David Montgomery - Beyond Equality

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

FIRST EDITION

Copyright 1967 by David Montgomery

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Distributed by Random House, Inc. Published simultaneously in Toronto, Canada, by Random House of Canada Limited.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 6718610

eISBN: 978-0-307-82802-6

v3.1

To Marty
who made it possible

The central political issues of the Reconstruction era were the future integrity of the United States of America and the future political and social status of the newly emancipated Negroes. At long last the writings of LaWanda and John Cox, W. R. Brock, James M. McPherson, Eric L. McKitrick, Kenneth M. Stampp, John Hope Franklin, and David Donald have established a respected status in American historical circles for this elementary proposition. That so much splendid scholarship had to be expended in order to demonstrate that the real subjects involved in the debate over Reconstruction were just what its leading participants always declared them to be testifies to the peculiar resiliency of the contrary viewpoint advanced earlier by such figures as Howard K. Beale and Charles A. and Mary R. Beard.

To Beale and the Beards the questions of guaranteeing integrity of the Union and Negro rights were smoke screens masking efforts by the Northeastern business community to secure its hegemony in the federal government against the threat of a hostile coalition of Southern and Western agrarian interests. Early in the 1960s their assumption that a unity of economic interests existed within Northeastern business was attacked almost simultaneously by Stanley Coben, Irwin Unger, and myself. The obverse of this assumption, that the foes of Radical Reconstruction manifested agrarian radicalism, was challenged by Robert P. Sharkeys study of the currency question. When Unger demonstrated that no coherent interest group was able to gain effective political hegemony in the decade following the Civil War, the circle of revisionist assault on Beale and the Beards was complete.

Yet echoes of the vanquished doctrine persist, not just in obsolete textbook chapters but often in the writings of revisionists themselves. Stampp, for example, portrayed Andrew Johnson as the same agrarian backward-looking Jacksonian Democrat Beale and William A. Dunning had envisioned, and, more important, deemed this characterization sufficient explanation of the Presidents policies. Similarly, John Hope Franklin, in the midst of his effort to focus attention on the central question of Negro rights, spoke of a war-spawned industrial plutocracy that was seeking to keep a stranglehold on government in order to maintain its entrenched position.

There are two cogent reasons for the persistence of the Beale-Beard thesis. The first is that the revisionists have devoted themselves primarily to exposing flaws in the older theory or scrutinizing isolated, if important, strands in the complex web of Reconstruction politics. Although McKitrick and the Professors Cox have analyzed Washington political relationships between 1865 and 1868 with great skill, although Sharkey and Unger have traced the currency dispute through the Reconstruction period, and Franklin, Stampp, and McPherson followed controversies over the status of Negroes down to 1877, none of these scholars has integrated the many strands of development into a meaningful whole. None has offered todays readers a new interpretation of Radical Republicanism to take the place of Beales.

Secondly, there is no escaping the suspicion that the interests and aspirations of Northern businessmen had something to do with the terms in which Reconstruction controversies were cast and the manner in which basic decisions were reached. The effective debate over the future of the South, after all, was carried on among Northerners, for they alone had access to the machinery of government. The social elite of Northern communities, furthermore, was composed at least in part of businessmen. Their approval or disapproval of a politicians course of action weighed heavily in determining its (and his) success or failure. Such considerations suggest that, for all the flaws in their conclusions, Beale and the Beards were not pursuing an altogether erroneous set of problems.

What is needed, then, is to reassemble the scattered fragments of this epochs historical interpretation in a new fashion. As a contribution to the achievement of this goal, I have undertaken in this book to identify and analyze the various Northern groups participating in the Reconstruction debate by examining their responses to issues which arose in their home communities. Viewed from the mainstream of national lifethat is, from the standpoint of the Union and Negro rightsthese local questions were peripheral. No attempt is made here to claim they were the real issues of the times, as Beale and the Beards said of tariffs, currency, and economic penetration of the South. But the towns and cities where these questions arose supplied the social base of Republican strength. State legislators who expressed their endorsement of congressional policies toward the South enacted their own measures to change life in the North. These communities and these measures reveal the general ideological inclinations with which Republican congressmen approached the Southern question.

In other words, at the very time Radical Republicans were wrestling enthusiastically with the extension of legal equality to Negroes, they were facing other problems, often less to their liking. Prominent among them was the insistence of labors spokemen that social reconstruction be extended northward. So must our dinner tables be reconstructed, demanded the Boston Labor Reform Association in 1865, our dress, manners, education, morals, dwellings, and the whole Social System. Here was a challenge from the flank, which both exposed the social roots of Radical ideology and contributed to the abrupt decline of Radical power and influence from its zenith of 1867 and 1868. Confrontation between labor and the Radicals produced a maddening imbroglio from which emerged a new style of politics, typified by the famous Republican Stalwarts, a peculiar ideology inherited from radicalism by the labor movement itself, and a genteel critique of Radicals, Stalwarts, and labor, which styled itself liberalism.

The labor question, therefore, is used here as a prism with which to study the political spectrum of Reconstruction America. To use it in this way presupposes a thorough understanding of its configuration in the thought and practice of the time. Such awareness has been blocked from one side by widespread acceptance of the Beale-Beard thesis among historians of labor, and from the other by the acquiescence of political historians in the terms of analysis employed by John R. Commons, Selig Perlman, and Gerald N. Grob. Then-bifurcation of types of labor leaders into wage-conscious trade unionists and antimonopoly reformers has obscured both the ideological affinity between the then-prominent trade unionists and the Radicals and the great strides made by wage earners between 1862 and 1875 in creating effective bargaining and lobbying institutions. Thinking of these labor leaders as anti-industrial romantics renders one incapable of appreciating their impact on contemporary economic and political life. On the other hand, isolating their conflicts with employers from their other social activities artificially divorces their efforts from the mainstream of national development. Workers were not purely economic men but were in every sense members of their local and national communities, and it is in this setting that their efforts to improve their lot should be studied.