Joey has passed into our language to mean a clown. He lived all his life among the people of Clerkenwell and died at 33 Southampton Street - now called Calshot Street.” After reading that, I had to include a tribute to Joey Tribbiani.
To get to the St Pancras Old Church, I walked through the King’s Cross and Camden area.
At the Old Church, there were a ton of cool gravestones, as well as some rather creepy trees.
Here are some pictures on the way back.
I went for a second walk during a call I had with a high school friend. I kind of just wanted to go South of the Thames, to explore some place I hadn’t seen before, but I found myself at the Imperial War Museum. Here’s a rough sense of the route I took.
Here are various pictures of the journey.
Bud: The sun is really starting to come out more. Sunset, especially after we go through daylight savings tomorrow, will be after 7pm! It’ll be glorious.
Thorn: I was taking a look at my new year’s resolutions the other day, and I am behind! It took me forever to finish Foner’s Reconstruction book, but I’m now trying to spend more time reading each night.
Gratitude: I went into my capital markets regulation professor’s office hours, and we had a really interesting chat about constitutional issues. She actually ended up giving me a case study idea to bring a comparative component to our OLC research, so I’m excited about that and grateful for her insights.
Future topics:
* Funnily enough, I was hoping to do a “vignettes” post this week, where I would write a bunch of different, much shorter and punchier essays. But that obviously didn’t work out — the Reconstruction topic just ballooned. But I do want to return to some of those other ideas — focused on voting rights questions — in a subsequent week.
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