RECONSTRUCTION

The Reconstruction era following the end of the American Civil War in 1865, like any postwar period, was a turbulent historical context for the production of a national literature. Until well into the twentieth century, literary artists, scholars, orators, and journalists grappled with the legacies of slavery and war within the uniquely American dynamics of race and democracy.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

When the Civil War ended, the United States faced the challenge of reconstructing a newly expanded civil democracy amid the rubble of war. Reconstruction called on the energies of the entire nation but was most contested within the radically redefined legal and social relationships of the American South. Not surprisingly, there was intense political conflict over the terms under which Reconstruction would proceed in the region, and at times violent conflict erupted over who would define those terms.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibited slavery in 1865 and freed close to 4 million people of African descent from chattel slavery, where they had been denied all rights of citizenship and prevented by law from learning to read and write. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) granted citizenship rights to black Americans and the Fifteenth (1870) guaranteed suffrage to all male U.S. citizens. The project of rebuilding a fractured nation began in the wake of these legal redefinitions of who was to be considered a citizen.

The term "Federal Reconstruction" (sometimes called "Radical Reconstruction") refers to the period between 1867 and 1877, when the federal government officially occupied the South and national policy focused on enforcing new civil rights and legal protections for black citizens in the former Confederate states. During this period, the Freedmen's Bureau was established to support free black communities in the South. Continuing the long labors of the black abolitionist movement, thousands of black activists, along with their white allies, worked to build schools, elect African American representatives to state legislatures, and build social institutions that were controlled by black citizens: colleges, businesses, newspapers, churches, civic organizations.

At the same time, some whites in both the North and South remained committed to racial segregation and white supremacy. They launched concerted efforts to suppress the black vote, to institute "black codes" that restricted the social and legal freedom of recently emancipated black citizens, and to reestablish the legal and social racial hierarchies of the slavery period through intimidation, resistance to federal authority, and violent aggression toward blacks.

This official Reconstruction ended in 1877 with a political compromise hammered out among white political leaders to settle the hotly contested 1876 presidential election, leading to the withdrawal of federal troops from the former Confederate states and to renewed political power for Southern whites. The formal end of Federal Reconstruction also relieved Southern whites of political pressure to honor the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and opened a new era of uninhibited white supremacy, political inequality, and racial segregation for black America.

The term "Reconstruction," however, is also used for the decades following 1877, when the project of rebuilding American democracy continued, sometimes along lines that advanced black freedom, sometimes along lines aimed at keeping democracy closed to millions of newly emancipated citizens. This longer period of Reconstruction, continuing well into the early decades of the twentieth century, was characterized both by substantial social and economic progress and by persisting racial, social, and economic conflict. Some American thinkers, in fact, argue that Reconstruction continued into the twenty-first century, though they differ about its relative purposes, successes, and failures.

CONTEXTUAL ISSUES

From 1870 to 1920, a number of historical issues were both central to the Reconstruction context within which writers were working and symbolically important within the American literature being produced. These included the particular legacies of slavery and the Civil War: displaced communities; catastrophic damage to persons, landscapes, and towns; broken and separated families; psychological trauma; the struggle for literacy and education; redefined gender roles in the wake of war and emancipation; Christian churches struggling over different and often conflicting interpretations of the gospel during and after the slavery era; economic shifts from rural to urban economies and from agrarian to industrial labor; immigration and expanding cultural diversity; the emergence of greater religious pluralism in a nation that had been dominated by white Protestant Christianity; developments in science and philosophy that sharpened tensions—for some—between traditional religion and the resources of "modernity"; and westward expansionism, which under the ideology of Manifest Destiny continued to obliterate or displace American Indians.

SLAVERY AS SETTING AND SYMBOL

For over two centuries, unpaid slave labor had built the U.S. economy, but in 1865 the 4 million newly freed slaves shared with poorer people of all races the reality of serious economic obstacles to personal and collective security. Literary treatments of race and democracy during Reconstruction were often closely intertwined with economic issues. The legacy of persisting material hardship for black Americans was a theme that emerged across genres, especially—but not exclusively—in the works of writers who were themselves African American.

For example, the ironic and highly symbolic stories in Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman (1899) repeatedly place black and white characters in situations where economic and political hierarchies are shifting along color lines. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's novel Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892) and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) both weave explicitly economic themes into narratives set both before and after the Civil War. Important nonfiction works such as W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Anna Julia Cooper's A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South (1892), and Booker T. Washington's "Atlantic Exposition Address" (1895) and Up from Slavery (1901) directly address the political economy of slavery and the impact on Reconstruction of economic relationships established during the slavery period. Economic themes in Reconstruction literature include the postwar challenges facing free black labor, racial conflict among the laboring classes generally, and white efforts to restrict and control black labor and black economic self-determination.

The broader topic of "slavery," as subject matter and as metaphor, also emerged as an important symbolic resource for a wide range of American authors during the Reconstruction era. American writers often offered sharply different images of the past and of what American life, democracy, and the nation's future should look like.

Poets such as Albery Allson Whitman (Not a Man and Yet a Man, 1877), Frances E. W. Harper (Sketches of Southern Life, 1872), Paul Laurence Dunbar (Lyrics of a Lowly Life, 1897; Lyrics of the Hearthside, 1899), and Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass, 1871–1872 edition; Democratic Vistas, 1871) use slavery figuratively in their work. Slavery was also a central theme for Reconstruction fiction writers as politically and culturally diverse as Joel Chandler Harris (Nights with Uncle Remus, 1883), Mark Twain (The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, 1894), Victoria Earle (Aunt Lindy: A Story Founded on Real Life, 1893), and Paul Laurence Dunbar (In Old Plantation Days, 1903; The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories, 1900).

Reconstruction-era playwrights who used slavery as a theme or setting include Bartley Campbell (The White Slave, 1882), Edward Sheldon (The Nigger, 1909), and Pauline E. Hopkins (Slaves' Escape: or, The Underground Railroad, 1880). In addition, during Reconstruction in the broader sense, hundreds of "Tom Troupes" toured the country, performing scenes adapted from Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and caricaturing black people and the slave experience in accordance with prevailing late-nineteenth-century white racist stereotypes.

In contrast, slave narratives published after the Civil War expanded on some of the narrative patterns characteristic of the genre in the antebellum years, but also portrayed African Americans looking back on slavery and placed new emphasis on the realities facing free black Americans during Reconstruction.

Writing in 1935, during the heyday of Jim Crow segregation, W. E. B. Du Bois concluded his ground-breaking historical study Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 with a chapter entitled "The Propaganda of History," in which he took American historians (and educators) to task for ignoring African American contributions to American democracy. American students, argued Du Bois, would complete their educations lacking any accurate sense of the realities of Reconstruction. But the problem was even deeper, as he showed by recounting his own experience as a writer:

Herein lies more than mere omission and difference of emphasis. The treatment of the period of Reconstruction reflects small credit upon American historians as scientists. We have too often a deliberate attempt so to change the facts of history that the story will make pleasant reading for Americans. The editors of the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica asked me for an article on the history of the American Negro. From my manuscript they cut out all my references to Reconstruction. I insisted on including the following statement:

"White historians have ascribed the faults and failures of Reconstruction to Negro ignorance and corruption. But the Negro insists that it was Negro loyalty and the Negro vote alone that restored the South to the Union; established the new democracy, both for white and black, and instituted the public schools."

This the editor refused to print. . . . I was not satisfied and refused to allow the article to appear.

After illustrating this deliberate exclusion of black perspective from the scholarly record, Du Bois added:

Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?

Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880, pp. 713–714.

THE CIVIL WAR AS SETTING AND SYMBOL

Not surprisingly, the Civil War itself appears extensively as a topic, setting, and symbol in literature of the Reconstruction period. For example, a number of white writers lament the loss of the war by the Confederacy, in some cases by explicitly embracing old norms of white supremacy and in other cases by focusing on the loss of southern (white) community and identity. These include Jefferson Davis's nonfiction The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881); Constance Fenimore Woolson's For the Major, an 1883 novel sympathetic toward the Confederacy; Mary Boykin Chesnut's A Diary from Dixie (1905); and John William De Forest's 1881 The Bloody Chasm, a novel set in Charleston, South Carolina.

Other writers—poets, playwrights, fiction writers, essayists, and social theorists—from all regions of the country and across the cultural, racial, and political spectrum grappled with the legacy of the Civil War on its own terms or addressed the general problem of war as a philosophical and political problem: Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage, 1895), Walt Whitman (Drum-Taps and Sequel, 1865; Memorandum during the War, 1875; Specimen Days and Collect, 1882), Ethel Lynn Beers (All Quiet along the Potomac and Other Poems, 1879), Louisa May Alcott (Proverb Stories, 1882), George Wilbur Peck (How Private Geo. W. Peck Put Down the Rebellion, 1887), Ambrose Bierce (Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, 1891, a collection including famous stories such as "Chickamauga" and "The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"), Paul Laurence Dunbar (Lyrics of Love and Laughter, 1903), Augustus Thomas (Alabama, 1891; The Copperhead, 1918), William Dean Howells (The Undiscovered Country, 1880), and Grace Elizabeth King (Monsieur Motte, 1888; Tales of a Time and Place, 1892; Balcony Stories, 1893). Many of the writers who used slavery as a literary trope also used the Civil War as setting and symbol.

A number of themes related to the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and to the legacy of slavery during Reconstruction emerged in both fiction and nonfiction between 1865 and 1920. These themes include: the importance of literacy and the need for schools controlled by newly freed black communities; the problems emerging within white communities—in the North and South—as new dynamics of civic equality and democratic access for black citizens sparked progressive change and a virulent white backlash; the rampant civic destruction during the war and the resulting struggle by communities to define themselves under new postwar social conditions; displaced populations and broken families (these two themes were especially prominent among African American writers during this period); redefined gender roles; the imperative for what might be called "theological Reconstruction," as American Christianity, sharply divided along racial lines in the antebellum era, entered the Reconstruction period with the problem of race still looming large and the reality of greater religious pluralism ahead; and finally, the persisting legacy of widespread social violence.

RACE

Many Reconstruction-era writers worked "the color line," as W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) called it, making use especially of skin color as a symbol for personal identity and the state of American democracy. Literary tropes related to race abound in Reconstruction writing, including "mixed race heritage," the "tragic mulatto," "blackness," "whiteness," "Indian-ness," and skin color used as a code for social and economic conflict within black communities. Interracial sexuality is a common theme among writers with dramatically different attitudes toward and artistic interests in race.

Within this complex symbolic matrix, many Reconstruction-era writers set stories and nonfiction within a "then" (slavery) and "now" (Reconstruction) conceptual framework. This technique often allowed them to illuminate the dynamics of racial progress or regress in Reconstruction America. Works by William Wells Brown (My Southern Home; or, The South and Its People, 1880) and James Weldon Johnson (The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 1912), as well as by the white writers Constance Fenimore Woolson (Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches, 1880) and George Washington Cable (John March, Southerner, 1895) make use of this method.

Similarly, the historical period of Reconstruction itself frequently appears as a symbol for America's glories or failures where race is concerned, presenting a wide range of perspectives on the American democracy's past, present, and future. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Iola Leroy uses Reconstruction as symbol, as do works by Charles Chesnutt (The Wife of His Youth, 1899; The House behind the Cedars, 1900; The Marrow of Tradition, 1901), Albion W. Tourgée (Fool's Errand, 1879; Bricks without Straw, 1880), George Washington Cable (The Grandissimes, 1880); The Silent South, 1885), Pauline Hopkins (Contending Forces: A Romance of Negro Life North and South, 1900), and W. E. B. Du Bois (Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, 1920).

One aspect of Reconstruction often overlooked because of the tendency to focus on black/white dynamics is the increased occupation of Indian Country by white settlers and recently emancipated blacks fleeing white violence in the South. American Indian oratory was recorded in writing during this period. Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa; 1858–1939), displaying interesting philosophical parallels to W. E. B. Du Bois, grappled with cultural and religious "double consciousness" in The Soul of the Indian (1911) and From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916). The apocalyptic voice of the Ghost Dance Songs composed by various tribes in the later nineteenth century exemplifies Native American resistance to forced displacement, which sometimes came at the hands of African American soldiers, for whom service in the American military offered professional opportunity after the Civil War.

The persisting problem in the United States of violent and institutionalized white supremacy was a frequent subject of Reconstruction-era literature. Many writers dealt directly with the theme, but two writers with profoundly different philosophies about race made it central to their work: Thomas Dixon (1864–1946) and Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931).

Notorious for his unapologetic embrace of white superiority and the Ku Klux Klan, Thomas Dixon celebrated white supremacist forms of Protestant Christianity and implicitly sanctioned white racial violence in his novels The Leopard's Spots (1902), The Clansman (1905), and The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire (1907). D. W. Griffith adapted The Clansman as the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, a "blockbuster" that drew long lines to theaters all around the country at a time when Ku Klux Klan membership in the United States surged for a second time since the Civil War.

In contrast, Ida B. Wells-Barnett worked as an activist and writer to confront Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and white race riots. Her now-famous pamphlets include: Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), A Red Record (1895), and Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900). Wells-Barnett exemplifies the refusal of black Americans and others to accept white supremacy as a national norm. Her use of the pen in combination with political activism was characteristic of the work of many social issue writers between 1870 and 1920.

INTERPRETIVE ISSUES

Both Federal Reconstruction and the broader Reconstruction period presented significant challenges over the years for historians and literary critics.

Much initial historiography of the era was written by white scholars who were sometimes "unreconstructed" sympathizers with white southern segregationist thinking or were unsympathetic either to full black emancipation or to the complete restructuring of American democratic life based on racial equality. W. E. B. Du Bois's groundbreaking study Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 (1935) was an early—or belated, depending on one's perspective—break with this white bias in social analysis, offering an interpretation of Reconstruction grounded in black historical experience and perspectives.

In the years since the publication of Black Reconstruction in America, historical and sociological analysis has expanded to consider a much wider range of sources and points of view. Additionally, Black studies, Africana studies, and American Indian studies, all interdisciplinary traditions of scholarship, have provided more balance in the American historical, literary, and interpretive record. In fact, some literary historians of Reconstruction believe it is important to treat historiography and other forms of narrative social analysis as distinct literary genres and to investigate the literary history of "histories of Reconstruction."

Since the mid-twentieth century, scholars in literary criticism and literary history have availed themselves of previously undervalued primary sources from the Reconstruction era (oral traditions, pamphlets, journalism) and have also made available a more representative selection of works from traditional literary genres such as autobiography, novels, plays, poetry, and short fiction.

One interpretive framework that has proven helpful for American thinkers has been the placement of Reconstruction within international contexts for the purpose of comparison. For example, various approaches to postcolonial theory in history, sociology, and literary studies can illuminate the history and literature of Reconstruction in new ways, as can cross-national or comparative work that considers American Reconstruction in relation to the history and literature of other nations such as South Africa, where racially coded hierarchies are also entrenched. Interpreters from outside the United States often see American social and literary history in terms that put American interpretive habits into sharper relief and sometimes introduce a necessary tension.

American society often exhibits what scholars call "historical amnesia," the tendency to repress or forget the true complexity of history in the United States. Reconstruction, charged with postwar tension and the often violent racial legacies of slavery and Manifest Destiny, offers scholars and students of American history and literature ample opportunity to confront head-on and overcome this historical amnesia.

See alsoJim Crow; Ku Klux Klan; New South

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Chesnutt, Charles W. The Marrow of Tradition. 1901. New York: Penguin, 1993.

Dixon, Thomas, Jr. The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. 1905. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970.

Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880. 1935. New York: Free Press, 1999.

Harper, Frances E. W. Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted. 1892. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1885. New York: Penguin Classics, 2002.

Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. Edited by William Andrews. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1995.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Edited by Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Secondary Works

Burt, Daniel S., ed. The Chronology of American Literature: America's Literary Achievement from the Colonial Era to Modern Times. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2004.

Chalmers, David M. Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan, 1865–1965. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965.

Edwards, Laura F. Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Perennial Classics, Illustrated Edition, 2002.

Foner, Eric, and Olivia Mahoney. American Reconstruction: People and Politics after the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997.

Fredrickson, George. Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Gossett, Thomas F. Race: The History of an Idea in America. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Nieman, Donald G., ed. African Americans and the Emergence of Segregation, 1865–1900. New York: Garland, 1994.

Packard, Jerrold M. American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow. New York: St. Martin's, 2002.

Painter, Nell Irvin. Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919. New York: Norton, 1987.

Trelease, Allen W. Reconstruction: The Great Experiment. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.

Turkel, Studs. Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel about the American Obsession. New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1993.

Sharon Carson